A freewheeling, nonlinear exploration of the performing duo and their decade-long collaboration from 1946 to 1956.
From 1946 to 1956, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis provoked audiences into rollicking laughter as they shook up and delighted a culture they both mediated and made fun of. Using the duo’s phenomenal popularity as a starting point, The Biggest Thing in Show Business looks askance at postwar America with a fast-moving sweep, jam-packed with unexpected connections, revealing details, and surprising insights. Aiming to be as unconventional as their subjects, Murray Pomerance and Matthew Solomon enact a highly spontaneous and up-to-the-minute approach to coauthorship that re-establishes the importance of Martin & Lewis in the cultural pantheon. As a result, the book’s structure, methodology, and writing style are thoroughly dialogic and firmly opposed to stale convention.
Table of Content
An American Utopia
User’s Manual
Can You Relax?
Can You Listen?
Part I
In the Playroom
Smash and Crash
Song of the South
Mouth to Mouth
Keep Good Records
Up the Ante
An Ampersanded Truth
An Interlude
Part II
Give Me a Head of Hair
The Tip of the Nose
I Stand Up, I Fall Down
‘I Like Blood!’
Eyes Tightly Shut
Another Interlude
Part III
The True Voice of Feeling
When the Moon Hits Your Eye
This Is Cardboard
Hustlers
In Stereo
With the Doctor
Dean and Jerry Full Frontal
Splitsville on Schedule
·
Coda
In the Library
Can You Look Up?
List of Illustrations
About the author
Matthew Solomon is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. He is the author of Disappearing Tricks: Silent Films, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century.
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