Screwball Comedy: Hollywood’s Fast-Talking Genre and the Essential Films

Halfway through Bringing Up Baby (1938), Cary Grant is a paleontologist who has lost a priceless dinosaur bone to a dog, been saddled with a tame leopard he never wanted, and been stripped of his dignity by a society woman who will not stop talking. Katharine Hepburn, the woman in question, is entirely sure she is helping. That combination, a calm man thrown into chaos by a woman who moves faster than he can think, is the engine of screwball comedy, the genre that made Depression-era audiences laugh at the rich and that still sets the standard for romantic comedy dialogue.

The term itself is usually traced to baseball, where a screwball is a pitch that breaks in an unexpected direction. It is a good image for films whose characters never go where you expect.

What makes a screwball comedy

There is no official checklist, and critics argue about which films belong. But most of the classic screwball comedies share a handful of traits.

• A battle of the sexes. The romance is fought out as a contest of wits, often between a man and a woman who start as adversaries.
• A dominant, unpredictable heroine. The woman usually sets the pace. She is impulsive, inventive and rarely punished for it.
• Class collision. Heiresses meet reporters, butlers turn out to be gentlemen, and the idle rich are shown as ridiculous without being hated.
• Speed. Overlapping dialogue, rapid entrances and exits, and plots that pile complication on complication.
• Remarriage and second chances. A striking number of these films are about divorced or separated couples who find their way back.
• Slapstick in evening wear. Pratfalls, torn clothes and broken furniture, performed by stars who look as though they have walked out of a fashion spread.

Why the genre appeared in the 1930s

Two historical pressures shaped it. The first was the Depression. Audiences liked films about the very rich, but they enjoyed those films most when the rich were shown as foolish and the characters with common sense were often the ones without money.

The second was the Production Code, enforced from July 1934. With frank sexual material ruled out, writers moved romantic tension into dialogue, physical comedy and situations of near-scandal that never quite tip over. If you are curious what came just before, my guide to pre-Code Hollywood covers those years. Screwball comedy flourished in exactly the space the Code left open: fast talk instead of explicit content, and the endless deferral of the obvious.

The essential screwball comedies

It Happened One Night (1934)

Often counted as the first screwball comedy, or at least the film that made the formula a hit. A runaway heiress and an out-of-work reporter travel together from Miami to New York by bus. Columbia was not a prestige studio, and the film was not expected to be a major success, but it became the first film to win all five of the top Academy Awards: Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay.

Twentieth Century (1934)

Released the same year, Hawks’s adaptation of the Hecht and MacArthur play pits John Barrymore, as a flamboyant Broadway producer, against Carole Lombard, as the unknown he turned into a star and who has since left him for Hollywood. Most of the action takes place on the train of the title. Barrymore goes gloriously over the top, and Lombard, in her first great comic role, keeps up with him.

My Man Godfrey (1936)

A scatterbrained socialite, played by Carole Lombard, picks up a “forgotten man” from a city dump during a scavenger hunt and hires him as the family butler. It became the first film nominated in all four acting categories, the year supporting awards were introduced, and its satire of a wealthy family coasting through the Depression is still sharp.

The Awful Truth (1937)

Cary Grant and Irene Dunne play a couple who divorce and then spend the film sabotaging each other’s new romances. Leo McCarey won the Academy Award for Best Director, and the film is the clearest example of the remarriage plot. It also helped turn Grant into the definitive screwball leading man.

Bringing Up Baby (1938)

Today it is the genre’s most famous title, but on release it did disappointing business and Hepburn’s career went through a difficult period afterward. Hawks keeps the pace almost unbearably fast, and the leopard, the dog and the missing bone are juggled with the precision of a farce on stage. It has since become one of the most admired comedies of the era, and Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc? (1972) was a deliberate homage.

Nothing Sacred (1937)

Ben Hecht’s script turns the genre toward black comedy. Fredric March plays a disgraced reporter who builds a newspaper crusade around a Vermont woman supposedly dying of radium poisoning, and Lombard plays the woman, who knows she is not dying and enjoys the trip to New York anyway. Produced by David O. Selznick in Technicolor, it is one of the few screwball comedies of the 1930s in color.

His Girl Friday (1940)

Hawks took Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s newspaper play The Front Page and turned the star reporter, Hildy Johnson, into a woman, the ex-wife of Grant’s scheming editor. The result is a romance as well as a newspaper satire, and the overlapping dialogue moves at a speed few films have matched since. Rosalind Russell gives one of the great comic performances of the decade.

The Lady Eve (1941)

Preston Sturges wrote and directed this story of a card sharp, played by Barbara Stanwyck, who targets a naive brewery heir, played by Henry Fonda, on an ocean liner, then falls for him. When he drops her, she comes back disguised as an English aristocrat to take her revenge. Sturges combines sophisticated dialogue with outright pratfalls, and Fonda’s repeated falls are a running gag that never stops being funny.

The Palm Beach Story (1942)

Sturges again, with Claudette Colbert as a wife who leaves her struggling inventor husband, played by Joel McCrea, to find a rich man who can finance his ideas. The film is close to the end of the classic cycle, and its sense of absurdity is pushed further than most of its predecessors.

The people who made it work

A few names come up again and again. Howard Hawks directed four of the films in the table and had a gift for pace. Preston Sturges went from writing Easy Living for Mitchell Leisen to directing his own scripts at Paramount. Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett wrote Midnight and Ball of Fire before Wilder became a director himself.

Among the stars, Cary Grant, Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, Irene Dunne, Jean Arthur and Barbara Stanwyck formed the core of the genre. Many of the actresses are profiled in my guide to old Hollywood actresses. William Powell, Fred MacMurray and Joel McCrea played the straight men who absorb the chaos.

Why the genre faded

By the mid-1940s the cycle had largely run its course. Wartime moods favored other kinds of entertainment, the fast-talking heiress began to feel dated, and Hollywood’s sense of humor shifted. Later comedies kept borrowing from the formula, from the Doris Day and Rock Hudson pictures of the late 1950s and 1960s to What’s Up, Doc?, but the original combination of Depression-era satire, Code-shaped indirection and a deep bench of studio contract players could not really be repeated.

If you are new to the genre, start with It Happened One Night for the foundation, then His Girl Friday for speed and The Lady Eve for sophistication. Watch at least one with an audience if you ever get the chance. These films were built for collective laughter, and you hear jokes in a full theater that you can miss at home.