Screwball comedies, a sub-genre of romantic comedy films, was predominant from the mids to the mids. The word 'screwball' denotes lunacy, craziness, eccentricity, ridiculousness, and erratic behavior. T hese films combine farce, slapstick, and the witty dialogue of more sophisticated films. In general, they are light-hearted, frothy, often sophisticated, romantic stories, commonly focusing on a battle of the sexes in which both co-protagonists try to outwit or outmaneuver each other.
They usually include visual gags with some slapstick , wacky characters, identity reversals or cross-dressing , a fast-paced improbable plot, and rapid-fire, wise-cracking dialogue and one-liners reflecting sexual tensions and conflicts in the blossoming of a relationship or the patching up of a marriage for an attractive couple with on-going, antagonistic differences such as in The Awful Truth The couple is often a fairly eccentric, but well-to-do female interested in romance and a generally passive, emasculated, or weak male who resists romance, such as in Bringing Up Baby , or a sexually-frustrated, humiliated male who is thwarted in romance, as in Howard Hawks' farce I Was a Male War Bride The zany but glamorous characters often have contradictory desires for individual identity and for union in a romance under the most unorthodox, insane or implausible circumstances such as in Preston Sturges' classic screwball comedy and battle of the sexes The Lady Eve However, after a twisting and turning plot, romantic love usually triumphs in the end.
See more discussion later in this section. These are dark, sarcastic, humorous, or sardonic stories that help us examine otherwise ignored darker serious, pessimistic subjects such as war, death, or illness. Two of the greatest black comedies ever made include the following: Stanley Kubrick's Cold War classic satire from a script by co-writer Terry Southern, Dr. Another more recent classic black comedy was the Coen Brothers' violent and quirky story Fargo about a pregnant Midwestern police chief Oscar-winning Frances McDormand who solves a 'perfect crime' that went seriously wrong.
Hal Ashby's eccentric cult film Harold and Maude was an oddball love story and dark comedy about a suicidal 19 year-old Bud Cort and a quirky, widowed octogenarian Ruth Gordon , with a great soundtrack score populated with songs by Cat Stevens. See examples of other feature films below for more. The film included an Oscar-winning performance from Anjelica Huston as the vengeful granddaughter of Nicholson's Don.
Tim Burton's dark and imaginative haunted house comedy Beetlejuice featured Michael Keaton as the title character in a dream house occupied by newlywed spirits Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin. These specific types of comedy also called put-ons, send-ups, charades, lampoons, take-offs, jests, mockumentaries, etc.
This category may also include these widely diverse forms of satire - usually displayed as political or social commentary, for example:. More recently, the genre has used celebrity as a trigger for screwball behavior, such as in Runaway Bride , Notting Hill , and America's Sweethearts While romantic comedy follows a more traditional dating ritual, with the male taking the lead usually after some maturing , as with Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally This free-spirited emancipator is usually a force to be reckoned with, be it Goldie Hawn's pathological liar in HouseSitter , first cousin to Lombard's master fibber in True Confession , or more recently, Queen Latifah, who awakens Steve Martin's "wild and crazy" past in Bringing Down the House The inevitability of the screwball heroine's victory is nicely summarized by Streisand at the close of What's Up, Doc?
Pace also plays a major role in screwball comedy. While the romantic story slows to narrative apoplexy at the close as the audience agonizes over whether the couple will ultimately get together, as in Tom Hanks's drawn-out orchestration of love at the end of You've Got Mail , or Billy Crystal's finally reconnecting with Meg Ryan at the conclusion of When Harry Met Sally … , screwball comedy's normally quick pacing escalates even more near the finale, as the title of Theodora Goes Wild suggests.
This pell-mell speed is often coupled with genre-defining action, such as Hepburn knocking down Grant's bronotosaurus skeleton symbolically the last vestiges of his academic rigidity in Bringing Up Baby , and Martin and Tomlin concluding All of Me with an out-of-control jazz dance number, designating the death of his law career to become a musician.
