Historical Comedy on Screen

In 1893, Friedrich Engels branded history `the cruelest goddess of all.' This sorrowful vision of the past is deeply rooted in the Western imagination, and history is thus presented as a joyless playground of inevitability rather than a droll world of possibilities. There are few places this is more evident than in historical cinema which tends to portray the past in a sombre manner. Historical Comedy on Screen examines this tendency paying particular attention to the themes most difficult to laugh at and exploring the place where comical and historical storytelling intersect. The first scholarly book of its kind, this work emphasizes the many oft-overlooked comical renderings of history, from The General (1927) to The Life of Brian (1979), from The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) to Life Is Beautiful (1997), and asks what they have to tell us if we begin to take them seriously.

Hannu Salmi is professor of cultural history at the University of Turku in Finland. He is a historian of film and popular culture, the series editor of Studies in Popular Culture and the advisory board member of Journal of Scandinavian Cinema. He is also director of the International Institute for Popular Culture in Turku.