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Silent Film Comedy and American Culture

Parts of Chapter Six appeared in ‘Consumerism and its Discontents: Harold Lloyd, Edward Bernays, and the Anxieties of Capitalism;, Archivos, 2006, 53, 150-175. Now expanded to analyse the relationship between slapstick and narrative comedy across Lloyd’s whole career. Chapter Seven appeared as ‘Buster Keaton and the South: The First Things and the Last’ in Journal of American Studies, 2006, 40, 487-502. Version of Chapter Eight published as ‘The Shell Shocked Silents: Trauma, Aphasia and the Silent War Film’ in Le cinema en toutes lettres, Houdiard, 2007, 27-41. A more detailed analysis of Langdon’s persona has been added; other material removed.

The book represents the result of nearly ten years of research, viewing and considering hundreds of comedy films produced during the silent era, relating these artefacts to a detailed study of the cultural anxieties and tensions of the period, and then framing the material via a psychoanalytic reading of consumerism. The book covers not only the canonical works of silent film comedy, but also a huge number of marginalised or lesser known figures, and engages with various schools of theory, from Mass Culture Theory to Laplanche, Metz and Lacan on cinematic absence, and Surrealist readings of absurdism and the comic.