Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, It Happened One Night, My Man Godfrey, The Awful Truth— welcome, one and all, to the all-too-brief era of the screwball comedy. From the mid-1930s to the early 1940s, theatergoers couldn’t toss a stick without hitting banter speedy enough to makeFast and Furiousracing scenes blanch, ludicrous plot MacGuffins, the biggest stars of the day merrily making fools of themselves, and slapstick stunts so outrageous that no one would survive a real life equivalent. Roughly a decade after the sub-genre’s inception, however, its heyday had already come and gone without so much asa Mid-Atlantic accented"by your leave." What caused this style to burn out almost as fast as it arrived?
Screwball Comedy’s Humble Origins
The rise of the screwball comedy wasn’t an overnight happenstance, nor did Hollywood collectively decide to slowly shift back toward an elaboratenessreminiscent of silent era slapstick. How the screwball came to be reads like a happy accident insofar as one can loosely apply that phrase to a tumultuous time in American history. The Great Depression (1929-1939) was well underway with no end in sight. Similar to how Netflix watch parties connected friends and family during the COVID-19 pandemic, audiences desperately wanted — even needed — a distraction. Hollywood escapism wrapped up in an absurdist romance and delivered by charming performers proved an irresistible prospect. If the film was socially aware enough tomock the upper classor pair an “opposites attract” wealthy socialite with a hard-working, good-humored average Joe (It Happened One NightandThe Philadelphia Story,to name two examples), that was a bonus.
Film historians credit theemotional impact of the Great Depressionas one reason for the screwball comedy’s unplanned rise, and cite the 1934 filmsIt Happened One NightandTwentieth Centuryas igniting a firestorm of inventive imitators. (As for where the name originated, describing the preposterously frenzied proceedings ofMy Man Godfreyas a “screwball comedy” was first seencourtesy of a 1936 edition ofVarietymagazine.)
Screwball Comedy Was Wildly Popular
Skip forward a few years and the screwball’s general ingredients had widely infiltrated mainstream cinema. Skip forward closer to one hundred years, and the sub-genre’s regarded as a staple of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Many of the most famous actors of the day and of all time cut their teeth on screwball comedies or made embodying various shenanigans their living:Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, Carole Lombard, Rosalind Russell, William Powell, Myrna Loy, Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, etc. Selling extravagant comedy isn’t as easy as it looks, but it was a rare thing indeed for a Hollywood actor not to rise to the occasion and savage the scenery as ruthlessly asBringing Up Baby’stitular pet leopard.
RELATED:‘His Girl Friday,’ ‘Twentieth Century,’ and Why the Screwball Comedy Needs to Be Resurrected
Even Under the Hays Code, Screwballs Were Creative & Surprisingly Egalitarian
Although more farcical than sincerely romantic, a screwball’s heart always beat according to the romance kindling between the male and female leads. Their will-they-won’t-they dance was defined by contests of witticisms, intellectualism, and blisteringly sharp banter rapid-fire enough to cause a metaphorical nosebleed. This was mostly a way around thenotorious Hays Code, with screwballs being dubbed “sex comedies without the sex.” The lovers' chemistry and their sexual tension had to manifest in ways acceptable to the Code; cue the actors conducting the human version of a mating call. If you don’t discover your soulmate through good old-fashioned repartee, are they really your soulmate?
A side effect of the Hays Code’s moralizing as well as women gaining the right to vote in 1920 was theScrewball’s surprising gender equality. Women were permitted to act just as rambunctious and loud as their male counterparts. They could scream, cry, drink, pick fights, and look like a glamorous hot mess while doing so; and fictional men fell in love with them for that fire. Sure, some plots are red flags in different genres (i.e., plotting the elaborate downfall of a love interest’s upcoming nuptials), but something about the plots' ludicrousness and the actors' humanity made the screwball heartwarming despite the structure’s inherent cynicism. Decades before therom-com became a legitimized genre, these romps put the basic concept of “boy meets girl” on a train, set the train on fire, and sent it over a twenty-thousand-foot cliff into a spiraling black hole while cackling gleefully.
Unlike Its Legacy, the Screwball Comedy Faded Away Without Spectacle
So what happened to this delightful phenomenon? Much like the screwball’s ascension, there’s a lack of one unifying reason or even an obvious decline. The most likely was the United States joining World War II after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. Hollywood’s attention shifted to raising funds for the war effort and embodied serious themes of patriotism and selflessness instead of rambunctious shenanigans. And once the war ended, Americans returning to their shattered image of suburbia peace found comfort in Technicolor melodramas and movie musicals. It’s not a huge leap to assume that people wanted more grounded escapism that reflected their changed world, or at least dramas where the intensely high stakes were serious but fake. Classic actors sniping at one another while assembling a dinosaur skeleton didn’t carry the same appeal after a traumatizing world war. And Hollywood, ever a reflection of the sociopolitical times, shifted to meet audiences where they were.
Even though the screwball comedy is an entity long gone, filmmakers influenced by its unique style produced deliberate tributes likeWhat’s Up, Doc?(1972) andDate Night(2010). And the originals are still beloved by modern audiences for their unfathomably wild antics, tough-as-nails women, scathing class critiques, and mesmerizing performances. Still, it’s a shame a sub-genre of such overflowing riches didn’t survive for much more than a decade.
