Coda: When Comedy Was King
Rob King
Chapter from the book: King, R. 2017. Hokum!: The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture.
Part of
Chapter from the book: King, R. 2017. Hokum!: The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture.
The coda to Hokum! tracks the ongoing recycling of “old-time” slapstick subsequent to the book’s main period of study. The market for throwback comedy that first opened around the mid-1930s proved to be a geyser that continued to spout reissues for many years to come – for instance, in the cycle of vintage-comedy anthologies that took off in the late 1950s, in the recycling of silent comedy shorts in syndicated children’s television programming in the early 1960s, and in the subsequent growth of an 8mm and 16mm collectors’ market. The history of this recycling, the book concludes, sheds light on the role of technological change in structuring nostalgia for media texts and artifacts.
King, R. 2017. Coda: When Comedy Was King. In: King, R, Hokum!. California: University of California Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.28.g
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Published on April 7, 2017