[Screwball Sunday #1] Defining the Genre

An introduction to screwball comedy

If there is one thing about my taste in film that you need to know, it’s that I am a massive screwball comedy fan. In fact, if you’ve been reading this publication for a while, you might already be aware of the fact. It’s the genre that got me into Old Hollywood in the first place, in no small part thanks to a university film professor who was a fan, and I will never not mourn the genre’s short-lived era. Its influence was big, though, and the elements of screwball can still be found in films being released today.

To honour screwball comedy – and hopefully introduce at least one new person to the genre – I am starting a series to examine its history, characteristics, and influence. Beyond my own writing in this series, each instalment will include discussion prompts and a recommended viewing section. I’m hoping this series can be educational for anyone who isn’t yet familiar with the genre but I also hope it can be a way to connect with fellow screwball enthusiasts and exchange thoughts and film recommendations. 

If this sounds interesting, please tune in every Sunday in November for what I’m going to start referring to as “Screwball Sundays.” 

What is Screwball Comedy?

In simplest terms, Screwball comedy is a subgenre of romantic comedy that puts an emphasis on a funny spoofing of love rather than love and romance itself which tends to be the focus of more traditional romantic comedies.¹ Screwball comedies are known for their fast pace, including snippy and fast-paced dialogue, as well as situational comedy, characters often placed in somewhat absurd situations. Over time, screwball has largely blended into a wider definition of a ‘romantic comedy’ as some of its key elements fell off due to cultural and political changes in the world. To this day, however, its elements remain present, not only in romantic comedies but in other genres as well. 

Characteristics of Screwball Comedies

The name “screwball” comes from baseball where it is a pitching technique which makes the ball move on a downward trajectory while rotating in a way that is unpredictable and difficult to hit. It is precisely the pitch’s unpredictability that relates to screwball comedy. Whether it's the dialogue or the plot, or even the characters’ movement, screwball comedies are defined by being unpredictable and not following the more traditional trajectories. 

The genre’s key elements include absurd situations, fast-paced and witty dialogue, battles of the sexes, and differences between economic classes. 

Screwball comedies are as farcical as they are romantic and the stories centre a will-they-won’t-they of the male and the female leads that is defined by its sharpness while placing the leads in nonsensical situations. For example, in Bringing Up Baby (1938), one of the definite representatives of screwball comedy, the two leads are forced to take care of a pet leopard. Remarriages are a common situation filmmakers used to place their leads in, and the absurdity usually came from the tricks they played at each other and the third (or the fourth) party involved in their quest to get back together. Examples of this include The Awful Truth (1937), The Philadelphia Story (1940), and His Girl Friday (1940).

His Girl Friday (1940) also happens to be a great representative of the fast-paced dialogue that the genre relies on. The film is fast-paced as it is but the characters converse at a speed where when you watch the film with subtitles, the subtitles lag at multiple times because they can’t keep up with the speed of the dialogue. It’s ridiculous and absurd but also adds to the intellectualism of the genre because it not only requires high attention from its audience but also implies the cleverness of its characters. 

His Girl Friday (1940)

Battle of the sexes is another prominent theme in screwball. This is often shown through banter while attempting to achieve a shared goal with both parties believing their solution is the way to go. Through such setups, the leads come across as mismatched but it is the time they spend together and the banter they develop that ultimately leads to romance. For the age that they were at their peak, screwball comedies were surprisingly feminist in that they firmly placed women as intelligent, capable, and professionally equal to their male love interests. His Girl Friday (1940) is again a great example of this as the two main characters both work in the same newsroom, and it is the female lead who is needed to save the day when an emergency strikes. It is also often the women who initiate and actively pursue the romantic relationship, with the man seemingly oblivious, which wouldn’t have necessarily been the case in real life in the 1930s. 

