作者: Gehring Wes D. Gehring

The book examines Charlie Chaplin’s evolving perspective on dark comedy in his three war films, Shoulder Arms (1918), The Great Dictator (1940), and Monsieur Verdoux (1947). In the first he uses the …

As a young boy in the depths of the 1890s depression, Joe E. Brown had a job: making faces at the firemen on passing coal-burning trains so they would throw coal at him. As a child he also worked as …

Charlie Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris (1923) was a groundbreaking film which was neither a simple recycling of Peggy Hopkins Joyce’s story, nor quickly forgotten. Through heavily-documented "period …

The 1930s are routinely considered sound film’s greatest comedy era. Though this golden age encompassed various genres of laughter, clown comedy is the most basic type. This work examines the Depress …

Woody Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery has been described as "a kind of Rear Window for retirees." As this quote suggests, an analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s methodical use of comedy in his …

Buster Keaton "can impress a weary world with the vitally important fact that life, after all, is a foolishly inconsequential affair, " wrote critic Robert Sherwood in 1918. A century later …

The twelve classic comedy films examined within these pages are distinguished by an equal number of defining comic performances. Ranging from The Great Dictator (1940) to A Southern Yankee (1948), ea …

This examination of dark comedies of the 1970s focuses on films which concealed black humor behind a misleading genre label. All That Jazz (1979) is a musical…about death–hardly Fred and Ginger te …

The 1950s were a transitional period for film comedians. The artistic suppression of the Mc Carthy era and the advent of television often resulted in a dumbing down of motion pictures. Cartoonist-tur …

Back in the golden age of humor books (late 1920s-early 1950s), when wits of the pantheon like Robert Benchley, James Thurber, and S.J. Perelman were producing their signature works, there was anothe …

This bio-bibliography was designed to present a combined biographical, critical, and bibliographical portrait of the Marx Brothers. It examines their significance in film comedy in particular, and as …

Parody is the least appreciated of all film comedy genres and receives little serious attention, even among film fans. This study elevates parody to mainstream significance. A historical overview pla …

This groundbreaking film study begins with a survey of American print humorists from eras leading up to and overlapping the advent of film–including some who worked both on the page and on the scree …