The screwball formula has not changed markedly since the s. New catalysts for craziness, such as celebrity, have evolved, as in the comic chaos Hugh Grant creates by bringing a movie star Julia Roberts to his grown sister's birthday party in Notting Hill. But these developments are merely concessions to evolving tastes, not major change. A greater issue is that the screwball heroine has lost some of her allure. For instance, both My Best Friend's Wedding and Forces of Nature start off as traditional examples of the genre.
Ultimately, both movies break with the screwball mold and essentially embrace romantic comedy. In today's truly life-on-the-edge existence, with new dangers from terrorist acts to AIDS, unpredictability is less appealing. Finally, the term screwball merits some closing clarification. Too often people wrongly pigeonhole as screwball any comedy with zany components, from films with personality comedians such as the Marx Brothers to the dark comedy of The Royal Tenenbaums Along related lines, just because a manic clown has a girlfriend does not make a picture a screwball comedy - all movie funny men have romantic interests.
Screwball comedy simply uses a strong eccentric heroine to parody the traditional romance. Others, such as Katharine Hepburn, Joel McCrea, Barbara Stanwyck, Constance Bennett, or William Powell, appeared two or three times and even to high acclaim, but are primarily remembered for their long string of successes in different, or related genres.
But there are certain stars who returned to the screwball fold again and again, firmly entwining their names and images with the overall historic impression of this remarkable group of motion pictures. The actors and actresses who appeared most frequently and to the greatest and most lasting effect in screwball comedy often did so only after achieving stardom in more conventional fare. The cycle's eight-year run generated few new stars from the ranks of the unknown, but it did rejuvenate several careers and assist in extending the length of others.
The actress who to many is the epitome of screwball spirit and style had a brief career due to premature death. A hard-working and ambitious actress from her early teens, Lombard was a thorough professional, having "paid her dues" in a wide variety of pictures by the time of her screwball breakthrough in one of the founding films of the genre, Howard Hawks' Twentieth Century Numerous biographical accounts depict her as Hollywood's beautiful tomboy, a tough-talking but vivacious charmer, adored by virtually all of her coworkers on both sides of the camera.
The practical-joking, impulsively outspoken aspects of her personality had been confined to her offscreen life until Hawks merged them into her role of the hot-tempered actress who verbally battles her flamboyant ex-directorllover John Barrymore in the successful filming of Hecht and MacArthur's rowdy stage play. The winning combination of attractiveness and eccentricity which gave screwball comedy its fresh appeal has been repeatedly tracked back to Lombard's delightfully enraged performance as stage star Lily Garland, but it was not until five films later, in Mitchell Leisen's Hands Across the Table that another screwball opportunity, and a more restrained one at that, beckoned.
Lombard's portrayal of a money-minded manicurist who finds love in a garret was more screwball in its approach to gold digging than in her performance per se, but her polished skill at romantic comedy in general blended well with the story and proved a stepping stone to the triple triumphs of My Man Godfrey , True Confession , and Nothing Sacred , which established her as the female embodiment of the screwball sensibility in movies.
In fact, it was a critic's borrowing of a baseball term, in reviewing the first of these, which coined the "screwball comedy" designation responding to Lombard's portrayal of a spoiled heiress' screamingly funny, albeit dizzy, bratty, and thoughtless behavior when she brings home a supposed "bum" and installs him as the new butler in the family mansion. The second film scored with audiences in large measure due to her memorable performance as an endearingly compulsive liar, whose phony murder confession wreaks havoc with the justice system.
The third picture gave Lombard a wide berth in which to shine as another truthless and wide-eyed "innocent," this time allowing a crass newspaperman to exploit ruthlessly the mistaken story of her impending death from radium poisoning.
The busy actress surrounded these screwball masterpieces with several other fine performances in standard romantic comedy and drama of the late s and the turn of the decade. Then she made what became her last screwball appearance, in a film surprisingly directed by thrill-master Alfred Hitchcock, Mr.
