In the second question, “Is childishness or adult behavior more acceptable?”, the screwball comedy undoubtedly opts for childishness. The antiheroes and heroines of a screwball comedy are necessarily childish. One way that this becomes apparent is in the relationship between the characters and their dogs in the movies. Gehring asserts that having a dog proves a childish quality within our antihero, but this alone seems invalid. It is not enough to say that having a dog makes someone a childlike adult, but rather the relationship with one’s pet and the behavior that it evokes exemplifies this childlike quality. For example in the “Awful Truth” when Jerry comes to visit Mr. Smith in Lucy’s apartment and Jerry begins playing the piano and singing with the dog, all of a sudden the view can observe “that it is not the dog itself (Creese)” that reinforces the antihero being childlike, but that the dog becomes an outlet for the immature behavior that the audience understands a responsible adult would never practice. In another prime example of this, the main characters in the self-same movie, during their divorce proceedings, have a fight over who should keep the dog. While this may not seem like an immature behavior at first, under closer scrutiny it becomes apparent that it truly is. An adult in that time would not fight over who got to keep the dog; their concern for children, assets, and other, more valuable, possessions would take precedence. In fighting over the dog, these “adults” seem nothing more than children pulling a rag doll between them, neither truly wanting it, but wanting to prove that it is theirs. Even their pleas to the judge seem childish. Jerry whines that he bought the dog, to which Lucy retorts that Mr. Smith likes her better and thus should stay with her. The entire seen is reminiscent of two children running to their mother and arguing with each other over who deserves the last ice cream more. They lack an essential adult quality: responsibility. Responsibility is something that the antihero and heroine lack, that every real adult embraces, and that every child fights to the end. They desire to always have fun and play games, avoiding doing work and meeting responsibilities, which impedes fulfillment as an adult and prolongs immaturity. Screwball comedy shows irreverence for love associated with childish. For instance, comments such as, “Stand still, Godfrey. It’ll all be over in a minute,” as Carole Lombard says to William Powell as their characters are about to be wed in My Man Godfrey demonstrates the ridiculousness and childishness of the upper classes. She seems almost his mother, chiding an impatient and antsy child, and neither of them seems to understand the gravity of their situation, a fact that would not escape the original viewers. It is almost as though they were children playing at getting married, not thinking about the fact that marriage comes with commitments and responsibilities.
Many times the adult thing to do is talk about your feelings, no matter how hard that is, and in Love Crazy, if Steve just told Susan exactly what happened at Isobel’s apartment and what they did, all the craziness could be avoided. Similarly, in The Awful Truth, if Jerry just told Lucy what he did in California and both discussed their strong doubts and feelings, they would have never jumped to erroneous conclusions as to each other’s faithfulness and ended up divorced. In His Girl Friday, if Walter just admitted that his love for Hildy was stronger than his love for his work, Hildy would never have left and they’d been together before the movie had even started. All their troubles could be avoided if they were just honest and spoke out about what went on inside them instead of playing such extravagant games and expecting themselves and others to jump through ridiculous hoops. “In the world of Screwball Comedy, such actions are triggered by an association with the freedom of childhood.” (Gehring, p.38) It is their inherent desire to be selfish that keeps them from doing the greater good. Childish behavior would coincide with Steve being impatient about getting his anniversary sex at the end of the night and therefore ruining the night by convincing Susan to do it in reverse, Jerry demanding answers about the Lucy’s relationship with her teacher but not feeling any responsibility for his actions in California, or Walter’s concern for making money and getting his girl but complete unconcern with the greater good of society or Hildy’s feelings. It can be seen that childishness is their inability to contain their composure and retain control over their own desires instead of letting their desires controlling them. Byrge and Miller compliment Gehring in his attempt to capture the characteristics that would describe a childlike nature to the Screwball comedy characters by describing them as, “The innocently aggressive, noisily silly, endearingly defiant, and happily destructive way that little children at play repeatedly disturb the peace and boredom of adults’ vain attempts at domestic tranquility” (2). This childishness and inability to accept adult life is one of the most marked elements of a screwball comedy.
