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