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Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy

Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley

Jack Benny became one of the most influential entertainers of the 20th century - by being the top radio comedian, when the comics ruled radio, and radio was the most powerful and pervasive mass ... More

Jack Benny became one of the most influential entertainers of the 20th century - by being the top radio comedian, when the comics ruled radio, and radio was the most powerful and pervasive mass medium in the US. In 23 years of weekly radio broadcasts, by aiming all the insults at himself, Benny created Jack, the self-deprecating “Fall Guy” character. He indelibly shaped American humor as a space to enjoy the equal opportunities of easy camaraderie with his cast mates, and equal ego deflation. Benny was the master of comic timing, knowing just when to use silence to create suspense or to have a character leap into the dialogue to puncture Jack’s pretentions. Jack Benny was also a canny entrepreneur, becoming one of the pioneering “showrunners” combining producer, writer and performer into one job. His modern style of radio humor eschewed stale jokes in favor informal repartee with comic hecklers like his valet Rochester (played by Eddie Anderson) and Mary Livingstone his offstage wife. These quirky characters bouncing off each other in humorous situations created the situation comedy. In this career study, we learn how Jack Benny found ingenious ways to sell his sponsors’ products in comic commercials beloved by listeners, and how he dealt with the challenges of race relations, rigid gender ideals and an insurgent new media industry (TV). Jack Benny created classic comedy for a rapidly changing American culture, providing laughter that buoyed radio listeners from 1932’s depths of the Great Depression, through World War II to the mid-1950s.Less

Sensational Internationalism: The Paris Commune and the Remapping of American Memory in the Long Nineteenth Century

J. Michelle Coghlan

In refocusing attention on the Paris Commune as a key event in American political and cultural memory, Sensational Internationalism radically changes our understanding of the relationship between ... More

In refocusing attention on the Paris Commune as a key event in American political and cultural memory, Sensational Internationalism radically changes our understanding of the relationship between France and the United States in the long nineteenth century. It offers fascinating, remarkably accessible readings of a range of literary works, from periodical poetry and boys’ adventure fiction to radical pulp and the writings of Henry James, as well as a rich analysis of visual, print, and performance culture, from post-bellum illustrated weeklies and panoramas to agit-prop pamphlets and Coney Island pyrotechnic shows. Throughout, it uncovers how a foreign revolution came back to life as a domestic commodity, and why for decades another nation’s memory came to feel so much our own. This book will speak to readers looking to understand the affective, cultural, and aesthetic afterlives of revolt and revolution pre-and-post Occupy Wall Street, as well as those interested in space, gender, performance, and transatlantic print culture.Less

After '89: Polish Theatre and the Political

Bryce Lease

This monograph takes as its subject the dynamic new range of performance practices that have been developed since the demise of communism in the flourishing theatrical landscape of Poland. After ... More

This monograph takes as its subject the dynamic new range of performance practices that have been developed since the demise of communism in the flourishing theatrical landscape of Poland. After 1989, Lease argues, the theatre has retained its historical role as the crucial space for debating and interrogating cultural and political identities. Providing access to scholarship and criticism not readily accessible to an English-speaking readership, this study surveys the rebirth of the theatre as a site of public intervention and social criticism since the establishment of democracy and the proliferation of theatre makers that have flaunted cultural commonplaces and begged new questions of Polish culture. Lease suggests that a radical democratic pluralism is only tenable through the destabilization of attempts to essentialize Polish national identity, focusing on the development of new theatre practices that interrogate the rise of nationalism, alternative sexual identities and forms of kinship, gender equality, contested histories of antisemitism, and postcolonial encounters. Lease elaborates a new theory of political theatre as part of the public sphere. The main contention is that the most significant change in performance practice after 1989 has been from opposition to the state to a more pluralistic practice that engages with marginalized identities purposefully left out of the rhetoric of freedom and independence.Less

The Woman Fantastic in Contemporary American Media Culture

Elyce Rae Helford, Shiloh Carroll, Sarah Gray, and Michael R. II Howard (eds)

In chapters devoted to individual television programs, adult and young adult literature, and comics, the authors collected in The Woman Fantastic in Contemporary American Media Culture discuss ... More

In chapters devoted to individual television programs, adult and young adult literature, and comics, the authors collected in The Woman Fantastic in Contemporary American Media Culture discuss feminist negotiation of today’s economic and social realities through the image of the fantastic female. Senior scholars and rising academic stars address figures from Wonder Woman and She-Hulk to Talia Al Ghul and Martha Washington; from Battlestar Gallactica’s female Starbuck to Game of Thrones’ Sansa; and from Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville to Cinda Williams Chima’s The Seven Realms.Less

Emotional Bodies: The Historical Performativity of Emotions

Dolores Martín-Moruno and Beatriz Pichel (eds)

Emotional Bodies provides a theoretical framework for studying the materiality of emotions. In line with recent research in the history of emotions, cultural studies, and new materialism, this volume ... More

Emotional Bodies provides a theoretical framework for studying the materiality of emotions. In line with recent research in the history of emotions, cultural studies, and new materialism, this volume focuses on what emotions do. Chapters interrogate how emotions do and undo us as both individual and collective bodies. With this aim, this book proposes “emotional bodies” as a tool to understand the performativity of emotional practices as the origin of particular configurations of bodies, such as patients, criminals, medieval religious communities, revolutionary crowds and contemporary humanitarian agencies. The multidisciplinary approach of this volume, which combines a diversity of sources as well as theoretical and historiographical approaches, challenges traditional notions of the body and the emotions, demonstrating the potential of “emotional bodies” to understand past and present societies.Less

Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times

Stacy Alaimo

Exposed argues for a material feminist posthumanism that departs from the predominant modes of humanist transcendence in theory, science, consumerism, and popular culture. Featuring three sections, ... More

Exposed argues for a material feminist posthumanism that departs from the predominant modes of humanist transcendence in theory, science, consumerism, and popular culture. Featuring three sections, the book calls for an environmental stance in which humanity thinks, feels, and acts as the very stuff of the world. As a work within the environmental humanities, it grapples with climate change, biodiversity, sustainability, ocean conservation, environmental activism, and the depiction of the anthropocene. And as a study in new materialism it focuses on how the materiality of human bodies provoke modes of posthumanist pleasure, environmental protest, and a sense of immersion within the strange agencies that constitute the world.Less

Nancy Cunard: Perfect Stranger

Jane Marcus

Jean Mills (ed.)

In the wake of inadequate histories of radical writing and activism, Nancy Cunard: Perfect Stranger rejects stereotypes of Cunard as spoiled heiress and “sexually dangerous New Woman,” offering ... More

In the wake of inadequate histories of radical writing and activism, Nancy Cunard: Perfect Stranger rejects stereotypes of Cunard as spoiled heiress and “sexually dangerous New Woman,” offering instead a bold, unapologetic, evidence-based portrait of a woman and her significant contributions to twenty-first-century considerations of gender, race, and class. This full length critical study by the late, path-breaking feminist scholar, Jane Marcus, rereads Cunard’s identity as a poet, an anthologist, a journalist, and political activist against racism and fascism.Less