Rob King

Rob King is a film historian with interests in American genre cinema, popular culture, and cultural history. Much of his work has been on comedy. His award-winning The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (2009) examined the role Keystone’s filmmakers played in developing new styles of slapstick comedy for moviegoers of the 1910s. His follow-up, Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture (2017), challenged the received wisdom that sound destroyed the slapstick tradition. He has published articles on early cinema, class, and comedy in a number of anthologies and journals, and is the co-editor of 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 The Oxford Handbook of Silent Cinema (2024). Departing from comedy, King’s next book is a critical biography of adult filmmaker Radley Metzger, Man of Taste: The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger (Columbia University Press, forthcoming 2025).