Slapstick comedy landed like a pie in the face of twentieth-century culture. Pratfalls and nyuk-nyuks percolated alongside literary modernism throughout the 1920s and 1930s before slapstick found explosive expression in postwar literature; experimental film; and popular music. William Solomon charts the origins and evolution of what he calls slapstick modernism --a merging of artistic experimentation with the socially disruptive lunacy made by the likes of Charlie Chaplin. Romping through texts; films; and theory; Solomon embarks on a harum-scarum intellectual odyssey from high modernism to the late modernism of the Beats and Burroughs before a head-on crash into the raw power of punk rock. Throughout; he shows the links between the experimental writers and silent screen performers of the early century; and explores the potent cultural undertaking that drew inspiration from anarchical comedy after World War Two.
2015-11-18 2015-11-18File Name: B0186MAJ54
Review