Smith While not on the dizzying plane of zany and impulsive behavior which typified the cycle at its height, Lombard's performance was nevertheless very effective in this sharp-edged Norman Krasna story of a couple's troubled re-courtship after learning their "perfect" marriage is not legal.
Lombard's subsequent and final performance, before losing her life in a plane crash the following year, was for the screen's master of sophisticated comedies of manners, Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be , while primarily a mixture of political satire a troupe of Polish actors trick the Nazis and the director's unique style of clever sexual innuendo, benefited greatly from Lombard's screwball-honed sense of comic timing and line delivery.
The grim realities of later war news, plus the picture's posthumous release following her tragic accident, cast an undeserved pall over the film which faded only with its widely applauded revival several years later. Lombard perished on a return flight to Hollywood from a successful war-bond sales tour, and her disappearance from the screen closely and symbolically presaged the departure of the very comedy style which, despite her success in other genres, she had come to represent.
It has been nearly impossible for latter-day writers to invoke the memory of screwball comedy without mentioning her name, and anyone who takes the opportunity to view her best work, despite the passage of a half-century, will immediately see why. Irene Dunne 's dual success in musical comedy and sentimental drama pre-dated her standout performances in the screwball cycle, and even without that third phase of her career, her place in Hollywood history would still be secure.
The marvelous extension of her acting range began with Theodora Goes Wild , which led to her non-exclusive pact with Columbia. Up to that point Dunne had impressed the public essentially by means of her superbly trained voice and resolutely cheerful dignity under dramatic stress.
She had played conventional musical comedy on stage since her late teens, and her early sound-film years had also given her the chance to emote effectively in some highly popular "weepies," the best known of which are Back Street and Magnificent Obsession In the picture's Mary McCarthy story, under Stanislavsky method director Richard Boleslawsky, Dunne revealed a new level of self-satirical, infectious good humor in mildly absurd situations.
She beautifully matched the comparable playing of Melvyn Douglas as her commercial artist "liberator," and Theodora Goes Wild became a big hit. Columbia tried to repeat that accomplishment the following year, with Dunne as the female lead in Leo McCarey's chaotically improvised but hugely successful The Awful Truth. Paired with Cary Grant as an estranged couple on the eve of their divorce, she delivered another astonishingly funny performance, particularly in the prized sequence in which she drops her good-natured dignity to crash a family gathering at the home of her spouse's intended new wife.
Dunne's characterization of a well-bred woman's satirical impersonation of a naIvely lewd cabaret chanteuse even topped Dunne's hilarious Theodora role as a proper lady author who pretends to assume the egregious lifestyle of her novel's sexually adventurous heroine. In , still at RKO but once again under the genially informal direction of McCarey, Dunne gave a stellar performance in an extraordinary picture which combined the tearjerking, heavy sentiment of her early films with a few leavening touches of screwball sensibility in the early scenes of attempted seduction by a world-class playboy Charles Boyer.
Although the film has been out of authorized circulation for a half-century, Love Affair remains, to those fortunate enough to have seen it, the peak of Dunne's non-screwball career.
Dunne's fortuitous relationship with McCarey continued, despite his convalescence following a car crash, in his subsequent and wholly screwball production directed by McCarey associate Garson Kanin of My Favorite Wife , in which a new comic marital triangle is structured around a flustered husband Cary Grant whose remarriage plans are interrupted by the reappearance of the wife he thought was lost at sea.
Dunne's gift for insinuating playful chinks in her armor of sensible behavior comes to the fore as she earnestly informsltorments her spouse with maddeningly incomplete details of her being marooned on an island with a handsome "Adam" Randolph Scott to her "Eve. Her final contributions to the screwball era at last united her with another of its masters, director Gregory La Cava, but at Universal they turned out a pair ofless successful comic romances, Unfinished Business and Lady in a Jam Hampered dually by the waning of the screwball cycle and by La Cava's growing reliance upon improvisation to the neglect of plot construction and audience response, the first project mixed serious, even psychological concerns with what might have been a top-rank screwball triangle involving the leading lady and two disparate brothers.
