'Uproarious Inventions': The Keystone Film Company, modernity, and the art of the motor

This paper explores the comic pleasure provided by technological stunts ('uproarious inventions') in Mack Sennett's Keystone comedies, and the larger role of mechanical spectacle in the formation of the culture of modernity. It argues that the display of mechanical effects in such films as The Cannon Ball (1915), A Submarine Pirate (1915) and A Clever Dummy (1917) provided Keystone's filmmakers with the key to a profound redefinition of slapstick form, a way of adapting 'low comedy' traditions to the tastes of the new mass audience for motion pictures.