Film comedy /

King (Brunel Univ., UK) weaves comic bits and film plots into a seamless overview of his subject, interlacing sundry perspectives on theories of laughter to create a grand fabric of analysis and practice. Beginning with a study of a presentational comic style--the disruptive place of discrete gags in film comedy narratives--King explores this diverse genre, which seeks to provide laughter and end "happily." He essentially champions a sort of incongruity-with-surprise paradigm that encompasses other perspectives, including satire, parody, and the more recent controversial black comedy of alloyed violence and laughter (e.g., Pulp Fiction). Of particular value is his useful application of Mikhail Bakhtin's medieval carnival comedy and Rabelaisian excess to explain the role of the body in comedy. Unlike the focused, detailed studies of Wes Gehring and Henry Jenkins, King's work has a scope that interconnects the broad variety shows of comedy, especially in his inclusion of one of the funniest subsets of film comedy, the animated cartoon. This reviewer's only complaint is that King ends his engaging and fascinating study too abruptly, with no summary or conclusion. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. T. Lindvall Regent University