Screwball comedy

Comedic films characterized by their whimsicality and often eccentric plots and characters

Hollywood had long made romantic comedies, but these films were indistinguishable from similar works on stage until filmmakers learned to rely less on dialogue and more on cinematography. The result was screwball comedy—a genre that has become closely identified with the 1930’s.

American filmmakers had made comedies from the beginning of the medium, but a new approach developed slowly during the 1930’s as the conventions of romantic comedies merged with the frenetic pace of the slapstick comedies of the silent era. As Hollywood grew more adept at dealing with challenges of sound, characters in romantic comedies began speaking differently, using more slang and generally talking faster. Along with gangster films, screwball comedies were the first American films to understand what could be accomplished with dialogue. The genre also captured the era’s mood by frequently emphasizing the social disparity between the well-to-do and those less fortunate.

The Emerging Screwball Genre

Among the best American romantic comedies of the early 1930’s were the films of director Ernst Lubitsch, such as Trouble in Paradise (1932), in which witty, charming lovers, former lovers, and would-be lovers parry back and forth until the inevitable outcome results. Such films often demonstrate the influence of plays, particularly those of Noël Coward, and the continental sensibilities of their screenwriters and directors. For screwball comedies to arise, a particular American slant had to be added to this formula. Arguably, the first screwball comedy was created by Victor Fleming, one of the most American of directors, and his frequent collaborator, John Lee Mahin. Bombshell (1933) presents a sexy movie star (Jean Harlow) who wants to adopt a persona more respectable than her working-class roots by marrying a stuffy marquis (Ivan Lebedeff), only to realize, after considerable turmoil, that a tough-talking studio publicist (Lee Tracy) is the man for her.

Bombshell created a blueprint to be copied with innumerable variations throughout the decade: man and woman resist falling for each other, argue constantly, and eventually fall in love as pretensions are punctured and the American vernacular is celebrated. Bombshell does not quite have the hectic pace associated with later screwball comedies such as Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934), one of the classics of the genre. The battles between spoiled rich girl Claudette Colbert and no-nonsense reporter Clark Gable as they make their way across the United States had perhaps the biggest impact of any film on both screwball and romantic comedies.

Major Screwball Comedies

The conflict between wealth and humble honesty creates a barrier between lovers in many screwball comedies. In Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey (1936), the wealthy, flighty Carole Lombard makes a homeless man, played by William Powell, her family’s butler on a whim only to see him change a self-involved household into better people. My Man Godfrey is considered one of the most socially conscious screwball comedies because it shows the economic effects of the Depression on those who have lost their jobs and homes and contrasts the willingness of such unfortunates to improve their circumstances with the selfish frivolities of the wealthy. This pattern is also seen in Easy Living (1937), written by Preston Sturges and directed by Mitchell Leisen, as working-girl Jean Arthur transforms the free-spending family of Edward Arnold, and The Mad Miss Manton (1938), one of several films to blend the screwball and mystery genres, in which socialite Barbara Stanwyck becomes more down-to-earth by solving a murder with reporter Henry Fonda.

The screwball-comedy formula reaches its apex in Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby (1938) as a paleontologist, played by Cary Grant, desperate to receive a donation necessary for his research, becomes involved with a daffy heiress, played by Katharine Hepburn, who is the niece of his potential benefactor, played by May Robson. Hawks’s screwball comedies are notable for their headlong pace and frenetic dialogue—a technique matching the material in Bringing Up Baby, as the paleontologist struggles to keep up with and comprehend the heiress—and dashes of slapstick, which, in the case of Bringing Up Baby, involve a dinosaur bone, a dog, and two leopards. Hawks essentially ignores logic to try anything for a laugh, as when the aunt and her friend, a famous explorer, played by Charles Ruggles, both elderly, suddenly decide to run outside, as if invigorated by the high spirits of the young people.

Other Screwball Comedies

Other prominent screwball comedies include Hawks’s Twentieth Century (1934), in which a flamboyant Broadway producer, played by John Barrymore, clashes with his biggest star, played by Lombard; Theodora Goes Wild (1936), with a prim young woman, Irene Dunne, exposed as the writer of a sexy novel; Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth (1937), with Grant and Dunne as a wealthy couple who divorce but cannot stop thinking about each other; and Leisen’s Midnight (1939), one of the least-known great films of the 1930’s, in which a down-on-her-luck singer, Colbert, stranded in Paris and a cab driver, Don Ameche, pretend, with the help of the wealthy Barrymore, to be Hungarian nobility.

Impact

Screwball comedies continued to be made into the 1940’s with such masterpieces as Hawks’s His Girl Friday (1940) and Sturges’s The Lady Eve (1941). However, along with gangster films, they remain one of the genres most closely associated with the 1930’s. Snubbing their nose at the wealthy and overly privileged while celebrating the ingenuity and resilience of ordinary Americans and the liveliness of the American idiom, the screwball comedy is one of Hollywood’s greatest accomplishments.

Bibliography

Cavell, Stanley. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981. Thorough examinations of It Happened One Night, The Awful Truth, and Bringing Up Baby.

DiBattista, Maria. Fast-Talking Dames. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001. Entertaining look at how women are depicted in comedies from the mid-1930’s through the early 1940’s.

Gehring, Wes D. Romantic Versus Screwball Comedy: Charting the Difference. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2002. Explains how screwball and romantic comedies are distinct genres and how the farcical nature of screwball comedies grew out of changes in American humor during the Depression. Looks at Grant and Hepburn as the embodiments of screwball style.

Harvey, James. Romantic Comedy in Hollywood from Lubitsch to Sturges. New York: Knopf, 1987. Analyzes the comic style of Capra, Hawks, Jean Arthur, Colbert, Grant, and Lombard. Includes an interview with Dunne.

Kendall, Elizabeth. The Runaway Bride: Hollywood Romantic Comedies of the 1930’s. New York: Knopf, 1990. The runaway bride device and its variations in It Happened One Night, My Man Godfrey, The Awful Truth, and similar films.

Sikov, Ed. Screwball: Hollywood’s Madcap Romantic Comedies. New York: Crown, 1989. Most thorough examination of the genre divides screwball comedies into such categories as newspaper screwball and screwball mysteries.

Weales, Gerald. Canned Goods as Caviar: American Film Comedy of the 1930’s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Analyses of twelve representative films.