Comedy Objects #1: Slapstick Speculation was chosen by Veronika Hanáková and Colleen Laird for Sight & Sound’s annual Best Video Essays of 2025 poll. You can read their texts below.
“When you are watching film comedies, what do you focus on? The predicaments of the main character, the misbehaviour of everything around them, the jokes? Noah focuses on Hollywood film comedies from the 1930s. To do so, he is able to connect the humour and the language (the delivery of the jokes) to the omnipresence of the financial crisis. A close reading of figures of speech, gesture, and music places film comedies less in the realm of frivolous slips of the tongue and more within the logic of the system, financial system. In researching the history and phenomenon of slapstick comedies, this essay pairs nicely with Petr Král’s Le Burlesque ou Morale de la tarte à la crème, even though they approach the subject from slightly different perspectives. Published as part of a special issue of the journal Images secondes on Cinema and Financial Speculation (edited by Occitane Lacurie and Barnabé Sauvage).” -Veronika Hanáková
“Slapstick Speculation shows how videographic methodology can treat archival research not as raw material but as an imaginative, processual space for reanimating history. By blending 1930s comedy shorts, novelty songs, and monologues with speculative fiction, the piece reconstructs Hollywood’s shift to sound through the eyes and labor of comedy workers navigating the shocks of the 1929 Crash. While that is the conceptual background of the piece, for me I can feel how video thinks across media, revealing liveness as an intermedial effect shared by vaudeville, radio, early sound film, the stock ticker, and the choice of font and text-on-screen placement.” -Colleen Laird