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“A totally engaging read [and] a fascinating look at the diversity and range of female comics . . . by an author who herself obviously has a sense of humor.” —Joanna E. Rapf, coeditor of The Blackwell Companion to Film Comedy Women in comedy have traditionally been pegged as either “pretty” or “funny.” Attractive actresses with good comic timing such as Katherine Hepburn, Lucille Ball, and Julia Roberts have always gotten plum roles as the heroines of romantic comedies and television sitcoms. But fewer women who write and perform their own comedy have become stars—and often they’ve been successful because they were willing to be funny-looking, from Fanny Brice and Phyllis D...
As femme fatale, cabaret siren, and icon of Camp, the Christopher Isherwood character Sally Bowles has become this century's darling of "divine decadence"--a measure of how much we are attracted by the fiction of the "shocking" British/American vamp in Weimar Berlin. Originally a character in a short story by Isherwood, published in 1939, "Sally" has appeared over the years in John Van Druten's stage play I Am a Camera, Henry Cornelius's film of the same name, and Joe Masteroff's stage musical and Bob Fosse's Academy Award-winning musical film, both entitled Cabaret. Linda Mizejewski shows how each successive repetition of the tale of the showgirl and the male writer/scholar has linked the y...
“A totally engaging read [and] a fascinating look at the diversity and range of female comics . . . by an author who herself obviously has a sense of humor.” —Joanna E. Rapf, coeditor of The Blackwell Companion to Film Comedy Women in comedy have traditionally been pegged as either “pretty” or “funny.” Attractive actresses with good comic timing such as Katherine Hepburn, Lucille Ball, and Julia Roberts have always gotten plum roles as the heroines of romantic comedies and television sitcoms. But fewer women who write and perform their own comedy have become stars—and often they’ve been successful because they were willing to be funny-looking, from Fanny Brice and Phyllis D...
Longtime fans of Carrie Fisher and her body of work will welcome this smart and thoughtful tribute to a multimedia legend.
Can a gumshoe wear high heels? In a genre long dominated by men, women are now taking their place-as authors and as characters-alongside hard-boiled legends like Sam Spade and Mike Hammer. Hardboiled and High Heeled examines the meteoric rise of the female detective in contemporary film, television, and literature. Richly illustrated and written with a fan's love of the genre, Hardboiled and High Heeled is an essential introduction to women in detective fiction, from past to present, from pulp fiction to blockbuster films.
Amy Schumer, Samantha Bee, Mindy Kaling, Melissa McCarthy, Tig Notaro, Leslie Jones, and a host of hilarious peers are killing it nightly on American stages and screens large and small, smashing the tired stereotype that women aren't funny. But today's funny women aren't a new phenomenon—they have generations of hysterically funny foremothers. Fay Tincher's daredevil stunts, Mae West's linebacker walk, Lucille Ball's manic slapstick, Carol Burnett's athletic pratfalls, Ellen DeGeneres's tomboy pranks, Whoopi Goldberg's sly twinkle, and Tina Fey's acerbic wit all paved the way for contemporary unruly women, whose comedy upends the norms and ideals of women's bodies and behaviors. Hysterical...
A study of the iconographic significance of the Ziegfeld girl in twentieth-century American conceptions of sexuality, race, class, and consumerism.
A movie that swept the 1934 Academy Awards and captivatedDepression-era America, It Happened One Night challenged theways Americans imagined marriage, romance, gender, and classdifference. This book examines key scenes and formal features ofIt Happened One Night, and explores its lasting importancein film history and in cultural studies. Consideration of the film’s role in establishing thegenre of the romantic comedy film Investigations into the film’s persistent sexuality andits creativity in avoiding Depression-era censorship Establishment of the cultural, economic, and political contextof a film that directly addresses the Depression and classissues Exploration of how the film invokes and develops the stardom ofClark Gable and Claudette Colbert and how this stardom intersectswith the film’s topics of gender, genre, sexuality, andclass
When Thelma and Louise outfought the men who had tormented them, women across America discovered what male fans of action movies have long known—the empowering rush of movie violence. Yet the duo's escapades also provoked censure across a wide range of viewers, from conservatives who felt threatened by the up-ending of women's traditional roles to feminists who saw the pair's use of male-style violence as yet another instance of women's co-option by the patriarchy. In the first book-length study of violent women in movies, Reel Knockouts makes feminist sense of violent women in films from Hollywood to Hong Kong, from top-grossing to direct-to-video, and from cop-action movies to X-rated sk...
Explores The Americans as a groundbreaking series that brilliantly merged the spy genre and domestic melodrama. Based on the actual KGB strategy of planting "illegals" into American life during the Cold War, The Americans (FX 2013–2018) focuses on Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (Matthew Rhys and Kerri Russell), Soviet spies posing as middlebrow travel agents in the Virginia suburbs. Groundbreaking and unsettling, The Americans spins its stories of espionage, violence, and politics around narratives of marriage, romance, bromance, and family. Exploring the series' bold merger of the spy genre and domestic melodrama, author Linda Mizejewski focuses on the characters and relationships that mad...