Humor in Latin American Cinema

A cursory look at some of the Latin American movies with the highest attendance in the history of their respective national industries reveals that comedies have been extraordinary successful film efforts in the continent. Surprisingly, the cultures of Latin America - which for the first time developed a truly continental market with the circulation of Argentine and, above all, Mexican comedies of the Golden Age (1930s-1950s) - have produced little historiographical or critical material investigating their rich past and current production at the intersection of humor and cinema. Humor in Latin American Cinema addresses a variety of regional humor traditions such as exploitation cinema, Brazilian chanchada, the Cantinflas heritage, the comedy of manners and light sexuality, as well as a variety of humor registers evident in different Latin American films. This book inquires how and if Latin American cultural criticism has so far approached humor and its significance in the context of the construction of regional, national, and local identities.

Juan Poblete is Professor of Latin/o American Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA. He is the author of Literatura chilena del siglo XIX: entre publicos lectores y figuras autoriales (2003), co-editor of Redrawing The Nation: National Identities in Latin/o American Comics (Palgrave, 2009), and co-editor of Sports and Nationalism in Latin America (Palgrave, 2015).

Juana Suarez is Visiting Scholar at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, USA. She is the author of Sitios de Contienda: Produccion Cultural y el Discurso de la Violencia (2010) and Cinembargo Colombia: Critical Essays on Colombian Cinema (Palgrave, 2012).