The Slapstick Camera: Hollywood and the Comedy of Self-Reference

Demonstrates that slapstick film comedies display a canny and sometimes profound understanding of their medium.

Slapstick film comedy may be grounded in idiocy and failure, but the genre is far more sophisticated than it initially appears. In this book, Burke Hilsabeck suggests that slapstick is often animated by a philosophical impulse to understand the cinema. He looks closely at movies and gags that represent the conditions and conventions of cinema production and demonstrates that film c...