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Drawing together contributions by scholars from a variety of fields, including theater, film and television, sociology, and visual culture, this volume explores the range and diversity of comedic performance and comic forms in the modern age. It covers a range of forms and examples from 1920 to the present day, including plays, film, television comedy, live comedy, and comedy on social media. It argues that the period covered was marked by an explosion of comic forms and a flowering of comic creativity across a range of media. From the communal watching of silent films at the start of the period, to the use of Twitter and other online platforms to share and comment on comedy, technology has brought about significant changes in its form, consumption, and social effects. As comic forms have shifted and developed, so too have attitudes to what comedy can and cannot do. This study considers its role in entertainment and in provoking consideration of a range of social and political topics. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: form, theory, praxis, identities, the body, politics and power, laughter, and ethics. These eight different approaches to comedy add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.>
About the author
Louise Peacock is Associate Professor of Drama in the School of Arts, Design and Humanities at De Montfort University, UK. She is the author of Serious Play: Modern Clown Performance (2009) and Slapstick and Comic Performance: Comedy and Pain (2014). She is a member of the editorial board of Comedy Studies.Andrew McConnell Stott is Dean of Undergraduate Education and Professor of English at the Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, University of Southern California, USA. A writer on British popular culture from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, his publications include Comedy (2005, 2014); The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi: Laughter, Madness, and the Story of Britain's Greatest Comedian (2009); and The Poet and the Vampyre: The Curse of Byron and the Birth of Literature’s Greatest Monsters (2014).Eric Weitz is Associate Professor of Drama at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.
