General Introduction PART ONE: GENRE, NARRATIVE AND PERFORMANCE 1 Steve Seidman, Performance, Enunciation and Self-reference in Hollywood Comedian Comedy 2 Peter Kramer, Derailing the Honeymoon Express: Comicality and Narrative Closure in Buster Keaton’s The Blacksmith PART TWO: APPROACHES TO SILENT COMEDY 3 Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik, The Case of Silent Slapstick 4 Tom Gunning, Buster Keaton, or the Work of Comedy in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction 5 William Paul, Charlie Chaplin and the Annals of Anality PART THREE: SOUND COMEDY, THE VAUDEVILLE AESTHETIC AND ETHNICITY 6 Henry Jenkins III, Anarchistic Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic 7 Mark Winokur, The Marx Brothers and the Search for the Landsman PART FOUR: COMEDIAN COMEDY AND GENDER 8 Kathleen Rowe, She Done Him Wrong: Spectacle and Narrative 9 Patricia Mellencamp, Lucille Ball and the Regime of Domiculture 10 Joanna E. Rapf, Comic Theory from a Feminist Perspective: A Look at Jerry Lewis 11 Steven Cohan, Queering the Deal: On the Road with Hope and Crosby PART FIVE: POST-CLASSICAL COMEDIAN COMEDY 12 Bambi L. Haggins, Laughing Mad: The Black Comedian’s Place in American Comedy of the Post-Civil Rights Era 13 Philip Drake, Low Blows? Theorizing Performance in Post-classical Comedian Comedy.