The second film had Dunne's character consulting an analyst - who disdains her madcap behavior. Like Lombard and Dunne, Colbert had been playing leads in major studio pictures for half a decade before joining the screwball parade.
Her transition to the genre actually put her at the procession's auspicious beginning, winning a Academy Award for her runaway heiress in Frank Capra's It Happened One Night.
Impetuous, stubborn, self-impressed and hopelessly spoiled, her character, in romantic conflict with the down-to-earth reporter Clark Gable who befriends and exploits her, helped set the style for both the battle-of-the-sexes and the cross-class conflict variations of screwball comedy for the rest of the decade.
Colbert's second appearance in a screwball comedy, The Gilded Lily , featured her in a much more docile part than the feisty one she had undertaken for Capra. Her working-girl character's obedient assumption of manufactured celebrity status woven by her reporter boyfriend out of her erstwhile and fleeting romance with a nobleman marked the last time for many years that Colbert would play the passive role in comedy of any stripe.
Her personal secretary character in She Married Her Boss successfully takes over both the family and business fortunes of Melvyn Douglas' compliant executive, and her shopgirl on holiday in I Met Him in Paris coyly plays the attentions of two determined suitors against each other in a protractedly funny game of romantic rivalry with an Alpine resort setting.
Even in the primarily non-screwball The Bride Comes Home , released between the two previous titles, Colbert's character remains in control - as an ex-heiress now impoverished still fending off the attentive men. So successful a comedienne was Colbert by the time of her second picture with the great Lubitsch, Bluebeard's Eighth Wife , that even the master of sophisticated screen suggestiveness was motivated to direct a screwball vehicle for her.
Darker in emotional tone than previous entries in the genre, the narrative presents Colbert as not just an amusingly determined young woman, but as a dollar driven doll whose new marriage to a possibly Landru-like millionaire nearly founders from what appears to be her connivance to drive him insane. The golddigger inclination of Colbert's character in that picture was softened, but still present the next year in the superbly screwball Midnight , scripted by the same team as Bluebeard Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett but directed instead by romanticist Mitchell Leisen.
It's a Wonderful World , a rare Colbert performance for MGM, does reveal some definite couple-on-the-run inspiration from It Happened One Night , but the anarchic tilt of the screwball vision is secondary to the emphasis on adventure. It was not until , at the close of the cycle, that Colbert made her next, and final, appearance in the genre - closing out the era just as magnificently, if not influentially, as she had helped initiate it eight years earlier.
In The Palm Beach Story she again portrays a money-minded female, but this time her character is already married. In the perverse logic of screwball, she resolves benignly to divorce him and go fortune hunting for a millionaire backer, using her shapely self as bait. Colbert's forthright, bright and determined style of performance, even when delivering the tortuously funny dialogue of writer-director Preston Sturges, was the direct opposite of the scatterbrained Lombard or the proper versus wild Dunne at either of her modal extremes.
The Colbert character functioned most often in screwball with obvious and extroverted intelligence, just as she did in drama or romantic comedy. In a Colbert screwball comedy, it was the setting, the situation, or the subsidiary players who provided the eccentricities. Like Irene Dunne and probably Carole Lombard, if she had lived , Claudette Colbert moved on to patriotic schmaltz of a high order, during wartime, and met the screen challenge of middle age with postwar domestic roles.
From to he was a Paramount-contracted leading man in various genres, seemingly cast more for his looks than his charm. A determination to pick his own parts motivated him to negotiate a non-exclusive arrangement with RKO and Columbia thereafter, and in he had the good fortune to appear in a pair of consecutive screwball hits: Topper free-lancing for Hal Roach as a cocktail-sipping ghost and Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth as an errant husband determined to reclaim his nearly divorced wife.
