American Film Comedy

American Film ComedyScrewball Comedies of the 1930sScrewball ThemesComic 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.

Screwball Themes, continuedComic 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.

Silent Era Comedy of the UnderdogsThe 3 Masters of Silent Comedy

Charlie Chaplin: Little Tramp character at odds with authority, class systems; the little immigrant triumphs and assimilates in the end.

Buster Keaton: the little man strives to assimilate; in Keaton, the entire universe seems to challenge him, not just people and society (he fights a hurricane in the short film One Week and Steamboat Bill, Jr..

Harold Lloyd: the middle-class striver who never gives up; anxiety about his social status in capitalistic culture. Screwball ComedyScrewball 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.

From Wes D. Gehring5Screwball ComedyGoal: 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. Directed by Gregory La Cava.

p. 1846Ball of Fire (1941) with Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper. Directed by Howard Hawks. 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.

Conventions of Screwball ComedyPost-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)SettingsContemporary, often settings of wealth: ocean liners, country clubs, luxurious homes

Often a movement from urban setting to the country (like Shakespeares green world in A Midsummer Nights Dream)

Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda, The Lady Eve (1941). Directed by Preston Sturges.

Settings, ContinuedOften a movement from the world of one protagonist to the other, which causes a movement between classes as well.

Settings sometimes incorporate the innocence of childhood: a playroom, a toy store, an attic with childrens toys.

Other ConventionsCross-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. Directed by Howard Hawks.

Other Conventions, continuedComic 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. Directed by Frank Capra.

Other Conventions, continuedA 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. Directed by Howard Hawks.