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ReFocus: The American Directors Series

ReFocus: The Films of Albert Brooks

Edited by Christian B. Long

Format

£95.00

In stock

About this book

Offers the first book-length investigation Albert Brooks’ more than six-decade comedy career
  • Situates Albert Brooks’ films in their cultural contexts, including representations of class, gender, religion, and race
  • Assesses Albert Brooks’ critical reputation and relative popularity, including his influence on contemporary filmmakers and comedians
  • Analyses every film written and directed by Albert Brooks, as well as a number of his acting and voice-over roles, his stand-up comedy albums, his talk show appearances, and his writing, both short-form and novelistic

This is the first sustained critical collection on Albert Brooks, one of the key but under-examined figures in American stand-up, television comedy and Hollywood film comedy. Analysing every film written and directed by Albert Brooks, including Real Life (1979), Modern Romance (1981) and Lost in America (1985), as well as a number of his acting and voice-over roles, his stand-up comedy albums, talk show appearances and writing, the book argues that Albert Brooks not only merits a wider viewership, both critical and popular, but also that his career offers a useful lens through which to understand American film and culture since the late 1960s.

Reviews

This collection of 11 essays argues for the importance of Brooks not only as a comic force but also as a skilled filmmaker who has deftly documented the absurdity and disappointments of the "professional-managerial" class of the late 20th century. Notable contributions include those on the yuppie figure in Lost in America, Brooks’s "ability to channel the female experience" through his collaborations with writer Monica Johnson, and the writer/director’s criticism of media dynamic sutilizing "anti-humor" in films from Real Life to Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World. [...] Highly recommended.
This collection of essays makes the case for Albert Brooks’s multi-faceted significance as a pioneer of meta-comedy, a satirist of baby-boomer complicity, and a prophet of fail culture. America has spent the last half century trailing Brooks. This book catches up with him.
Table of contents

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction, Christian B. Long

2. Irony Ends in Why, Thomas Britt

3. The Counterculture Squared: Albert Brooks’ Saturday Night Live, Jeff Menne

4. Your General Humor Buildup: Constructing Albert Brooks, JD Connor

5. When Success is Failure, Christian B. Long

6. Easy Riders, Raging Yuppies: Lost in America and the Work of the Professional-Managerial Class, Derek Nystrom

7. Albert Brooks Channeling the Feminine, Rebecca Bell-Metereau

8. Defending Purgatorio: Dante, Brooks, and Finding One’s Celestial Place, Frank Percaccio

9. Albert Brooks’ Anatomy of Love, Enid Stubin

10. Finding Brooks: Animating the Baby Boomer Generation in Finding Nemo, Dietmar Meinel

11. Debt, Payback, and Economics in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, Tom Ue

Contributors

About the author

Christian B. Long

Dr Christian Long is an Academic Language and Learning Educator at Queensland University of Technology.

More in this series

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