Overview

From cabaret songs inspired by Buster Keaton to Mickey Mouse’s diagnosis as a “melo-maniac,” Weimar Slapstick and Hollywood Comedy Transformed explores the extraordinary appeal of American slapstick, cartoon, and screwball comedies during and after Germany’s Weimar Republic. Bridging two crucial sites of interwar modernity, Paul Flaig offers a fundamental reassessment of Weimar culture, Hollywood comedy, and their intertwined legacies. Through a series of comic pairings—including Harold Lloyd and Curt Bois, Felix the Cat and psychotechnics—Flaig investigates the aesthetic, political and sexual forces that shaped Weimar Germany’s fascination with American film comedies, as they were taken up and transformed by German filmmakers, philosophers, advertisers, artists, and politicians. Examining a wide range of sources—including films, manifestoes, arts journals, feuilletons, and trade press reports—he underscores the essential and diverse contributions of Weimar culture to our understanding of these comic laboratories of modernity.

Full Product Details

Author:   Paul Flaig (University of St. Andrews, UK)
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint:   Bloomsbury Academic
Dimensions:   Width: 15.80cm , Height: 2.00cm , Length: 23.60cm
Weight:   0.621kg
ISBN:  

9781350439153

ISBN 10:   1350439150
Pages:   304
Publication Date:   02 October 2025
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

Introduction I: Charlie, Buster and Harold in Weimar: Slapstick between Mass Culture and the Avant-Garde Opening Act: Charlie’s Shoes 1. The Tramp Re-functioned: On Brecht and Chaplin 2. ‘Dada Buster’: Technology, Fashion and Sensation from Slapstick Deadpan to the Weimar Avant-Garde 3. A German (Jewish and Queer) Harold Lloyd: Curt Bois and the White-Collar Worker II: Uncanny Things and Animate Adventures Opening Act: Dial M for Mickey 4. From Caligari to Disney: Animation Aesthetics, the Comic Uncanny and American Cartoon Humor Abroad 5. Felix the Psychotechnical Cat, or, the Usefulness of Comic Cartoons III: The Screwball Letters: The Frankfurt School meets 1930s Hollywood Sound Comedy Opening Act: The Marxist Brothers 6. Groucho, Harpo and Adorno: Culture becomes Comic in A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races 7. Slapstick Betrayed: Walter Benjamin and Capracorn Bibliography Index

Reviews

A masterful study of Weimar culture’s engagement with American slapstick, Paul Flaig’s book uncovers forgotten histories—Berthold Brecht on Charlie Chaplin, Walter Benjamin on Frank Capra, Germany’s lost Laurel and Hardy—restoring the intellectual and historical contexts that shaped this transatlantic comic dialogue. A genuinely revelatory work. * Robert J. King, Columbia University, USA * In this brilliant book, Paul Flaig shows how the familiar characters of American slapstick (Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Mickey) assumed new meanings within the crisis-laden context of the Weimar Republic. Both film history and intellectual history, Weimar Slapstick covers an astonishing range of contexts, from philosophy to the Bauhaus to advertising film. -- Michael Cowan, The University of Iowa, USA Weimar Slapstick provides a welcome deep-dive into the influence of American slapstick on Weimar and post-Weimar German cultural practice and theory. It is an invaluable resource for scholars in transnational media studies and will remain essential reading for those interested in U.S.-German cultural relations for years to come. -- Ervin Malakaj, University of British Columbia, Canada

Author Information

Paul Flaig is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St. Andrews, UK. He is the co-editor of New Silent Cinema (2015) and his writing has appeared in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Camera Obscura, Cinema Journal, animation and Screen. He is co-director of the German Screen Studies Network.

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