Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 American Film Comedy and Cultural Critique: Glitches in the Smooth Running of the Social Machine
- 2 The Feeding Machine and Feeding the Machine: Silence, Sound and the Technologies of Cinema
- 3 The Constitution of the Real: Documentary, Mockumentary and the Status of the Image
- 4 Parody: Targeting Cinema's Narrative Technics
- 5 The Unspeakable and Political Satire: Performance, Perception and Technology
- 6 Conclusion: Between the Machine and the Event: Film Comedy
- Index
5 - The Unspeakable and Political Satire: Performance, Perception and Technology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 American Film Comedy and Cultural Critique: Glitches in the Smooth Running of the Social Machine
- 2 The Feeding Machine and Feeding the Machine: Silence, Sound and the Technologies of Cinema
- 3 The Constitution of the Real: Documentary, Mockumentary and the Status of the Image
- 4 Parody: Targeting Cinema's Narrative Technics
- 5 The Unspeakable and Political Satire: Performance, Perception and Technology
- 6 Conclusion: Between the Machine and the Event: Film Comedy
- Index
Summary
Other dogs bite their enemies. I bite my friends to save them.
Diogenes of Sinope‘Jack, Jack,’ I said. ‘You don't want to do it. Remember what happened to the guy who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima? He went crazy!’
‘That asshole? He was not properly brainwashed. I,’ he said with great pride, ‘have been properly brainwashed.’
Spalding Gray, in Swimming to CambodiaIn the early part of the 1910s in the US, a small but influential movement to eliminate Darwinism and evolution from public education started to gain some legislative momentum, eventually resulting in laws forbidding such instruction and ending in one of the great trials of the century: the Scopes Trial of 1925. The trial became a radio and media spectacle featuring two of the best-known orators of the age: populist and perennial presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan and legal star for civil and constitutional rights Clarence Darrow. The two adversaries had once been friends and colleagues but fell out primarily over their religious views. Bryan famously took a swipe at geology, Charles Lyell, what his scientific investigations wrought in relation to the age of the earth, and Church dogma on the matter by saying, ‘Better to trust in the Rock of Ages than to know the age of rocks.’ The trial became a circus, in spite of the seriousness of the legal issues at stake, open-air tents containing preachers contending with hawkers of everything from food to cloth to special occasion goods.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Comedy and Cultural Critique in American Film , pp. 125 - 160Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013