Blurb Curb

I just read Alan Dale's look at slapstick, Comedy Is A Man In Trouble, published twenty years ago.  Slapstick can be hard to write about--it's very visual and not easy to capture in words, which is why many critics try to raise it by noting its relation to "higher" things like satire or pathos.  Dale will have none of it, and good for him.

Slapstick doesn't need any excuses.  It makes us laugh and does it by telling us something about ourselves.  And the true masters have done amazing and varied things with the form.  But I was also surprised by the short description on the book on the back cover, which includes:

Comedy Is A Man In Trouble presents a lively look at a form of comedy that has its origins in ancient Greece and in American Vaudeville and has been expanded and refashioned by everyone from W. C. Fields and Marion Davies to Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant.

Did the person who wrote this even read the book?  The book only mentions Fields and Grant in passing, while Davies gets a couple pages and Hepburn gets a few more (in Dale's chapter on women in slapstick).

In fact, Dale discusses only a handful of names at length (and apologizes for it in his intro).  There's a chapter on Chaplin, one on Lloyd and Keaton, one on the Marx Brothers, one on Preston Sturges and one on Jerry Lewis.  Indeed, to write a blurb, you don't even need to read the book, just the table of contents.  Comedy Is A Man In Trouble is published by the University of Minnesota Press.  I expect higher standards.