Video essay and publication: "Comedy Objects #1: Slapstick Speculation"

The videographic essay and article “Comedy Objects #1: Slapstick Speculation” were recently published in English and French in a special issue of the journal Images secondes on “Cinema and Financial Speculation” (edited by Occitane Lacurie and Barnabé Sauvage).

Through examples of films, novelty songs, and comic monologues from the 1929 Wall Street Crash, “Slapstick Speculation” explores how the ups and downs of market values were intertwined with slapstick bodies during Hollywood’s transition to sound.

This is the first installment of Comedy Objects, a project that brings together archival research with speculative fiction to think about comedy workers in the United States during the Great Depression.

This project was supported by a post-doctoral fellowship at the ArTeC Graduate School (2023-2024).