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With his thumbprint on the most ubiquitous films of childhood, Walt Disney is widely considered to be the most conventional of all major American moviemakers. The adjective "Disneyfied" has become shorthand for a creative work that has abandoned any controversial or substantial content to find commercial success.

But does Disney deserve that reputation? Douglas Brode overturns the idea of Disney as a middlebrow filmmaker by detailing how Disney movies played a key role in transforming children of the Eisenhower era into the radical youth of the Age of Aquarius. Using close readings of Disney projects, Brode shows that Disney's films were frequently ahead of their time thematically. Long before the cultural tumult of the sixties, Disney films preached pacifism, introduced a generation to the notion of feminism, offered the screen's first drug-trip imagery, encouraged young people to become runaways, insisted on the need for integration, advanced the notion of a sexual revolution, created the concept of multiculturalism, called for a return to nature, nourished the cult of the righteous outlaw, justified violent radicalism in defense of individual rights, argued in favor of communal living, and encouraged antiauthoritarian attitudes. Brode argues that Disney, more than any other influence in popular culture, should be considered the primary creator of the sixties counterculture—a reality that couldn't be further from his "conventional" reputation.

Moving from Moneyball and Football Manager to coverage of analytics gurus like Daryl Morey, Buehler shows how a fixation on managerial moves has taken hold across the entire sports media landscape. Buehler’s chapter-by-chapter look at specific media forms illustrates different facets of the managerial craze while analyzing the related effects on what fans see, hear, and play. Throughout, Buehler explores the unsettling implications of exalting the management class and its logics, in the process arguing that sports media’s managerial lionization serves as one of the clearest reflections of major material and ideological changes taking place across culture and society.

Insightful and timely, Front Office Fantasies reveals how sports media moved the action from the field to the executive suite.

A roadmap for understanding and creating comedy from the visionary Second City comedy director

Great comedy can feel ineffable—and unlearnable. Debunking the myth that “either you are funny, or you aren’t,” Libera breaks the magic of comedy down into an innovative theory and practical toolkit. Developed over the course of thirty years as a director for The Second City and professor of comedy studies in their training center, Libera’s approach is effective across stand-up, sketch, film, and television comedy, as evidenced by her powerhouse students: Amy Poehler, Kristen Schaal, Steven Yeun, and many more of your favorites.

This book starts with a way to think about comedy and then guides you through concrete strategies for making your work smarter, richer, funnier. Libera covers everything from generating material to revising and performing to fostering social connection through comedy. In the book’s final section, Libera draws from her personal life to make a profound case for why future comedy writers should consider the ethics of their art and their responsibility to their fellow human beings in the audience. Readers won’t just be funnier because of this book—they’ll be better people.

"The most sensational, perpetual teenager in the world.” —Jim Henson

"To know him was to love him, and we do." —Mark Hamill
 
Funny Boy: The Richard Hunt Biography tells the life story of a gifted performer whose gleeful irreverence, sharp wit and generous spirit inspired millions. Richard Hunt was one of the original main five performers in the Muppet troupe. He brought to life an impressive range of characters on The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock and various Muppet movies, everyone from eager gofer Scooter to elderly heckler Statler, groovy girl Janice to freaked-out lab helper Beaker, even early versions of Miss Piggy and Elmo. Hunt also acted, directed and mentored the next generation of performers. His accomplishments are all the more remarkable in that he crammed them all into only 40 years. 

Richard Hunt was just 18 years old when he joined Jim Henson’s company, where his edgy humor quickly helped launch the Muppets into international stardom. Hunt lived large, savoring life’s delights, amassing a vivid, disparate community of friends. Even when the AIDS epidemic wrought its devastation, claiming the love of Hunt’s life and threatening his own life, he showed an extraordinary sense of resilience, openness and joy. Hunt’s story exemplifies how to follow your passion, foster your talents, adapt to life’s surprises, genuinely connect with everyone from glitzy celebrities to gruff cab drivers – and have a hell of a lot of fun along the way.

A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection

The National Comedy Center and Smithsonian Institution hold unparalleled collections of artifacts that illustrate the vitality and importance of comedy in American life, from vaudeville, silent films, and TV sitcoms to stand-up, sketch, and cartoons. Now, for the first time, these collections are brought together in vibrant photographs and illuminating essays that tell the story of how comedy shaped American history.
 
Written by historians responsible for safeguarding these cultural treasures, the book takes readers behind the scenes to uncover the stories behind American heirlooms like Groucho Marx’s tailcoat, George Carlin’s joke files, Carol Burnett’s “Went with the Wind” dress, Johnny Carson’s monologues, and the very first Saturday Night Live script, alongside materials from cultural touchstones like The Simpsons, The Muppet Show, In Living Color, All In the Family, and I Love Lucy.

With a foreword by comedy legend Mel Brooks, this dynamic work offers pop culture aficionados, history lovers, and comedy nerds alike a new perspective on America’s past and who we are as a nation through our comedy.

A provocative peek into this complicated film as a space for subversion, activism, and imaginative power

While both fans and foes point to Mad Max: Fury Road’s feminist credentials, Furious Feminisms asks: is there really anything feminist or radical happening on the screen? The four authors—from backgrounds in art history, American literature, disability studies, and sociology—ask what is possible, desirable, or damaging in theorizing feminism in the contested landscape of the twenty-first century. Can we find beauty in the Anthropocene? Can power be wrested from a violent system without employing and perpetuating violence? 

This experiment in collaborative criticism weaves multiple threads of dialogue together to offer a fresh perspective on our current cultural moment. 

Forerunners: Ideas First
Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

Exploring alternative possibilities of viewpoint through cinematic experimentation

In this boldly multidimensional work, Domietta Torlasco alternates between theoretical writings, film essays, and fragmented excerpts from an original screenplay to construct a temporal as well as spatial architecture for her critical intervention. Futures of the Flesh posits that cinematic experimentation holds the strongest potential to reimagine life—its forms, rhythms, and affects—beyond the division between subject and object, human and animal, animate and inanimate. Such potential cannot be clearly located in either space or time but, on the contrary, requires that we think according to momentum, diffraction, and difference.

As a novel notion and the formative medium of both subject and object, the flesh affirms the openness and indefinite generativity of being, allowing for the appearance of new perceptual relations and forms of kinship. Torlasco stages a dialogue between thinkers including Hortense Spillers and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and turns to canonical films, including Blade Runner and Solaris, classic sci-fi literature, such as Octavia Butler’s Kindred, and contemporary video art to elucidate how these media imaginatively rework the distinction between categories of being. This book endeavors to redefine the relation between theory and practice, analysis and creation, to name the primary relations that, under specific techno-aesthetic conditions, enable the emergence of porous, un-bordered forms of life.