Rob King

On his book The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture

Cover Interview of August 13, 2009

Editor’s note

Originally, this interview ran on the Rorotoko cover page under the headline

“The history of comedy is that of the changing social patterns that produce and permit laughter.”

We highlighted two quotes.

On the first page:

“Why people laugh, who and what they laugh at – these are historical categories that change over time.”

On the second:

“The classic comedies of the 1920s are the culmination of a process; the history of earlier companies such as Keystone show that process in development.”

history / media studies / 20th century / business / film / pop culture / migration / los angeles / labor / entertainment /

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011