British Comedy Cinema

I.Q. Hunter, Laraine Porter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415666657
• eBook ISBN: 9781136508370
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

British comedy cinema has been a mainstay of domestic production since the beginning of the last Century and arguably the most popular and important genre in British film history.

This edited volume will offer the first comprehensive account of the rich and popular history of British comedy cinema from silent slapstick and satire to contemporary romantic comedy. Using a loosely chronological approach, essays cover successive decades of the 20th and 21st Century with a combination of case studies on key personalities, production cycles and studio output along with fresh approaches to issues of class and gender representation. It will present new research on familiar comedy cycles such as the Ealing Comedies and Carry On films as well as the largely undocumented silent period along with the rise of television spin offs from the 1970s and the development of animated comedy from 1915 to the present.

Films covered include: St Trinians, A Fish Called Wanda, Brassed Off, Local Hero, The Full Monty, Four Lions and In the Loop.

Contributors: Melanie Bell, Alan Burton, James Chapman, Richard Dacre, Ian Hunter, James Leggott, Sharon Lockyer, Andy Medhurst, Lawrence Napper, Tim O'Sullivan, Laraine Porter, Justin Smith, Sarah Street, Peter Waymark, Paul Wells

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. British comedy cinema: Sex, class and very naughty boys
• 2. From slapstick to satire: British comedy cinema before 1930
• 3. ‘No limit’: British class and comedy of the 1930s
• 4. ‘Northern films for Northern people’: The story of the Mancunian Film Company
• 5. Ealing comedies 1947–57: ‘The bizarre British, faced with another perfectly extraordinary situation’
• 6. ‘From adolescence into maturity’: The film comedy of the Boulting brothers
• 7. Margaret Rutherford and comic performance
• 8. A short history of the Carry On films
• 9. ‘Gird your armour on’: The genteel subversion of the St. Trinian’s films
• 10. Norman Wisdom: Rank Studios and the rise of the Super Chump
• 11. ‘From telly laughs to belly laughs’: The rise and fall of the sitcom spin-off
• 12. From window cleaner to potato man: Confessions of a working-class stereotype
• 13. Making Ben-Hur look like an epic: Monty Python at the movies
• 14. Travels in Curtisland: Richard Curtis and British comedy cinema
• 15. ‘The sight of 40-year-old genitalia too disgusting, is it?’: Wit, whimsy and wishful thinking in British animation, 1900–present
• Index