Gehring recognizes that earlier writers wrote dark comedies, but he credits Chaplin with popularizing the film style. He posits three characteristics of that style: “anti-establishment settings,” “omnipresence of death,” and “tendency of people to be beast-like to their fellow men” (later, he adds sexual predation to this last category (p. Gehring establishes the parameters of Chaplin’s dark comedy style in the first chapter. Despite the title, the majority of the work is dedicated to the first two themes. Gehring, a noted film scholar, constructs a biography of Charlie Chaplin built around three themes: Chaplin’s development of dark comedy, the interconnectedness of Chaplin’s private life and his movies, and, lastly, Chaplin’s “war” movies.
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