Eccentric Laughter explores new ways to watch postwar British film comedies arguing that their representations of eccentricity offered a set of possible queer futures for a Britain that had been destabilized by years of conflict and social upheaval. Far from being the apolitical cinema described by previous critics these comediesincluding both perennial favorites from Ealing Studios and neglected films ripe for rediscoverymake a joke of and suggest alternatives to the heterocentric home and family. Referencing a wide range of theories the book gives details of how these films comic queernesses are not structured on fixed identities but on an open play of possibilities depicting eccentricity artifice drag ruins and the wild in ways that can still offer inspiration for experiments in living today.