Weimar Slapstick and Hollywood Comedy Transformed

From cabaret songs inspired by Buster Keaton to Mickey Mouse’s diagnosis as a “melo-maniac,” Weimar Slapstick and Hollywood Comedy Transformed explores the extraordinary appeal of American slapstick, cartoon, and screwball comedies during and after Germany’s Weimar Republic. Bridging two crucial sites of interwar modernity, Paul Flaig offers a fundamental reassessment of Weimar culture, Hollywood comedy, and their intertwined legacies.

Through a series of comic pairings—including Harold Lloyd and Curt Bois, Felix the Cat and psychotechnics—Flaig investigates the aesthetic, political and sexual forces that shaped Weimar Germany’s fascination with American film comedies, as they were taken up and transformed by German filmmakers, philosophers, advertisers, artists, and politicians. Examining a wide ranging of sources—including films, manifestoes, arts journals, feuilletons, and trade press reports—he underscores the essential and diverse contributions of Weimar culture to our understanding of these comic laboratories of modernity.