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Clarence Brown: Hollywood’s Forgotten Master

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context of women and comedy, yet productively engaged by White, are Jack Halberstam’s proposals of queer temporality and queer failure. These ‘sexless’ concepts of queerness are convincingly used by White… Click to show full abstract

context of women and comedy, yet productively engaged by White, are Jack Halberstam’s proposals of queer temporality and queer failure. These ‘sexless’ concepts of queerness are convincingly used by White not only to lay out the queer times of old age in chapter five, but also to explicate the fundamental differences between sitcom and sketch comedy, for example in terms of ‘the ontological draw of sitcom narrative’ (p. 130). An area which would have profited from a more thorough engagement with existing theory, however, is White’s use of camp. Considering the longstanding discussion about the use of camp outside the confines of male queerness (see, e.g., Katrin Horn’s, Women, Camp, and Popular Culture. Serious Excess, 2017 and Pamela Robertson’s Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna, 1996), White’s application of the term to feminist sitcoms and ‘the “new” man, the camp heterosexual’ (p. 94) without an introductory definition and a clear assessment of its affects and aesthetics risks a dilution of the term and its queer potential. Despite these flaws, the scope of White’s analysis of the varied forms of queerness of television comedy is impressive, and especially her focus on lesser known sitcoms and sketch comedies makes this book a valuable contribution to charting the history of women in comedy. White’s analysis of age as a central axis of comedic deviance, furthermore, speaks to a much-needed broadening of our understanding of ‘funny women’. For scholars interested in a transatlantic comparison of different comic trajectories and traditions, White’s study finally, will become an essential source.

Keywords: clarence brown; brown hollywood; queer; comedy; forgotten master; hollywood forgotten

Journal Title: Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
Year Published: 2019

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