Includes bibliographical references (pages 230-236) and index.
Contents:
Introducing American silent film comedy: Clowns, conformity, consumerism -- A convention of crazy bugs: Mack Sennett and US's immigrant unconscious -- Accelerated bodies and jumping jacks: Automata, mannequins and toys in the films of Charlie Chaplin -- Nobody loves a fat man: Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle and conspicuous consumption in the US of the 1920s -- Dizzy Doras and big-eyed beauties: Mabel Normand and the notion of the female clown -- Consumerism and its discontents: Harold Lloyd and the anxieties of capitalism -- Buster Keaton and the American South: The first things and the last -- The shell-shocked silence: Langdon, repetition-compulsion and the first World War.
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