Hollywood comedians : the film reader

This critical anthology brings together new and pre-published scholarly material devoted to comedians and to the cinematic, cultural and industrial contexts within which they worked. As well as offering ways of reading the development of the comedian film, from the silent era to the contemporary period, the book also introduces diverse approaches to the study of the comedian film from scholars such as Tom Gunning, Peter Kramer, Steve Seidman, Henry Jenkins, Patricia Mellencamp, Kathleen Rowe and Steve Neale. The book explores the relations between film and other media (vaudeville, television, stand-up performance), between the carnivalesque and genre, and between performance and narrative; it also examines how the comedian film has provided a forum for working through representations of ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality and the body. Krutnik is one of the pioneers in this area, whose work is extensively cited in the growing critical literature on the field. This volume extends his earlier explorations of the comedian film, inaugurated in the 1984 Screen article, The Clown Prints of Comedy, and developed through a range of subsequent publications. Beyond its usefulness as a teaching resource, the book also signals and develops paradigms for the scholarly study of films that are often marginalized within established agendas of film and cultural studies. Besides compiling and editing this collection, Krutnik also provided a 10,000 word general introduction and introductory material for the books five sections (a further 5-6000 words in total). The introduction not only outlines the various contributions presented in the book but aims to provide a more wide-ranging and rigorous scrutiny of a range of formal, historical and ideological approaches to performer-centred comedy. It seeks to locate the comedian film, and the representational issues it raises, within broader histories of both Hollywood and traditions of critical discourse on film and popular culture.