Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture by Rob King (review)

James Agee summed up a whole tradition of thinking about American film comedy in his influential essay “Comedy’s Greatest Era” when he asserted, “The only thing wrong with screen comedy today is that it takes place on a screen which talks.”¹ Agee’s assertion defined how sound-era screen clowning has been discussed, much as the essay established the canon of silent comedians deemed worthy of studying. Gerald Mast’s The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies preserves the idea of a breach between silent and sound comedy, shifting from a focus on silent clowns to screwball comedy with the entry of talking pictures, a move that oversimplifies the history of both subgenres.²

Continuing a project begun with his own earlier book The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture, Rob King’s Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture seeks to reassess the historical evolution of screen slapstick, here digging deeper into what happened as this comic tradition entered the sound era.³ In the process, King provides a rich illustration of how to bring a deeper historical understanding to an essential film genre. Agee, Mast, and Walter Kerr’s The Silent Clown represents the masterpiece tradition at work, writing a history focused on exceptional works by essential artists, largely isolated from larger developments in the genre, leaving aside the film industry or a broader mediascape.⁴ King’s approach is thoroughly revisionist, a genre history as grounded in the archive and the trade press as it is in the screening room, one that seeks to dramatically expand which films matter. His primary contribution here involves a recentering of the history of sound shorts, which have received very limited attention compared to what has been written about the silent shorts of Mack Sennett and Hal Roach. To do so, he has to reconstruct the industrial history of 1930s short-film production, including some rich material on the ways shorts were being positioned as a desirable alternative for audiences apt to be too weary to watch double features. He traces key producers, including Earle W. Hammons’s Educational Pictures and the Jules White unit at Columbia, as they seek to differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace. Well-known performers such as Laurel and Hardy and the Three Stooges are discussed at some length here, but so are those less likely to be recalled today, such as Andy Clyde or Clark and McCullough.

King is attentive to the discourses that framed these shorts and, in particular, the responses of exhibitors in the trade press that offer an indication of regional and class divides in terms of what forms of comedy proved desirable. Here, he does identify some signs that slapstick bore a “stigma” during the early sound period. As one critic recalled, “Sound came along and out went the pies.”⁵ The book’s opening paragraph also signals a shift in the meaning of the word “hokum” during this period. A New York Times reporter notes with surprise that a piece of stage slang which originally meant surefire material now more often referred to “hooey, tripe, apple-sauce, blah and bologna.”⁶ The instability in how slapstick was read during this transitional period remains a core concern across the book. King shows the continued popularity of slapstick across the decade, especially outside of the major metropolitan areas.

King draws on Raymond Williams’s model of cultural dynamism (of emergent, dominant, residual, and archaic cultural practices) and Pierre Bourdieu’s field of production models to account for several shifts in the status of slapstick across the 1930s.⁷ As King explains, these comic shorts emerged from “a sui generis network of interpersonal, professional and institutional relations radiating out of the studio gates into the fields of vaudeville, burlesque, circus and even literary humor within which hierarchies of comedic value...