Slapstick : an interdisciplinary companion / edited by Alena E. Lyons, Ervin Malakaj.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Lyons, Alena E., editor.

Malakaj, Ervin, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Comedy--Technique.

Comedy.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (424 pages)

Place of Publication:

Berlin ; Boston : Walter de Gruyter GmbH, [2021]

Summary:

Despite its unabated popularity with audiences, slapstick has received rather little scholarly attention, mostly by scholars concentrating on the US theater and cinema traditions. Nonetheless, as a form of physical humor slapstick has a long history across various areas of cultural production. This volume approaches slapstick both as a genre of situational physical comedy and as a mode of communicating an affective situation captured in various cultural products. Contributors to the volume examine cinematic, literary, dramatic, musical, and photographic texts and performances. From medieval chivalric romance and nineteenth-century theater to contemporary photography, the contributors study treatments of slapstick across media, periods and geographic locations. The aim of a study of such wide scope is to demonstrate how slapstick emerged from a variety of complex interactions among different traditions and by extension, to illustrate that slapstick can be highly productive for interdisciplinary research.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Acknowledgements

Contents

Introduction: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Slapstick

Part I: History of Slapstick

Introduction

The Descent of Slapstick

Ideology, Performance, and Ironic Distance in Musical Slapstick

Sinking and Falling Bodies: The Beginnings of Literary Slapstick in the Pre-Modern Era

Part II: Instruments of Slapstick

The Broken Mirror: From Commedia All’Improvviso to Slapstick Comedy

Harold Lloyd and the Reappearing Hand: Disability, Embodiment, and Slapstick

Wardrobe Malfunction and Slapstick Humiliation in The Lonely Island’s Popstar:

Gazing at Slapstick with Luiza Folegatti’s Drag King Series O Deleite da Mulher Barbada

Part III: Narrative Structures of Slapstick

Telling and Showing: Slapstick in Stephan Schütze’s Comic Theory and Heinrich von Kleist’s Der zerbrochne Krug

A Constraint-Based Approach to the Slapstick Seriality in Larry Semon Comedies, 1918–1920

The Anonymized Randomness of Vicco von B.: On Chaos and Order in Loriot’s Agfa Advertisements

Part IV: Bodies of Slapstick

The Tragicomic Body: On the Relation between Tragicomedies and Slapstick

‘Or Words to That Effect’: The Antimetaphysics of Slapstick

Gender and Jewish Difference in Early German Slapstick

Part V: Politics of Slapstick

Slapstick Comediennes in Silent Cinema: Women’s Laughter and the Feminist Politics of Gender in Motion

Lubitsch’s Queer Slapstick Aesthetics

The Slapstick of Greater Mexico: The Poetics and Politics of Eugenio Derbez

Interpersonal and Social Sensibility in Slapstick from the Perspective of Religious History

Part VI: Sticking to the Slap: The Contact Points of Slapstick

Closing Remarks: Creating Openings

Each One, Who Falls – A Conversation

Contributors

Index

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9783110570977

3110570971

9783110571981

3110571986

OCLC:

1287133481