Romantic comedies take the exact opposite approach to this question. Instead of reverting to childish antics, such as in a screwball comedy, they hold that adult behavior is a more desirable way to live by. Elements such as careers, morality, truth and the feelings of others play into the decision making. For instance, in My Best Friend’s Wedding, the heroine Julianne and her gay best friend lie on her bed and discuss the moral and ethical ramifications of stealing a groom from his bride and thus destroying another couple’s wedding in order to satisfy Julianne’s selfish desires. This kind of rational discourse is nonexistent in the screwball world. In fact, in the screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby, Grant must make the decision between a normal, safe relationship from which he is already committed to or the zany, unpredictable life with the comic anti-heroine. In the end, Grant drops his marriage commitment to the normal woman in favor of the screwball heroine. In a direct contrast, in the romantic comedy My Best Friend’s Wedding, Michael decides to stay true to his prior marriage commitment with his fiancée despite Julianne’s confession of love, breaking the screwball mold and making the obviously the more responsible course of action. However, even Julianne’s confession of love is a direct contrast to a screwball comedy’s course of action. In a screwball comedy, important issues are swept under the rug and are not discussed. An example of this is The Awful Truth, in which the issues in Jerry and Lucy’s marriage and their reasons for suspecting each other of infidelity are not truly discussed. Julianne’s profession of love to Michael, fruitless as it ends up being, is a much more adult response to an emotion than Lucy and Jerry’s reaction to their emotions. Another major difference is that within romantic comedies, the career and responsibilities play a major role in the lives of the characters. Everyone in the romantic comedy has a career and is actively involved within that career. However, in screwball movies such as The Thin Man, detective Powell is happy just spending his wife’s money and experiencing the most pleasure he can in his settled down state. At one point, everyone is enjoying cocktails at a party when the joyful singing on the radio is interrupted by a report describing a developing criminal investigation and Powell’s response is to turn it off saying “Does it always have to be business?” When confronted about the investigation by his friends his response is “I’m a gentleman now” implying his lack of concern for his responsibilities and career. However, in You’ve Got Mail, the hero and heroine clash over their businesses. Joe’s book “Superstore” threatens to destroy Kathleen’s smaller bookstore, and they clash continuously over their careers. This can be juxtaposed to The Awful Truth in which there is no attempt to establish an occupational cover for Cary Grant. In fact, there was a point in filming “When Cary came to that scene he stopped and laughed, ‘Where am I supposed to have gotten any money?’ He asked. ‘I never work, you never show me doing any sort of job’” (Gehring, 31). This is an obvious contrast to the fact that in a screwball comedy, the career of the main character is anything but important. The adult concerns of those in a romantic comedy are very different from the childish nature of the screwball comedies’ characters.
One of the most essential elements of the screwball comedy is satire, and this comes through heavily in the reversal of gender roles in screwball comedy. While in most films, the male pursues the female of his dreams and then controls the relationship, in the screwball genre, the roles flip. Gehring makes the point that the comic antihero suffers from basic male frustration (especially in relation to women), and thus, in the screwball marriage, the questioning of the conventional marriage becomes evident in the fact that, “The traditional hero can control his woman and doesn’t stick his neck out for no one” and the screwball male has an inability to control his wife, resulting in a true satire of a traditional marriage (Creese). For instance, in “Love Crazy” Steve Ireland desperately wants to make love to his wife on his anniversary and ignore everything else, but because of his inability to control the situation as a man in a traditionally portrayed marriage would, the entire situation becomes nothing more than a parody of marital conventions. He is weak and fleeting and does not at all fulfill the role of a conventional man. In another example of the reversal of gender roles, the conventional man, such as Ward “Manly Man” Willoughby, becomes irrelevant. While he does the right thing according to society, yet he is still always wrong. No one remembers his name and in the very end he gets locked up in the asylum with no one to save him. In a traditional film in which traditional marriage and gender roles were maintained, the husband would not be weak and the strong men in the film would end up well, not in a mental institution. The last questioning of conventional marriage comes in the form of a strong, assertive woman. All the power in the film lies with Susan, Steve’s wife. In a completely satiric reversal of roles, she is an uncontrollable force, and, rather than being passive in the stereotype of women at that time, she moves the entire story along by herself. Everything is done according to Susan’s word; she asks for the divorce, she hooks up with Ward, and she sends Steve to the insane asylum. Screwball comedy is entirely female driven, with an eccentric heroine saving an antiheroic leading man from a