Zach Sands - Film Comedy and the American Dream

Film Comedy and the American Dream

In Film Comedy and the American Dream, Zach Sands takes the history of American movie comedy seriously as a source of a sustained and evolving critique of that elusive yet indispensable cultural concept, the American Dream. Through careful, insightful, and witty analyses of crucial movie comedies over the course of American movie history, Sands traces the promise and dashed hopes of the American Dream in relation to economics, gender, and neoliberalism, taking on sex comedies, bromances, and zombies along the way.

John Alberti, Northern Kentucky University, US

Film Comedy and the American Dreamis an examination of national identity in the era of the American superpower as projected in popular comedic films that center on issues of upward mobility. It is the story of what made audiences laugh and why, and what this says about the changing shape of the American Dream from the end of the Second World War through the first part of the twenty-first century. Through a combination of narrative and thematic analyses of popular comedic films, contextualized within a dynamic historical framework, this book traces the increasing disillusionment with this guiding ideology in the face of multiple forms of systemic exclusion. It argues that film comedy is a major component of the discourse surrounding the American Dream because these movies often evoke humor by highlighting the incongruities that exist between the ideals that define this nation versus the actual lived experiences of its citizens.

Zach Sandshas a PhD in American Culture Studies from Bowling Green State University, Ohio, US.

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com .

47 Horror Film and Affect
Towards a Corporeal Model of Viewership
Xavier Aldana Reyes

48 Indias New Independent Cinema
Rise of the Hybrid
Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram

49 Early Race Filmmaking in America
Edited by Barbara Tepa Lupack

50 Film Text Analysis
New Perspectives on the Analysis of Filmic Meaning
Edited by Janina Wildfeuer and John A. Bateman

51 The Camera-Eye Metaphor in Cinema
Christian Quendler

52 Surveillance in Asian Cinema
Under Eastern Eyes
Edited by Karen Fang

53 US Youth Films and Popular Music
Identity, Genre, and Musical Agency
Tim McNelis

54 The Cinematic Eighteenth Century
History, Culture, and Adaptation
Edited by Srividhya Swaminathan and Steven W. Thomas

55 The Contemporary Femme Fatale
Gender, Genre and American Cinema
Katherine Farrimond

56 Film Comedy and the American Dream
Zach Sands

Zach Sands

First published 2018
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2018 Taylor & Francis

The right of Zach Sands to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.