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Another Fine Mess: A History of American Film Comedy (Cappella Books
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. C. Fields to Will Ferrell. The first book of its kind in more than a generation, Another Fine Mess is an eye-opening, entertaining, and enlightening tour of the American comedy, encompassing the masterpieces, the box-office smashes, and all the little-known gems in between.
- GenresNonfictionHistory
528 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2010
5 people are currently reading
87 people want to read
About the author
Saul Austerlitz
7 books65 followersI 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
May 14, 2021
This guy wrote three—three!!!—books about the television show Friends.
I hate this book. I had to read it in college and understood almost immediately it was trash.
Just acknowledging this book’s existence makes me livid enuff to wanna burn it.
DO NOT READ THIS GARBAGE. You’re better off learning about comedic cinema on your own.
I hate this book. I had to read it in college and understood almost immediately it was trash.
Just acknowledging this book’s existence makes me livid enuff to wanna burn it.
DO NOT READ THIS GARBAGE. You’re better off learning about comedic cinema on your own.
November 3, 2013
Smooth, effortless writing, exquisitely researched. You're lost if you don't care about movies or comedy. If you do, you've got a lot of watching (and laughing) ahead of you.
June 9, 2024
A bunch of factual errors, rather condescending to works for which he doesn’t prefer
June 3, 2017
I'm on an unpleasable tear at the moment in the book sampling department. I feel like a cross between Goldilocks and Lizzie Borden, picking up books, reading a few words and then tossing them aside in violent disgust. First I tried a "humorous memoir" that was not only not funny but written by a person with an uninteresting life and nothing to say. Then a "burlesque mystery" -- a paragraph or two of which was all I needed to know it was too trivial to spend any time on. Hoping for something more serious, I picked up a book that came to me at my day job at the think tank, concerning a professor's trip around the country holding a sort of impromptu Constitutional Convention with ordinary citizens. A worthy idea, given that the original Constitution was not created by a democratic process, but by a sort of public spirited, paternalistic high-jacking. But the book is written in that disposable, popular style that earmarks it as junk as far as I'm concerned -- more a stunt than a book. The proper media for the project would have been radio or video, I think.
I didn't like Another Fine Mess any better, but the milk train had to stop somewhere and I needed a blogpost today. Author Saul Austerlitz is a film critic with credits at the New York Times, Boston Globe et al, and granted, he is a better wordsmith than the other three authors I recently dabbled in but who will remain nameless. That said, the work falls far short of its ambitious subtitle "A History of American Film Comedy". In reality, the book is a collection of biographical essays on dozens of comic film artists from Chaplin to Judd Apatow, indiscriminately mixing in slapstick clowns, directors, and actors. Thus artists as disparate as Doris Day, Ernst Lubitsch, Buster Keaton, Richard Pryor and the Coen Brothers are all mixed in together. Which COULD be fine, if some effort were made to analyze themes in American comedy from a very high level and tie all these artists together in some context: sex? violence? race? class? None of that here, though. Just rather tired recaps of the careers of famous comedians and directors of comedies. In the cases of the twentieth century artists, the descriptions are nothing we haven't seen before in many, many previous books. You might say a saving grace is the addition of more recent figures, like Christopher Guest, Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler, except for the salient fact that the writer, again, makes no effort to put them in a context, not even a performance context. While he might decry Sandler's talents in relation to Jim Carey or Mike Myers (arguable), it would be far more useful in my opinion to discuss Sandler in relation to forbears -- Jerry Lewis as an obvious example. The author talks about Lewis, of course...but there's no intelligent way to talk about Martin & Lewis without relating them to Abbott & Costello in my view, and this is precisely what the author does not do. Each artist is presented in a silo, a vacuum. I fail to see in what way it is a "history". Neither insightful nor original nor even fun (as one might hope a book about comedy ought to be -- god forbid), this book is destined to collect dust on my shelf for a good, long time.
