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“Hokum! makes such a valuable contribution to historiography in its ability to fill a hole in contemporary film history, increasing our understanding of both the (perceived) narrowed place of the comedy film short in the 1930s and the production and reception of slapstick comedy during that era.”—Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Professor of Radio-Television-Film, University of Texas at Austin
“As the wild antediluvian southern Bolivian oyster calls to its mother (get the book to get the joke), so does Rob King call on scholars to abandon their preconceptions about the fate of slapstick cinema. With solid research, jewel-like prose, and plenty of wry humor (to wit the oyster), he convincingly busts the myths and chases away the nostalgia for silent film comedy. Instead, we leave with a lasting sense of the form’s persistent cultural relevance.”—Donald Crafton, author of Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and World-Making in Animation
“Hokum! moves deftly through questions of performance, aesthetics, technology, political economy, trade practices, and popular reception to convincingly unseat deeply entrenched understandings of the transition to sound and its impact on the history of screen comedy. In so doing, Rob King asks us to attend to the seemingly marginal and degraded slapstick short of the early sound period, not in order to question or overturn that valuation but to understand in a nonreductive way how that valuation came to be and what it entails for how we have come to think about screen comedy and its historical audiences. King’s book is some of the smartest film history being written today.” —Mark Lynn Anderson, author of Twilight of the Idols: Hollywood and the Human Sciences in 1920s America
List of contents
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.
Summary
Takes a comprehensive view of short-subject slapstick comedy in the early sound era. Challenging the received wisdom that sound destroyed the slapstick tradition, the author explores the slapstick short's Depression-era development against a backdrop of changes in film industry practice, comedic tastes, and moviegoing culture.
Additional text
"King’s approach is thoroughly revisionist, a genre history as grounded in the archive and the trade press as it is in the screening room, one that seeks to dramatically expand which films matter. ... Hokum! is a triumph! King demonstrates what happens in an era of expanded access to archival texts that are now more widely available on DVD, the digitization of trade press reports, and the ongoing refinement of film historiography. At the risk of ending on an unapologetically bad pun, comedy has a new King. "
