Slide 1

American Film Comedy
Screwball Comedies of the 1930s


Slide 2

Themes
• Comic integration of outsiders
(immigrants, other classes) and desire for
assimilation.
• Exposing divisions in society through
exaggeration but also working to heal
those divisions.
• Theme of integration (or reintegration)
into society of those who have become
alienated.


Slide 3

Themes, continued
• Comic disruption of the forces of social
order through chaos and disorder.
• Desire for upward mobility and crossclass relationships.
• Often ending with a marriage that
signifies the formation of the new
community out of the old.


Slide 4

Silent Era
• Charlie Chaplin: “Little
Tramp” character at odds
with machines, authority.
• Buster Keaton: deadpan
features and inventive
response to change.
• Harold Lloyd: the middleclass striver who never
gives up; anxiety about
fitting in.


Slide 5

Screwball Comedy
• Screwball comedy: eccentrically comic
battle of the sexes, with the male
generally losing.
• Hero of screwball comedy is an antihero
forever frustrated by his attempts to
create order.
• Thomas Sobchack and Vivian C. Sobchack:
“the predatory female who stalks the
protagonist” is a basic genre convention.


Slide 6

Screwball Comedy, continued
• Goal: to free the man from
stuffy social conventions
and allow the couple to
learn the meaning of love
and “natural” ways of
behaving.
• Andrew Bergman:
comedies bridged class
differences but were
essentially politically
conservative because they
sought to “patch up”
differences rather than
expose them.
• Carole Lombard and
William Powell in My Man
Godfrey, 1936


Slide 7

Screwball Comedy, Continued
• Screwball comedy parodies the
traditional love story. The more
eccentric partner, invariably the woman,
usually manages a victory over the less
assertive, easily frustrated man.
• Role reversal (aggressive woman, passive
man) reflects anxieties about Depressioninduced unemployment and instability of
gender roles.


Slide 8

Conventions of Screwball Comedy
• Post-Production Code.
• Screwball comedy had to find substitutes
for the frank sexuality of Pre-Code films.
• Slapstick violence
• Witty dialogue.
• Scenes with comic sexual tension or
predicaments (a couple trapped in a
room or forced to pretend they are
married, for example)


Slide 9

Settings
• Contemporary, often
settings of wealth: ocean
liners, country clubs,
luxurious homes
• Often a movement from
urban setting to the
country (like
Shakespeare’s “green
world” in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream)
• Barbara Stanwyck and
Henry Fonda, The Lady
Eve (1941)


Slide 10

Settings, Continued
• Often a movement from the world of one
protagonist to the other, which causes a
movement between classes as well.
• Settings sometimes incorporate the innocence
of childhood: a playroom, a toy store, an attic
with children’s toys.


Slide 11

Other Conventions
• Cross-dressing,
disguises, or gender
confusion; mistaken
identity.
• Comic repetitions of
scenes, phrases, and
incidents, sometimes
with elements
reversed.
• Cary Grant in Bringing
Up Baby, 1938.


Slide 12

Other Conventions, continued
• Comic misunderstandings,
often over words; fastpaced, “hyperactive”
dialogue.
• Screwball comedy places
importance on the
meanings of words, alerting
audiences to double
meanings.
• To signal this importance,
characters are often
writers or newspaper
reporters.
• Clark Gable and Claudette
Colbert in It Happened One
Night, 1934


Slide 13

Other Conventions, continued
• A common plot: the
“comedy of
remarriage” (Stanley
Cavell), in which
warring or divorced
partners reunite, as
in The Awful Truth,
1937
• Rosalind Russell and
Cary Grant in His
Girl Friday, 1940