Comedy and Cultural Critique in American Film

Ryan Bishop is Professor of Global Arts and Politics and Co-director of the research group Archaeologies of Media and Technology at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, United Kingdom. He co-edits the journal Cultural Politics (Duke UP), and is a series editor for Technicities (Edinburgh University Press) and Cultural Politics (Duke UP).

• Acknowledgements; 1 American Film Comedy and Cultural Critique; 2 The Feeding Machine and Feeding the Machine: Silence, Sound and the Technologies of Cinema; 3 The Constitution of the Real: Documentary, Mockumentary, and the Status of the Image; 4 Parody: Targeting Cinema’s Narrative Technics; 5 The Unspeakable and Political Satire: Performance, Perception, and Technology; 6 Conclusion: Between the Machine and the Event: Film Comedy; Index

Bishop offers a rich contextualized history of the American comedy film. Covering a wide range of films and theorists, the book makes a unique contribution to both film studies and visual culture studies. He explores the way comic films – as complex textual, technological, and social constructs – contributed to the specific forms and powers of visuality in twentieth-century modernities.