Professor Rob King Contributes Chapter to 'The Oxford Handbook of Screen Comedy'

Professor and head of Film and Media Studies Rob King has contributed a chapter titled “Cyborg Laughter” to the The Oxford Handbook of Screen Comedy (Oxford University Press, 2025). Edited by film scholars Peter C. Kunze and William V. Costanzo, the book attempts to define and categorize current and evolving trends in the growing field of humor and comedy. "By its very nature, comedy eludes definition and crosses boundaries," reads the book's description. "Trying to grab the wriggling creature and subject it to analysis presents special challenges. The contributors featured in this volume apply a range of methods to analyse case histories, interpret trends, and theorize the changing face of comedy."

"Cyborg Laughter," which is the final essay of the book, discusses the potential and possibility of replicating humor through Artificial Intelligence. King starts by discussing humor as both elusive and decidedly human, "For centuries, a common assumption across the various theories of humor has been that laughter is performed only by humans and, as such, serves as a unique criterion of human—or human-like—intelligence," King says. The essay then explores how, through the two predominant means of AI research—top-down (symbolic) and bottom-up (statistical)—AI has the potential to create humorous human behavior, approximating that of an actual person, while also having the potential to cause glitches, a physical representation of the limits of technological approximation of human behavior which becomes a source of humor. 

Professor King is a film historian with particular interest in American genre cinema, popular culture, and cultural history. His latest book, Man Of Taste: The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger, published by Columbia University this past March, is a comprehensive analysis of Radley Metzger, one of the foremost American directors of adult cinema during the ‘porno-chic’ period in the 70s. King’s past publications include two other books: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (University of California Press, 2009), which examined how The Keystone’s Film Company—an early film studio founded in 1912 in Edendale, Los Angeles—contributed to a new style of slapstick comedy films in the 1910s; and Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture (University of California Press, 2017), argued against the impression that sound ruined the slapstick cinematic tradition. King has also published articles on early cinema, class, and comedy in a number of journals, and has co-edited five anthologies: Early Cinema and the National (2008), Slapstick Comedy (2010), Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks, and Publics of Early Cinema (2012), Cornell Woolrich and Transmedia Noir (2023), and another Oxford Handbook: The Oxford Handbook of Silent Cinema (2024).