Hoaxes, Ballyhoo Stunts, War, and Other Jokes: Humor in the American Marketing of Hollywood War Films during the Great War

In this chapter, I want to reframe our understanding of the role of movies in the US war effort in 1917–1918 by focusing not on American propa-ganda war movies and their assumed power to persuade and manipulate, but on the marketing paratexts of such movies and their power to offer participatory spaces for audiences.1 More precisely, I propose to forego any discussion of film texts as propaganda in order to analyze film culture as a discursive space designed with audience engagement in mind; specifically, as a performative culture used by the American nation to engage with patriotic values. What made this possible, I argue, was the deployment of humor in the marketing of propaganda films—through jokes, hoaxes, carnival-inspired fun, and excessive theatricality.