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Hokum! is the first book to take a comprehensive view of short-subject slapstick comedy in the early sound era. Challenging the received wisdom that sound destroyed the slapstick tradition, author Rob King explores the slapstick short’s Depression-era development against a backdrop of changes in film industry practice, comedic tastes, and moviegoing culture. Each chapter is grounded in case studies of comedians and comic teams, including the Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, and Robert Benchley. The book also examines how the past legacy of silent-era slapstick was subsequently reimagined as part of a nostalgic mythology of Hollywood’s youth.
Table of Content
List of Illustrations and Audiovisual Media
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART I. CONTEXTS
1. “The Cuckoo School”: Humor and Metropolitan Culture in 1920s America
2. “The Stigma of Slapstick”: The Short-Subject Industry and Its Imagined Public
PART II. CASE HISTORIES
3. “The Spice of the Program”: Educational Pictures and the Small-Town Audience
4. “I Want Music Everywhere”: Music, Operetta, and Cultural Hierarchy at the Hal Roach Studios
5. “From the Archives of Keystone Memory”: Slapstick and Re-membrance at Columbia Pictures’ Short-Subjects Department
Coda: When Comedy Was King
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Index
About the author
Rob King is Associate Professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and author of the award-winning The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture.
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