This style of comedy brilliantly matched Grant's ability to deliver witty lines with a unique mixture of angst, amusement and elan, and he was soon in great demand to repeat that performance style in similar films. Director Howard Hawks, in pursuing his Twentieth Century vision of having attractive leading players do the kind of physical humor once reserved for eccentric comics, then found Grant ideal for the part of a flustered dinosaur-researcher in Bringing Up Baby Although Katharine Hepburn's uninhibitedly aggressive, female prankster-pursuer proved to be too extreme in its liberated looniness for contemporary tastes, Grant's endearingly passive - but flustered male won him still greater industry recognition as the movies' new farceur of choice.
Director George Cukor , who had unsuccessfully paired Grant with Hepburn two years earlier in the disastrous Sylvia Scarlett , then gave the pair another try in the mildly screwball Holiday , resulting in an appealingly enthusiastic performance from the actor as a young Wall-Street success who switches fiancees en route to escaping the Gotham rat race.
Hawks pushed a willing Grant over the edge of customary cinematic restraint in the verbally explosive His Girl Friday , to the effect that his driving and devious editor character becomes a Vesuvius of screwball invective, imperiousness and petty' intrigue.
That same year Grant excelled in an Awful Truth reworking called My Favorite Wife , yet another screwball classic about a disrupted marriage comically reconstructed to the mutual delight of its fictional participants and real-life viewers. Before the cycle waned, Grant managed to score one more time - in Cukor's elegant Philadelphia Story , as the perplexed ex-husband of an "ice goddess" Katharine Hepburn as an overly cultured, socially perfect, Main-Line heiress.
He wins her back from an impending remarriage after a revealing, pre-nuptial encounter with the working press. Subsequently Grant lent his by-then practiced comic expertise to a pair of quasi-screwball gems, the fervently sentimental Penny Serenade and the Capra-like social comedy The Talk of the Town , both under the guidance of the director who had elicited Grant's memorable Cockney-soldier performance in Gunga Din , George Stevens.
A seasoned stage performer, Douglas might have returned permanently to Broadway had he not scored a genuine hit as the repressed title character liberated by Claudette Colbert's dutiful secretary in Columbia's She Married Her Boss Douglas' assured gift for sly sophistication mixed with an impish sense of amusement won him the same sort of non-exclusive arrangement with that studio that Grant would also parlay to continuing screwball success, only in Douglas' case he split his Columbia time for the next seven years with other assignments primarily at MGM instead of RKO.
Nevertheless, much of Douglas' frequent screen work in the latter half of the decade was in either conventional romantic drama or in Thin Man -style mysteries. However, his ego-inflated suitor in Paramount's I Met Him in Paris was another hilarious contribution to the screwball cycle, then at its peak.
The comedy classic for which Douglas is best remembered was less screwball than political satire overlaid with the comedy of manners, but his mastery of the "battle of the sexes" banter with Greta Garbo in the Ernst Lubitsch-MGM Ninotchka is clearly of an extended piece with Douglas' finest efforts in the cycle under study here. That same year he also did the solidly screwball Good Girls Go to Paris for Alexander Hall at Columbia and excelled as a bemused British professor, pursued in America by Joan Blondell's social climbing ex-waitress.
Douglas' next screwball picture was Too Many Husbands , part of that group of multiple variations on the comic love triangle of The Awful Truth in which a spare spouse or accidental case of bigamy spurs the plot.
In this case the unexpectedly flatteredand-courted wife Jean Arthur gets to choose and just barely does between worldly Douglas and homespun Fred MacMurray. Although Lubitsch's first authentically screwball effort, Bluebeard's Eighth Wife , had misfired from the miscasting of non-sophisticate Gary Cooper as the male lead, the director's success with Douglas the following year did at least inspire the master to approach the borders of the genre again in The result was the psychologically bizarre That Uncertain Feeling , in which polished farceur Douglas dithers and schemes while playing an upper-class husband to chic Merle Oberon with growing misgivings about how to react to his neglected wife's blossoming affair with a flamboyant, possibly psychotic, concert pianist Burgess Meredith.
Although the premise of Our Wife , with its masquerade, for business reasons, of a non-existent marriage would seem most appropriately screwball even without Douglas in the cast, the goings-on lack the requisite social bite and credible sexual tension, veering off instead into conventional farce.