rigid lifestyle. A classic example is when Hepburn’s love rescues Grant from his mundane career and equally sterile fiancée in Bringing Up Baby. In addition, the inevitability of the screwball heroine’s victory is nicely summarized in Lady Eve, when Henry Fonda learns the moral of the screwball comedy: when you think, consider or try to understand, you lose. By considering the morality of being with Barbara Stanwyck, he ends up unhappy and sets himself into a wacky cascade of screwball moments brought about by our heroine’s thirst for revenge. Every time Fonda throws a quote such as “The difference between man and beast is the ability to understand,” he learns facts he didn’t want to know, such as how many men Stanwyck had been with before him. Fonda doesn’t truly learn his lesson until at the end where he finally says, “I don’t want to understand.” Still, the genre also has room for the antiheroic screwball heroine who wins despite herself. In Bringing Up Baby, Hepburn ruins Grant’s car, ruins his golf game, and loses his opportunity at getting the million dollars grant, and even destroys the brontosaurs exhibit (symbolically the last vestiges of his academic rigidity), but in the end Grant still falls in love with her. Eventually, she both loosens up the classically rigid male and frees him from a domineering, deadening fiancée. This female dominated relationship is not so apparent in romantic comedies
The screwball heroine has lost some of her allure. Sleepless in Seattle borrows from screwball comedy without really becoming a part of the screwball genre itself, because it lacks double entendres, fast talk, and the mock adultery. Despite having zany situations and a romantic plot, Sleepless in Seattle is an addition to the romantic comedy genre (Shumway). In contrast to the female driven relationships in a screwball comedy, the romantic comedy heroines are considerably less eccentric, as seen by the soon-to-be-married Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle. The heroines are often decidedly serious, unlike the screwball heroine, though, they are not subject to such zany events as having a net thrown over them. For instance, My Best Friend's Wedding starts off as traditional examples of the genre. In the 1930s the leading ladies of this picture would have broken up the wedding and saved her man from a life of boring rigidity, but in this film the man opts for the less flashy and eccentric fiancées. Instead of depicting her as a life-sucking drone, as a screwball comedy would have, these pictures portray her as safe and comfortable. Ultimately, the movie breaks with the screwball mold and essentially embraces romantic comedy. In today's truly life-on-the-edge existence, with new dangers from terrorist acts to AIDS, unpredictability is less appealing. Along related lines, just because a manic clown has a girlfriend does not make a picture a screwball comedy. All modern funny men have romantic interests. For instance, calling the modern comedy such as Adam Sandler in Happy Gilmore a screwball comedy would be like labeling Casablanca a musical because it has a lot of singing in it. Screwball comedy simply uses a strong eccentric heroine to parody the traditional romance genre, while a romantic comedy has a more typical male pursuing female feel to it. There is a last question to be answered when determining if a movie is a screwball or romantic comedy.
Screwball comedies are not slow movies; on the contrary, they are fast-paced and unrelenting. They go straight to the silly, taking no side roads or meandering digressions. In The Awful Truth, Jerry and Lucy’s marriage is over almost before the movie begins because Jerry accuses Lucy of sleeping with her French singing instructor and she accuses him of participating in less-than-wholesome activities in California and they are in the divorce court before the audience ever even gets to see them as a couple. They take no time in getting to the silly antics. For instance, My Man Godfrey begins with the rich sisters Irene and Cornelia taking part in a scavenger hunt in a Hooverville and the physical comedy starts right away when Cornelia is pushed into a pile of ashes by Godfrey. The antics don’t stop; their mother’s beau does an impression of a gorilla just to satisfy her need for amusement. His Girl Friday doesn’t tart with physical humor, but the entire first scene of the film is fast-paced. Hildy walks into Walter’s newspaper print to tell her ex-husband, Walter, that she is getting re-married. The dialogue is fast-paced and humorous, and Walter and Hildy’s argument once she reaches his office and tells him her news is comical and speedy.
Romantic comedies are, by comparison, slow. In all three movies, the characters are well-established and the movies don’t speed up just because the audience wants to know the ending. In Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, the lovers don’t even meet until the very end of the movie, and in My Best Friend’s Wedding, the movie builds until Julianne’s confession of love to Michael near the end of the film. The movies develop slowly, building characters and relationships and explaining the reasons behind each character’s actions. The viewer isn’t thrown into a story with no explanation; indeed, the viewer knows almost everything about the characters. In Sleepless in Seattle, we know Sam’s wife has died of cancer, his profession (architect), his son’s name, his lifestyle, and his emotional state even before his son makes the call to the radio station that begins the action of the film. This slower pace is a true digression from the fast-paced world of the screwball comedy.
