Screwball Comedies of the 1930s

 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.

 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.

 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: 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.

 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 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.

 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)

 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)

 Often a movement from the world of one protagonist to the other, which causes a movement between classes as well.  Stanley Cavell: screwball comedies often are set in Connecticut.  Settings sometimes incorporate the innocence of childhood: a playroom, a toy store, an attic with children’s toys.

 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

 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

 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