The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780520255388)

From its founding in 1912, the short-lived Keystone Film Company--home of the frantic, bumbling Kops and Mack Sennett's Bathing Beauties--made an indelible mark on American popular culture with its high-energy comic shorts. Even as Keystone brought "lowbrow" comic traditions to the screen, the studio played a key role in reformulating those traditions for a new, cross-class audience. In The Fun Factory, Rob King explores the dimensions of that process, arguing for a new understanding of working-class cultural practices within early cinematic mass culture. He shows how Keystone fashioned a style of film comedy from the roughhouse humor of cheap theater, pioneering modes of representation that satirized film industry attempts at uplift. Interdisciplinary in its approach, The Fun Factory offers a unique studio history that views the changing politics of early film culture through the sociology of laughter.

Author: Rob King
ISBN-10: 0520255380
ISBN-13: 9780520255388
Publisher: University of California Press
Language: English
Published: 12/10/2008
Pages: 376
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.30lbs
Size: 9.02h x 6.00w x 0.95d

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 01/09/2009 pg. 17
Choice 06/01/2009