ABSTRACT
Like the performers he studies, Henry Jenkins is a virtuoso. In this, his second book, Jenkins employs diverse procedures of cultural analysis: What Made Pistachio Nuts? includes studies of production, of reception, of performance style, of the poetics of genre, of particular film texts, and of the social construction of taste. The result is a complex, provocative, and entertaining assessment of the place of the ‘anarchistic comedy’ subgenre within the comic tradition in the US, and within the history of a crucial transitional period of the comedian comedy film genre in particular. His wellsupported and absolutely convincing thesis is ‘that anarchistic comedy emerged from the classical Hollywood cinema’s attempt to assimilate the vaudeville aesthetic’ (p. 24). Jenkins’s particular interest in the anarchistic moments prominent in certain US films of the early thirties should not diminish his work’s interest for cultural analysts in general, however, for his contribution to Columbia University Press’s ‘Film and Culture’ series (edited by John Belton) represents a theoretically informed engagement with historically significant socio-cultural phenomena. Jenkins’s well-documented book, which includes an index, 176 photographs, and extensive endnotes, is based in part on impressive and painstaking archival research; however, his project is not at all reducible to an antiquarian attempt to resurrect for its own sake the neglected subgenre of anarchistic comedy. On the contrary, Jenkins is interested in this particular marginal cultural form for what it suggests about processes of cultural conflict and negotiation which remain obscured in the standard accounts of the development of the dominant Hollywood aesthetic.