I didn't like Another Fine Mess any better, but the milk train had to stop somewhere and I needed a blogpost today. Author Saul Austerlitz is a film critic with credits at the New York Times, Boston Globe et al, and granted, he is a better wordsmith than the other three authors I recently dabbled in but who will remain nameless. That said, the work falls far short of its ambitious subtitle "A History of American Film Comedy". In reality, the book is a collection of biographical essays on dozens of comic film artists from Chaplin to Judd Apatow, indiscriminately mixing in slapstick clowns, directors, and actors. Thus artists as disparate as Doris Day, Ernst Lubitsch, Buster Keaton, Richard Pryor and the Coen Brothers are all mixed in together. Which COULD be fine, if some effort were made to analyze themes in American comedy from a very high level and tie all these artists together in some context: sex? violence? race? class? None of that here, though. Just rather tired recaps of the careers of famous comedians and directors of comedies. In the cases of the twentieth century artists, the descriptions are nothing we haven't seen before in many, many previous books. You might say a saving grace is the addition of more recent figures, like Christopher Guest, Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler, except for the salient fact that the writer, again, makes no effort to put them in a context, not even a performance context. While he might decry Sandler's talents in relation to Jim Carey or Mike Myers (arguable), it would be far more useful in my opinion to discuss Sandler in relation to forbears -- Jerry Lewis as an obvious example. The author talks about Lewis, of course...but there's no intelligent way to talk about Martin & Lewis without relating them to Abbott & Costello in my view, and this is precisely what the author does not do. Each artist is presented in a silo, a vacuum. I fail to see in what way it is a "history". Neither insightful nor original nor even fun (as one might hope a book about comedy ought to be -- god forbid), this book is destined to collect dust on my shelf for a good, long time.
November 23, 2011
alright, let's be real. you're putting yourself in hot water with a subtitle like, "a history of..." and you're keeping your book to a tidy 475 pages (goodreads has this page count incorrect - its 512 with index and bibliography) despite traversing 80 years worth of material. "how could you not mention x film?" "why did you leave out y director?" i realize you can't please every reader with a volume like this and you're just asking for trouble.
however.
a "short entry" on nora ephron and you don't mention "when harry met sally"?! doesn't matter that her screenplay was nominated for an oscar, let's just leave that film out and focus on "you've got mail" (which is good, but come on).
a "short entry" that conveniently combines diane keaton and mia farrow just so we can see them strictly through the lens of woody allen muses. that's pretty insulting to the both of them.
also, the "top 100 american comedies" based on... the author's humble opinion, or what?
this book is just an indulgent platform for the author to discuss his opinions on the history of american film comedy, minus the history. it's cursory and unfulfilling. that this book is "intended to serve as the beginning of a fruitful discussion" is an understatement.
however.
a "short entry" on nora ephron and you don't mention "when harry met sally"?! doesn't matter that her screenplay was nominated for an oscar, let's just leave that film out and focus on "you've got mail" (which is good, but come on).
a "short entry" that conveniently combines diane keaton and mia farrow just so we can see them strictly through the lens of woody allen muses. that's pretty insulting to the both of them.
also, the "top 100 american comedies" based on... the author's humble opinion, or what?
this book is just an indulgent platform for the author to discuss his opinions on the history of american film comedy, minus the history. it's cursory and unfulfilling. that this book is "intended to serve as the beginning of a fruitful discussion" is an understatement.
September 12, 2016
I read this book because I enjoyed Austerlitz's "Sitcom."
Unfortunately, he wrote "Another Fine Mess" before "Sitcom," and while "Sitcom" is tightly focused, telling the history of the sitcom by looking at 24 sitcom episodes, "Another Fine Mess" attempts to cover about 95 years of movie comedy by looking at 30 careers.
In short, Austerlitz is trying to cover way too much in this look at comedy from Charlie Chaplin to Judd Apatow.
And yet, and yet, I enjoyed this book. Austerlitz is an engaging writer, and he clearly enjoys what he is writing about. I found, oddly, that while I didn't agree with all his judgments (the first half of "The Lady Eve" is funnier than the second half? Really?) I ended up agreeing with most of the overall career assessments he offered. If you want a look at how American film comedy has changed from the days of the silents until the near present, you could do a lot worse than look at "Another Fine Mess."
Unfortunately, he wrote "Another Fine Mess" before "Sitcom," and while "Sitcom" is tightly focused, telling the history of the sitcom by looking at 24 sitcom episodes, "Another Fine Mess" attempts to cover about 95 years of movie comedy by looking at 30 careers.
In short, Austerlitz is trying to cover way too much in this look at comedy from Charlie Chaplin to Judd Apatow.
And yet, and yet, I enjoyed this book. Austerlitz is an engaging writer, and he clearly enjoys what he is writing about. I found, oddly, that while I didn't agree with all his judgments (the first half of "The Lady Eve" is funnier than the second half? Really?) I ended up agreeing with most of the overall career assessments he offered. If you want a look at how American film comedy has changed from the days of the silents until the near present, you could do a lot worse than look at "Another Fine Mess."
April 1, 2011
I am especially enjoying the material on silent movie stars.
February 11, 2013
I wish there had been a bit more biography than listography of these great people, but it did open my eyes to a few more movies and actors/directors to check out.
September 2, 2013
The title of this book should be "A White Male-Centric History Of American Film Comedy." Not such a fine mess at all.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews