To save as a PDF, click "Print" and select "Save as PDF" or "Print to PDF" from the Destination dropdown. On a mobile device, click the "Share" button, then choose "Print" and "Save as PDF".
Available From UC Press
The Fun Factory
The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture
From its founding in 1912, the short-lived Keystone Film Company—home of the frantic, bumbling Kops and Mack Sennett's Bathing Beauties—made an indelible mark on American popular culture with its high-energy comic shorts. Even as Keystone brought "lowbrow" comic traditions to the screen, the studio played a key role in reformulating those traditions for a new, cross-class audience. In The Fun Factory, Rob King explores the dimensions of that process, arguing for a new understanding of working-class cultural practices within early cinematic mass culture. He shows how Keystone fashioned a style of film comedy from the roughhouse humor of cheap theater, pioneering modes of representation that satirized film industry attempts at uplift. Interdisciplinary in its approach, The Fun Factory offers a unique studio history that views the changing politics of early film culture through the sociology of laughter.
Rob King is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies and History at the University of Toronto.