Table of Contents

1. An Introduction to Silent Film Comedy and American Culture: Clowns, Conformity, Consumerism 2. A Convention of Crazy Bugs: Mack Sennett and America's Immigrant Unconscious 3. Accelerated Bodies and Jumping jacks: Automata, Mannequins and Toys in the Films of Charlie Chaplin 4. Nobody Loves A Fat Man: Conspicuous Consumption and the Case of Fatty Arbuckle in 1920's America 5. Dizzy Doras and Big-Eyed Beauties: Mabel Normand and the Notion of the Female Clown in American Silent Film 6. Consumerism and its Discontents: Harold Lloyd and the Anxieties of Capitalism 7. Buster Keaton and the South: The First Things and the Last 8. Sleepwalkers on Parade: The Shell-Shocked Silence of Harry Langdon Coda