No auditors This course examines how comedy in American cinema has been enlisted to stage race, sexuality, and their conjunction in twentieth-century America. In spite of its promises of respectability and stability, marriage or the prospect of marriage in the films we examine seem to constitute the very site of gender, racial, and social mayhem. Marriage is, thus, a place where love and nationhood come to exorcise their demons, a task that produces humor as well as failure, exuberance as well as disarray.
Weekly film viewing attendance is required in additional to class time.
Required critical and theoretical readings accompany each screening assignment.