The Fun Factory
The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture
by Rob King
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Book Presentation:
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.
About the Author:
Rob King is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies and History at the University of Toronto.
Press Reviews:
"A searching and briskly authoritative history."— National Post
"[An] ambitious and innovative study [and] an important contribution. . . . A wonderful analysis of the historical and cultural complexity of this key moment of modernity and one of its major industries. [It] should be compulsory to all scholars in the field."— Leonardo Reviews
"King goes well-beyond the hagiography of most writing on the Keystone Company and its famous comics to demonstrate the company’s importance for history beyond the artistic merits of its individual performers. . . . Essential reading for all those film historians not necessarily interested in slapstick comedy."— Screening The Past
"This studio history, where bumbling Kops, funny drunks, slapstick humor, and bathing beauties reigned, offers insights on the politics of early filmmaking through the sociology of laughter."— Communication Booknotes Quarterly
"Unique."— Interaction / Bms Book News
"Carefully argued and exhaustively researched. [A] fascinating social history (a good, good read) [that] can help convince the skeptical or the uninitiated that seeking out books in this field can enjoyably deepen one's understanding of the fascinating history of America."— Smile Politely
> From the same author:
Hokum! (2017)
The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture
by Rob King
Subject: Genre > Comedy/Humor
Early Cinema and the National (2008)
Dir. Richard Abel, Giorgio Bertellini and Rob King
Subject: Silent Cinema
> On a related topic:
Without Lying Down (1998)
Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood
Subject: Others persons > Frances Marion
Lonesome Luke's Lively Life (2025)
Hal Roach, Harold Lloyd and the Rolin Film Co.
Dir. Steve Massa
Subject: Actor > Harold LLoyd
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