Check out a new article in the La Review of Books from the always brilliant Maggie Hennefeld.
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THERE WAS NO funnier sight gag in early cinema than the catastrophe of epidemic contagion. In The Yawner (1907), a man’s involuntary yawning transmits irresistibly to his housekeeper, a squadron of military soldiers, day drinkers at a café, a police officer, and an inanimate portrait of a woman, who’s roused from her stasis by the impulsion to yawn. Habitual tics such as yawning, laughing, sneezing, hiccupping, itching, coughing, barking, sobbing, and blinking spread like wildfire when too many nervous bodies found themselves together in close quarters (Read More...)