The Palgrave Handbook of Music in Comedy Cinema / Progress in Mathematics (PDF)

"What's been missing from the literature on film music -a sustained study of music in the genre of film comedy- has now been supplied by Emilio Audissino and Emile Wennekes in a masterful and inclusive anthology devoted to how music makes us laugh. Audissino and Wennekes have taken an interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and multinational approach that informs the individual contributions all of which take funny music very seriously. Sure to be the standard reference in the field."

- Kathryn Kalinak, Professor of Film Studies, Rhode Island College, US

This handbook tackles the understudied relationship between music and comedy cinema by analysing the nature, perception, and function of music from fresh perspectives. Its approach is not only multidisciplinary, but also interdisciplinary in its close examination of how music and other cinematic devices interact in the creation of comedy. The volume addresses gender representation, national identities, stylistic strategies, and employs inputs from cultural studies, musicology, music theory, psychology, cognitivism, semiotics, formal and stylistic film analysis, and psychoanalysis. It is organised in four sections: general introductions, theoretical investigations, music and comedy within national cinemas, and exemplary case studies of films or authors.

Emilio Audissino is Associate Professor at Linnaeus University, Sweden. His research interests are film and television history; audio-visual style and techniques; screenwriting; neo formalist film analysis; comedy; horror; and sound and music in media. Notably, he is the author of The Film Music of John Williams. Reviving Hollywood's Classical Style (2021/2014) and of Film/Music Analysis. A Film Studies Approach (2017).

Emile Wennekes is Chair Professor of Musicology: Music and Media at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. He is the author of multiple books and edited volumes, as well as some hundred scholarly book chapters, articles, and conference presentations. Among his most recent publications are two co-edited books entitled Advances in Speech and Music Technology (2021; 2023 - with a.o. Anupam Biswas). Wennekes chairs the Study Group Music and Media (MaM) of the International Musicological Society. Previously, Audissino and Wennekes edited the volume Cinema Changes: Incorporation of Jazz in the Film Soundtrack (2019).