The presidency of the 45th president of the United States, Donald Trump, impacted many sectors of society. One of these was comedy, which became obsessed with Trump, who was himself a comedic figure. This book looks at this impact, called the Trump Effect, on American comedy—an effect that has changed its historical forms drastically.

From Chaplin's tramp to the Bathing Beauties slapstick comedy supplied many of the most enduring icons of American cinema in the silent era. This collection of fourteen essays by film scholars challenges longstanding critical dogma and offers new conceptual frameworks for thinking about silent comedy's place in film history and American culture.

This book traces a trend that has emerged in recent years within the modern panorama of American horror film and television, the concurrent—and often overwhelming—use of multiple stock characters, themes and tropes taken from classics of the genre. American Horror Story, Insidious and The Conjuring are examples of a filmic tendency to address a series of topics and themes so vast that at first glance each taken separately would seem to suffice for individual films or shows. This book explores this trend in its visible connections with American Horror, but also with cultural and artistic movements from outside the US, namely Baroque art and architecture, Asian Horror, and European Horror. It analyzes how these hybrid products are constructed and discusses the socio-political issues that they raise. The repeated and excessive barrage of images, tropes and scenarios from distinct subgenres of iconic horror films come together to make up an aesthetic that is referred to in this book as Baroque Horror. In many ways similar to the reactions provoked by the artistic movement of the same name that flourished in the XVII century, these productions induce shock, awe, fear, and surprise. Eljaiek-Rodríguez details how American directors and filmmakers construct these narratives using different and sometimes disparate elements that come together to function as a whole, terrifying the audience through their frenetic accumulation of images, tropes and plot twists. The book also addresses some of the effects that these complex films and series have produced both in the panorama of contemporary horror, as well as in how we understand politics in a divisive world that pushes for ideological homogenizations.

At the age of 44, renowned comedian Richard Lewis found himself on a gurney in the ER, toxic with alcohol, and hallucinating from excess cocaine use. The same neuroses and dysfunctions that had been the basis for his successful stage persona and inspired his best material had, it seemed, turned on him. How he got there, how he finally got on the road to recovery, and how he copes with being Richard Lewis sober on a daily basis are the subjects of this very funny, deeply honest, inspiring, but very untreacly book. USA Today called it "candid and inspirational.… A journey through Lewis' personal Inferno to eventual salvation."

This book explores the implications for today's critical concerns of the work of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), one of the most powerful and influential thinkers of the 20th century.

Charlie Chaplin was one of the cinema’s consummate comic performers, yet he has long been criticized as a lackluster film director. In this groundbreaking work—the first to analyze Chaplin’s directorial style—Donna Kornhaber radically recasts his status as a filmmaker. Spanning Chaplin’s career, Kornhaber discovers a sophisticated "Chaplinesque" visual style that draws from early cinema and slapstick and stands markedly apart from later, "classical" stylistic conventions. His is a manner of filmmaking that values space over time and simultaneity over sequence, crafting narrative and meaning through careful arrangement within the frame rather than cuts between frames. Opening up aesthetic possibilities beyond the typical boundaries of the classical Hollywood film, Chaplin’s filmmaking would profoundly influence directors from Fellini to Truffaut. To view Chaplin seriously as a director is to re-understand him as an artist and to reconsider the nature and breadth of his legacy.

How the insane asylum came to exert such a powerful hold on the American imagination. Madhouse, funny farm, psychiatric hospital, loony bin, nuthouse, mental institution: no matter what you call it, the asylum has a powerful hold on the American imagination. Stark and foreboding, they symbolize mistreatment, fear, and imprisonment, standing as castles of despair and tyranny across the countryside. In the "asylum" of American fiction and film, treatments are torture, attendants are thugs, and psychiatrists are despots. In Nightmare Factories, Troy Rondinone offers the first history of mental hospitals in American popular culture. Beginning with Edgar Allan Poe's 1845 short story "The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether," Rondinone surveys how American novelists, poets, memoirists, reporters, and filmmakers have portrayed the asylum and how those representations reflect larger social trends in the United States. Asylums, he argues, darkly reflect cultural anxieties and the shortcomings of democracy, as well as the ongoing mistreatment of people suffering from mental illness. Nightmare Factories traces the story of the asylum as the masses have witnessed it. Rondinone shows how works ranging from Moby-Dick and Dracula to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Halloween, and American Horror Story have all conversed with the asylum. Drawing from fictional and real accounts, movies, personal interviews, and tours of mental hospitals both active and defunct, Rondinone uncovers a story at once familiar and bizarre, where reality meets fantasy in the foggy landscape of celluloid and pulp.

These, together with the emphasis on individual responsibility for health and material security - not to mention resurgent machismo and a restored belief in the natural and unnatural - help to explain the health disaster experienced in the United States, United Kingdom, and elsewhere. A review of English-language cinematic entertainment of the eighties reveals that the health crisis was scarcely alluded to, although such values as those of militarism, masculinity, and family loyalty were addressed - whether supportively or critically. It is the argument of this book that the HIV virus and AIDS are approached, if at all, only obliquely, particularly within the genre of the horror film, and especially through those films dealing with corporeality or with lethal challenges to the traditional nuclear family.