Incongruous Entertainment

Steven Cohan is Professor of English at Syracuse University. He is the author of Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties; the editor of Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader; and a coeditor of The Road Movie Book and Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema.

• Acknowledgments viiIntroduction 11. Improbable Stuff: Camp and the MGM House Style 412. The Lady is a Camp: Glamour, Star Turns, and the Boys in the Chorus 883. Dancing with Balls: Sissies, Sailors, and the Camp Masculinity of Gene Kelly 1494. What a Glorious Classic: Singin’ in the Rain and Mass-Camp Recycling 2005. Hollywood’s Most Precious Jewels: The MGM Musical’s Return As a Camp Commodity 2466. Judy on the Net: Garland, Camp, and Contemporary Fandom 287Conclusion 337Notes 343Works Cited 353Index 361

“Steven Cohan’s Incongruous Entertainment brings together two fascinating subjects-camp and the musical-that are often casually linked but have never been explored as carefully and usefully as they are here.”-Pamela Robertson Wojcik, author of Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna “Steven Cohan’s scholarship is impeccable and his writing elegant and witty. He pulls together all the previous approaches to camp and uses them to explore the mgm musical and its stars from every angle I could think of-and a few I would never have thought of.”-Alexander Doty, author of Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon “Cohan meticulously supports his argument with detailed examples while eloquently and often humorously bringing the musicals and their stars to life. Both fans and novices are invited to rethink the political import of the MGM musicals from the studio era through the present. . . . Because of Cohan's revisionist scholarship, this book is also an essential read for anyone who studies camp and musicals.” - Leah Perry (Journal of Popular Culture)