About this item
Charlie Chaplin. Buster Keaton. The Marx Brothers. Billy Wilder. Woody Allen. The Coen brothers. Where would the American film be without them? Yet the cinematic genre these artists represent--comedy--has perennially received short shrift from critics, film buffs, and the Academy Awards. Saul Austerlitz’s Another Fine Mess is an attempt to right that wrong. Running the gamut of film history from City Lights to Knocked Up, Another Fine Mess retells the story of American film from the perspective of its unwanted stepbrother--the comedy. In 30 long chapters and 100 shorter entries, each devoted primarily to a single performer or director, Another Fine Mess retraces the steps of the American comedy film, filling in the gaps and following the connections that link Mae West to Doris Day, or W.
About the Author
I am a freelance writer whose work has been published in the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Slate, and The New Republic, among others. I am an adjunct professor of writing and comedy history at New York University, as well as the author of Kind of a Big Deal: How Anchorman Stayed Classy and Became the Most Iconic Comedy of the Twenty-First Century (Dutton, 2023) , Generation Friends: An Inside Look at the Show That Defined a Television Era (Dutton, 2019) , Just a Shot Away: Peace, Love, and Tragedy with the Rolling Stones at Altamont (Thomas Dunne Books, 2018) , Sitcom: A History in 24 Episodes from I Love Lucy to Community (Chicago Review Press, 2014) , Another Fine Mess: A History of American Film Comedy (Chicago Review Press, 2010) , and Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video from the Beatles to the White Stripes (Continuum, 2007) . Booklist named Another Fine Mess one of the ten best arts books of 2010, and Just a Shot Away received rave reviews, including from the New York Times Book Review, which called it "the most blisteringly impassioned music book of the season. " Generation Friends was named the second-best comedy book of 2019 by New York magazine, as well as one of New York's 15 best books on TV comedies. I grew up in Los Angeles and am a graduate of Yale University and New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. I lives with my wife and two children in Brooklyn.
