Screwball Comedy

ORIGINS

Screwball comedy was tied to a period of transition in American humor that gained momentum by the late 1920s. The dominant comedy character had been the capable cracker-barrel type, such as Will Rogers; it now became an antihero, best exemplified by characters in The New Yorker writings of Robert Benchley (1889–1945) and James Thurber (1894–1961), or Leo McCarey's (1898–1969) silent comedy shorts with Laurel and Hardy. (McCarey would later direct the screwball classic The Awful Truth , 1937). Antiheroic humor is driven by the ritualistic humiliation of the male; screwball comedy merely dresses up the setting and substitutes beautiful people for this farcical battle of the sexes.

The Great Depression fueled the antiheroic nature of the screwball genre. Moviegoers looked to the movies as a means of lighthearted escape from their everyday worries. Coupled with this was the Depression-era fascination with the upper classes, which is still a component of the genre, as in the wealthy backdrop of Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). Moreover, screwball plotlines sometimes pair couples from different classes, as in Frank Capra's (1897–1991) watershed work, It Happened One Night (1934), in which a blue-collar reporter (Clark Gable) and a runaway heiress (Claudette Colbert) squabble but eventually fall in love. This romance becomes a metaphor for various forms of reconciliation, be it romantic or generational. Garry Marshall updated many of these components in his 1999 salute to the genre, Runaway Bride , which featured both a reporter (Richard Gere) and a woman with commitment issues (Julia Roberts). Similarly, writer and director Steve Gordon (b. 1938) brilliantly focuses on the genre's occasional union of classes in Arthur (1981), with a billionaire (Dudley Moore) falling for a waitress (Liza Minnelli).

Hollywood's implementation of the Production Code in 1934 also affected screwball comedy. This same year saw the release of such pioneering examples of the genre as Howard Hawks's (1896–1977) Twentieth Century and It Happened One Night . Since American censorship has always been more concerned with sexuality than with violence, it hardly seems a coincidence that a genre sometimes referred to as "the sex comedy without sex" should blossom at the same time the code appeared.

A fourth period factor was the film industry's then recent embrace of sound technology. Whereas silent comedy keyed upon the solo-hero status of personality comedians such as Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977) and Buster Keaton (1895–1966), talking pictures were geared toward the verbal interaction of doubled heroes, such as the screwball couple. Even the early sound personality comedian films had a multiple-hero interaction, with the 1930s being the heyday of comedy teams from the celebrated Marx Brothers to period favorites such as Wheeler and Woolsey and the Ritz Brothers. The extension of these manic comedy teams also influenced screwball comedy. A defining trait of the screwball couple was having them act more like broad comedians. They were sophisticates gone silly. Pioneering examples of the sexy but clowning screwball couple include John Barrymore (1882–1942) and Carole Lombard (1908–1942), interacting in zany slapstick situations in Hawks's benchmark Twentieth Century , and Gable and Colbert, pretending to be an argumentative married couple in It Happened One Night .

Yet another catalyst in the 1930s for screwball comedy was the genre's marriage of directors trained in silent comedy to the army of wordsmiths who descended upon Hollywood with the coming of sound. Journalists,

playwrights, novelists, humorists, and every other kind of writer found at least a temporary California home as the film capital panicked over the sudden importance of words. All this talent helped usher in a golden age of dialogue comedy. Frequently these writers fed on their journalistic past. Thus a good number of screwball comedies have a newspaper backdrop, from the studio era's It Happened One Night , Nothing Sacred (1937), and His Girl Friday (1940) to Runaway Bride .

Screwball comedy's wittiest dialogue was the product of former Broadway playwright Preston Sturges (1898-1959), the writer and director of such watershed examples of the genre as The Lady Eve (1941) and The Palm Beach Story (1942). But he was also a student of slapstick, which made him a perfect auteur for a farcical genre defined by both verbal wit and visual comedy. Sturges notwithstanding, most of the key screwball directors, such as McCarey and Hawks, received their cinematic start in silent pictures. Indeed, McCarey's motto was "do it visually." Consequently, the sight gag (from a facial expression to a fall) was a natural component of the screwball comedy arsenal.