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Buffoon Men - Classic Hollywood Comedians and Queered Masculinity (Paperback, New)
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Buffoon Men - Classic Hollywood Comedians and Queered Masculinity (Paperback, New)
Series: Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series
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Film scholars and fans have used distinctive terms to describe the
Classic Hollywood comedian: He is a ""trickster,"" a ""rebel,"" or
a ""buffoon."" Yet the performer is almost always described as a
""he."" In Buffoon Men: Classic Hollywood Comedians and Queered
Masculinity, Scott Balcerzak reads the performances of notable
comedians such as W. C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny, Stan
Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey, and Bud
Abbott and Lou Costello through humor and queer theory to expose a
problematic history of maleness in their personas. He argues that
contrary to popular notions of Classic Hollywood history, these
male comedians rearranged or, at times, rejected heteronormative
protocols. Balcerzak begins by defining the particular buffoonish
masculinity portrayed by early film comedians, a gender and genre
construct influenced by the cultural anxieties of the 1930s and
'40s. In chapter 1, he considers the onscreen pairing of W. C.
Fields and Mae West to identify a queered sexuality and drag
persona in Fields's performance, while in chapter 2 he examines the
two major constructions of Fields's film persona-the confidence man
and the husband-to show Fields to be a conflicted and subversive
figure. In chapter 3, Balcerzak considers the assimilation and
influence of Eddie Cantor as a Jewish celebrity, while he turns to
the cross-media influence of Jack Benny's radio persona in chapter
4. In Chapters 5 and 6, he moves beyond the individual performer to
examine the complex masculine brotherhood of comedy duos Laurel and
Hardy, Abbott and Costello, and Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey.
Buffoon Men shows that the complicated history of the male comedian
during the early sound era has much to tell us about multimedia
comedic stars today. Fans and scholars of film history, gender
studies, and broadcast studies will appreciate Balcerzak's thorough
exploration of the era's fascinating gender constructs.
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