The actor did, however, participate one more time in the screwball cycle before it faded with the arrival of the war. Douglas was in splendid form as a "possibly" deceived husband attempting to seduce his own wife - while she pretends to be her non-existent, more liberated sister.
MGM's re-editing of the finished film, to placate angry censors who saw Douglas' character as remorselessly attempting adultery, only succeeded in raising the narrative's confusion level. In any case, the leading lady's radical departure from her more exotic screen image so distressed her fans that dissatisfaction with the production was even more widespread.
Its boxoffice failure helped ring down the curtain on screwball. A dance-band saxophonist whose vocalizing with Gus Arnheim's orchestra in the late s led to featured parts in a few Broadway musicals, MacMurray was only a fresh recruit to Paramount's stable of talent when Claudette Colbert saw his screen test and requested him as her costar in The Gilded Lily So appealing were his tall good looks and unpretentious Midwestern manner that he was soon partnering several more of Hollywood's top draw actresses in a veritable stream of romantic comedies and adventures.
Most of these mainstream productions were, of course, non-screwball. The Gilded Lily most definitely was screwball, however, with its clever barbs against both the upper class and the media. MacMurray was quite effective as the scheming reporter and publicity maven who crafts Colbert's character into the personification of a public non-event - a talentless "entertainer" made famous via her much touted "rejection" of a nobleman Ray Milland, also cast in his first big Paramount part.
Four films later, and still that same year, MacMurray was back in screwball and once more playing the no-nonsense Midwesterner who turns the head of a working girl this time Carole Lombard away from a rich but unsuitable suitor.
The film was Hands Across the Table , and its success confirmed MacMurray's: His surprising charm seems to have stemmed from the assuredness with which he could portray the "average guy. Jean Arthur was the enjoyably flattered spouse, busily setting up roadblocks to the boudoir destinations of rivals MacMurray and Melvyn Douglas, who by this point in the screwball cycle had, with MacMurray, become the only serious competition to Cary Grant as the genre's premiere actors.
Their onscreen rivalry to impress the wife they accidentally, of course share is one of the most overt displays of screwball comedy's couching the romantic pursuits of the economically comfortable in the rowdy but good natured, push-turns-to-shove antics of children. The contrast inherent in Douglas' polished urbanity versus MacMurray's practiced inanity not only heightens the humor, but also displays the range of personality types which the screwball vision could comfortably accommodate.
MacMurray's final screwball showcase came in the same year that most of the other recurrent participants bowed out of the cycle, Take a Letter, Darling cast him as a male secretary to Rosalind Russell's high powered lady boss.
The actor's accomplished ability to register alternate moods of comic frustration, warm insincerity, and blundering determination served him very well in what was his seventh collaboration with director Mitchell Leisen. The comic twist in the film is the character's discomfort at sex role reversal, coupled with the effects of his seeming disinterest in his attractive employer.
MW Dictionary has noun form, only! Great List! Excellent and timely article. I just completed an humorous anecdotal essay I rarely write humor [intentionally, anyway] but this was a special occasion. Due to that essay this list came in very handy. This article provides great descriptions of basic humor. Concise and precise. I got acquainted with humour and its different types that were so advantageous for my thesis.
I do appreciate it! Say, like: My dog hates to go for walks with me, he keeps falling off the treadmill. Not a good example. Some words are just incredibly funny individually. Damp is one. Spatchcock is another. Then shunt them together and just let the wonder of a damp vermillion spatchcock wash over you.
Oh hang on. Humor has always been a rewarding and uplifting part of my life. Besides relieving stress, it leaves me with a calm heart and a better view of life. Being a small man it has saved me from being hurt by big bad men, most of the time. But now at the sunset of life my greatest joy is seeing others my age smile when we are together.
My lovely wife and best friend is happy too. I love to use a little satire, sometimes stories about laughable experiences of life that occur from time to time. But parody is one of my favorites when i. How can anyone deny that God is a happy God and he loves good humor too.
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