Comedy and Cultural Critique in American Film

Ryan Bishop is Professor of Global Art and Politics at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton (UK) and Research Associate at Witwatersrand University (South Africa). His most recent book projects are Cold War Imaginaries: Technology, Temporality, Culture (co-edited with John Beck forthcoming 2026 Edinburgh University Press) and Technocrats of the Imagination: Art, Technology and the Military-Industrial Avant-garde (co-authored with John Beck, Duke University Press 2020). Bishop is lead editor of the journal Cultural Politics (Duke UP) and the book series associated with the journal (Duke UP) and the series “Technicities” (co-edited with Jussi Parikka, Edinburgh University Press).

Bishop offers a rich contextualized history of the American comedy film. Covering a wide range of films and theorists, the book makes a unique contribution to both film studies and visual culture studies. He explores the way comic films – as complex textual, technological, and social constructs – contributed to the specific forms and powers of visuality in twentieth-century modernities.

• Acknowledgements; 1 American Film Comedy and Cultural Critique; 2 The Feeding Machine and Feeding the Machine: Silence, Sound and the Technologies of Cinema; 3 The Constitution of the Real: Documentary, Mockumentary, and the Status of the Image; 4 Parody: Targeting Cinema’s Narrative Technics; 5 The Unspeakable and Political Satire: Performance, Perception, and Technology; 6 Conclusion: Between the Machine and the Event: Film Comedy; Index