Buffoon Men: Classic Hollywood Comedians and Queered Masculinity Audiobook By Scott Balcerzak cover art

Buffoon Men: Classic Hollywood Comedians and Queered Masculinity

Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series

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Buffoon Men: Classic Hollywood Comedians and Queered Masculinity

By: Scott Balcerzak
Narrated by: Gary Roelofs
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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.

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.

The book is published by Wayne State University Press.

©2013 Wayne State University Press (P)2016 Redwood Audiobooks Art Entertainment & Performing Arts Film & TV Gender Studies History & Criticism Social Sciences Celebrity Comedy Witty Queer Classic Film
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Loved it !! this story. the narrator is so fantastic it's like your really there!! good overall

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This was a captivating listen. I’ve been a fan of classic Hollywood comedies since I was a kid, and have loved and enjoyed the unconventional representation of masculinity in these films, but this book definitely put so many things into focus, and illuminated so many aspects that I only assumed had been unintentional, yet now seem to be part of the very fabric of the comedy itself. It would probably fill another book, but I would have loved for the author to have talked a bit about the gender and sexual fluidity in American animation, such as The Looney Tunes, but since so much of that comedy is influenced by the comedians discussed in this book, I guess it’s just a continuation of what is discussed here.

A must listen for anyone interested in classic Hollywood

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