Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture

by Rob King

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.

374 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Greta · Rating 4 out of 5]

It rather tickles my fancy to be reading an academic treatise about Keystone, but it is interesting and well done, and quite readable (i.e. not obtuse). Makes the interesting observation that the earliest Keystone films, like Sennett's Biographs, were more "polite" situation-type comedies and that the chases and slapstick were in a way a reversion to films recent disreputable past. That is, while the industry was gentrifying and trying to appeal to a respectable audience, Keystone was going the other direction with both knockabout humor and parodies of melodramas--the former possibly of particular resonance with industrial workers subject to taylorizing regimens at their workplaces. Later, when they became part of Triangle, which wanted to appeal to middle class audiences, they went back to more genteel sentimental comedies, emphasizing romance and playing down class differences. Also notes how Keystone morphed knockabout slapstick into physical comedy involving mechanical devices, which weren't considered vulgar like butt-kicking, and discusses the difference in meaning between Mabel Normand and the Bathing Beauties. Still, it does crack me up to encounter Mabel Normand and Jürgen Habermas in the same paragraph.

[Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has a lot of information on the Keystone studios, but is presented in a semi-pretentious, overly wordy manner. It took too long to get to the point that the author was trying make. Very Dry!