American Film Comedy

Screwball Comedies of the 1930s

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.

Themes, continued

• Comic disruption of the forces of social order through chaos and disorder.

• Desire for upward mobility and cross-class relationships.

• Often ending with a marriage that signifies the formation of the new community out of the old.

Silent Era

• Charlie Chaplin: “Little Tramp” character at odds with machines, authority.

• Buster Keaton: deadpan features and inventive response to change.

• Harold Lloyd: the middle-class striver who never gives up; anxiety about fitting in.

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.

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

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 Depression-induced unemployment and instability of gender roles.

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)

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)

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.

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.

Other Conventions, continued• Comic

misunderstandings, often over words; fast-paced, “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

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