Comedy Incarnate : Buster Keaton, Physical Humor, and Bodily Coping PDF

COMEDY INCARNATE

COMEDY INCARNATE
Buster Keaton, Physical Humor and Bodily Coping

Buster Keaton was an engineer of the comic, a craftsman of gags, a mechanic of humor. While Carroll does not aspire to be as funny as Keaton, he can match (and follow) him in intricate and brilliant analysis, providing a logic of illogic. A book that will change how we think about slapstick and film style.
Tom Gunning, University of Chicago

Comedy Incarnate is a brilliant, inventive and lucid examination of Buster Keaton s The General. Through close textual analysis, Carroll opens up a wide expanse of historical and theoretical territory positioning The General in relation to the writings of Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and Poulet, as well as to the films of Chaplin, Lloyd, and Langdon.
Lucy Fischer, University of Pittsburgh

Building on Keaton s directorial practice as a sort of civil engineer who engaged a mechanical universe, Carroll . . . investigates how Keaton s emphasis on gags and their intelligibility characterize the film in specific ways. In so doing he opens up an understanding of how Keaton s comedy of body intelligence works, especially in contrast to contemporaries like Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, and he shows how intelligence the artist s and the viewer s informs laughter.
CHOICE

Comedy Incarnate explores the intricacies of Buster Keaton s unique visual style to discover what provokes laughter in his timeless films, paying special attention to The General. Keaton s precise body comedy, coupled with his unconventional directorial decisions, suggests a new way of analyzing the film in terms of its visual elements as opposed to its narrative. Written by one of America s foremost film theorists, this in-depth examination of the comedy of the steam, steel, and railroad era will provide a fresh vantage point for analysis of film and comedy itself.