Rob King is Associate Professor at Columbia University's School of the Arts and author of the award-winning The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture.

"King thus explores a series of critical questions about how cultural forms dwindle and reemerge... his work points toward a new avenue of research worth looking into when considering alternative constructions of American film history; instead of breaking down the myths that haunt much of film scholarship, the development of these very myths may reveal more about cultural consciousness."

• List of Illustrations and Audiovisual MediaAcknowledgmentsIntroductionPART I. CONTEXTS1. “The Cuckoo School”: Humor and Metropolitan Culture in 1920s America2. “The Stigma of Slapstick”: The Short-Subject Industry and Its Imagined PublicPART II. CASE HISTORIES3. “The Spice of the Program”: Educational Pictures and the Small-Town Audience4. “I Want Music Everywhere”: Music, Operetta, and Cultural Hierarchy at the Hal Roach Studios5. “From the Archives of Keystone Memory”: Slapstick and Re-membrance at Columbia Pictures’ Short-Subjects DepartmentCoda: When Comedy Was KingList of AbbreviationsNotesIndex