Comedy Incarnate: Buster Keaton, Physical Humor, and Bodily Coping

Comedy Incarnate explores the intricacies of Buster Keaton’s unique visual style to discover what provokes laughter in his timeless films, paying special attention to The General. Keaton’s precise body comedy, coupled with his unconventional directorial decisions, suggests a new way of analyzing the film in terms of its visual elements as opposed to its narrative. Written by one of America’s foremost film theorists, this in–depth examination of the comedy of the steam, steel, and railroad era will provide a fresh vantage point for analysis of film and comedy itself.

Acknowledgments.

Introduction: The Phenomenological Background.

1. Themes in The General.

2. Style in The General.

3. Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd, and Langdon.

Summary.

Appendix: Narration in Keaton′s The General.

Index

Noel Carroll is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His recent books include The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (Wiley–Blackwell, 2008) and On Criticism (2008). He is co–editor, with Jinhee Choi, of Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures (Wiley–Blackwell, 2005).

“Buster Keaton was an engineer of the comic, a craftsman of gags, a mechanic of humor. While Carroll does not aspire to be as funny as Keaton, he can match (and follow) him in intricate and brilliant analysis, providing a logic of illogic. A book that will change how slapstick and film style are written about.”
Tom Gunning, University of Chicago

“Comedy Incarnate is a brilliant, inventive and lucid examination of Buster Keaton’s The General. Through close textual analysis, Carroll opens up a wide expanse of historical and theoretical territory – positioning The General in relation to the writings of Merleau–Ponty, Bergson, and Poulet, as well as to the films of Chaplin, Lloyd, and Langdon. Lucy Fischer, University of Pittsburgh

"Building on Keaton′s directorial practice as a sort of civil engineer who engaged a mechanical universe, Carroll...investigates how Keaton′s emphasis on gags and their intelligibility characterize the film in specific ways. In so doing he opens up an understanding of how Keaton′s comedy of body intelligence works, especially in contrast to contemporaries like Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, and he shows how intelligence––the artist′s and the viewer′s––informs laughter." CHOICE