Comic Politics: Gender in Hollywood Comedy After the New Right (Inside Popular Film)

Are Jim Carrey, Robin Williams, and Eddie Murphy the celluloid compatriots of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair? This book argues that the rubber faces of '80s and '90s comedy films, helped to transform us into the flexible, self-managing citizens beloved of the new right--and its successors. Through its sustained look at the box-office comedies of the last two decades, Comic Politics provides a critical introduction to key approaches to comedy. It tests the usefulness and limits of psychoanalytics, Bakhtinian and postmodernist theory against comedians and comedies from Woody Allen to Wayne's World. The book includes a look at animation and computer enhanced comedies.