Very often, the ability for women to pursue relationships happens to be a result of the economical differences between the leads with the woman belonging to an upper class while the male lead is either a member of the middle or the working class. While I would argue that this film belongs to the romantic comedy genre over screwball, It Happened One Night (1934)² is one of the earlier examples of this dynamic, with Bringing Up Baby (1938) and My Man Godfrey (1936) being other great examples of these social class differences. The vast majority of screwball comedies are set in New York City or its vicinity (often Connecticut) precisely because the city offers a large economic disparity, which allows for scenarios of an upper class woman running into a lower class man to be a lot more plausible than perhaps elsewhere in the country.

My Man Godfrey (1936)

At its core, screwball has a big overlap with the theatrical genre of farce,³ and it is the above-mentioned elements that define the genre. As time passed and screwball comedies became a thing of the past, many of its key features remain present across genres. 

Brief History

Screwball comedy emerged in the early 1930s as a result of both the Great Depression⁴ and the introduction of the Hays Code which effectively banned any notion of sexuality in film.⁵ Both of these are reflected in the key elements of screwball. The genre often features the archetype of a spoiled heiress that effectively mocks the upper class. The general moviegoing audiences at the time of the Great Depression could relate to the working class man and his initial hostility towards the upper class characters but, just like the male lead in the film, they needed to see the quirky and witty side of the spoiled heiress to fall in love with her. The banter between the leads and a fast-paced back and forth came as a replacement for any sex that would normally be shown in romantic films. It added to the tension, effectively showcasing the sexual tension between the leads, without explicitly showing or saying anything that would conflict with the Code. In fact, screwball comedies are filled with sexual tension and subtext. It’s a part of their charm. In many ways, their ability to depict sexuality without depicting it reminds me a lot of the ways in which animated films use subtext and double entendres to keep the parents entertained.  

With the Great Depression being a prominent driver of the genre, it perhaps isn’t surprising that the screwball comedies peaked towards the end of the 1930s and started their decline into the 40s. The start of World War II and the subsequent involvement of the United States in the war also played a role, with Hollywood studios shifting focus to support the federal government’s propagandistic efforts and prioritising the production of films that would reinforce American values and boost the morale of the nation.⁶ When the war ended, the political and cultural landscape in the US was vastly different from what it was like prior to the war which meant the ideologies of the nation shifted and with them, so did Hollywood’s approach to storytelling. 

There isn’t a singular event or a specific year when the era of screwball comedies ended but as a genre that was originally defined by large political and cultural events, it is not surprising that it would fall off once other issues and events became more prominent. It is a genre, however, that left a mark, and even if filmmakers after the 1940s no longer tied all the screwball elements together, they kept them on an individual basis to add to their stories. 

Discussion Questions

1. Take one of the films from the recommended viewing list and break it down into each key component of screwball. 

2. Can you think of any other genres that were a direct result of political or cultural events?

3. I am always looking for recommendations! Share your favourite screwball comedies that you think other people should see. 

Recommended Viewing 

Three-Cornered Moon (1933)

It Happened One Night (1934)

Bringing Up Baby (1938)

His Girl Friday (1940)

The Lady Eve (1941)

1. Gehring, Wes D. Romantic vs. Screwball Comedy: Charting the Difference. Scarecrow Press, 2008.

2. It Happened One Night (1934) is widely considered the first romantic comedy and some consider it as one of earliest screwball comedies. I've always viewed it as a romantic comedy more than a screwball comedy but it does contain prominent elements of screwball, including the stereotypical spoiled heiress falling in love with a working class man.

3. Gehring, Wes D. Romantic vs. Screwball Comedy: Charting the Difference. Scarecrow Press, 2008.

4. Byrge, Duane, et al. The Screwball Comedy Films: A History and Filmography, 1934-1942. McFarland, 1991.

5. Greene, Jane M. “A proper dash of spice: Screwball comedy and the Production Code.” Journal of Film and Video, vol. 63, no. 3, 1 Oct. 2011, pp. 45–63.

6. https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/notebook-primer-screwball-comedy