Introduction

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.