Historical Comedy on Screen

<div> </div><p>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 somber manner. <br /><em><br />Historical Comedy on Screen</em> 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 book emphasizes the many oft-overlooked comical renderings of history and asks what they have to tell us if we begin to take them seriously.</p>