Despite its unabated popularity with audiences, slapstick has received rather little scholarly attention, mostly by scholars concentrating on the US theater and cinema traditions. Nonetheless, as a form of physical humor slapstick has a long history across various areas of cultural production. This volume approaches slapstick both as a genre of situational physical comedy and as a mode of communicating an affective situation captured in various cultural products. Contributors to the volume examine cinematic, literary, dramatic, musical, and photographic texts and performances. From medieval chivalric romance and nineteenth-century theater to contemporary photography, the contributors study treatments of slapstick across media, periods and geographic locations. The aim of a study of such wide scope is to demonstrate how slapstick emerged from a variety of complex interactions among different traditions and by extension, to illustrate that slapstick can be highly productive for interdisciplinary research.

• Acknowledgements 6
• Contents 8
• Introduction: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Slapstick 12
• Part I: History of Slapstick 22
• Introduction 22
• The Descent of Slapstick 26
• Ideology, Performance, and Ironic Distance in Musical Slapstick 48
• Sinking and Falling Bodies: The Beginnings of Literary Slapstick in the Pre-Modern Era 64
• Part II: Instruments of Slapstick 84
• Introduction 84
• The Broken Mirror: From Commedia All’Improvviso to Slapstick Comedy 90
• Harold Lloyd and the Reappearing Hand: Disability, Embodiment, and Slapstick 112
• Wardrobe Malfunction and Slapstick Humiliation in The Lonely Island’s Popstar: 132
• Gazing at Slapstick with Luiza Folegatti’s Drag King Series O Deleite da Mulher Barbada 150
• Part III: Narrative Structures of Slapstick 172