While screwball comedies are often confused with romantic comedies, there is another genre of film that is often wrongly labeled screwball comedy: the populist film. Though there are many differences between the screwball film and the populist film, the main difference is the view of the rich and the common man in each genre. In a screwball comedy, though the rich are reckless and wild, they are typically portrayed as fairly harmless. They don’t truly hurt people, and are often benevolent. For instance, the Weenie King, a rich man, gives one of our heroines seven-hundred dollars in exchange for nothing but wholesome company. The screwball comedies poke fun at the average man and the cracker-barrel philosopher. For instance, in My Man Godfrey, which some may argue is a populist film, the home-town ordinary man can’t tame the well-to-do women. In fact, Irene saves him from himself through a screwball marriage indicated by Godfrey ignorance of the situation (Creese). The average man is shown as bumbling and unaware of his surrounding. No sort of whole-some values or virtues prevail; instead, Godfrey just accepts this all-pervasive craziness and our zany story ends on that silly note. However, populist films view the common man in a much different light.
Screwball has a primarily elitist overtone, in which the spoiled brats of the upper class mocked the populist cracker-barrel philosopher, went crazy and got away with everything and the populist genre which quickly became a clear off-shoot from the screwball where the populist cracker-barrel philosopher won out over the city, the rich, and authority. Jim Leach would say screwball comedy directors like Frank Capra’s shift their focus from the sexual to the social implications of the comedy and formed a new genre that would much better be described as populist. These populist films no longer focused on the zaniness and sexuality of the upper class, but on the goodness of the common man. In It Happened One Night we see glimpses of real American values, such as on the bus when everyone on the bus sings together and a spoiled brat is show to the light, ultimately learning the joys of being ordinary down-home folk. It is through moments of learning “the proper way to dunk a doughnut” and “how to properly hitchhike” that it becomes obvious that It Happen One Night is a populist movie because it holds out to real people as opposed to screwball comedies where it’s just all about having fun. Though these scenes are poking fun at the cracker-barrel philosopher because we know that there is no polite way to dunk a doughnut and nothing Peter does works because there is no real guide to hitchhiking, we see that they are examples of a good, honest, down-home working class lifestyle, which leads to Ellie losing her cynical attitude and falling in love with Peter and the idea of the working class lifestyle rather than going back to her old affluent life before. As Jim Leach put, “the only positive strategy in screwball comedy is to accept the all-pervasive craziness, the populist comedy argues that what society regards as crazy is really a manifestation of the normal human values with which society has lost touch.” In It Happened One Night Peter claims to be an expert on hitchhiking [cracker-barrel philosopher] but nothing he tries works, eventually out of frustration he ends up thumbing his nose at passing cars. Yet the sheltered Ellie then shows him how it's done. She stops the next car dead in its tracks by lifting up her skirt and showing off a shapely leg. This glorification of the ordinary is a key component in any populist film.
The screwball formula has changed markedly since the 1930s, the stories are slow to start and possess provocative conversation about morality and direct social commentary on political and societal issues. Today’s take on the genre might actually have gay characters, as in My Best Friend's Wedding, whereas a pioneering screwball comedy only teases about it, such as when a frilly night-gowned Cary Grant jumps in the air and yells, “I just went gay all of a sudden!” in Bringing Up Baby. However, whether screwball or romantic comedy, love invariably triumphs on the silver screen. Conventional marriage may be called into question or the role of men and women may be redefined, but the common motif that has seemed to always reign supreme among all others is love. The undeniable message in screwball, romantic and even populist films is that love will endure, that love will triumph over class, money, desire and any societal bounds. The genres will always be in a state of flux because American culture is forever changing, but the message as reflected by the past has and will probably always be the same.
Work Cited
Byrge, Duane, and Robert Milton Miller. The Screwball Comedy Films: A History and Filmography, 1934–1942. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1991.
Cavell, Stanley. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
Creese, Richard. “English Composition 3 Lectures on Screwball Comedy” UCLA College of Letters and Sciences
Gehring, Wes D. Romantic vs. Screwball Comedy: Charting the Difference. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002.
Leach, Jim. The Screwball Comedy. London: Wallflower Press, 2002.
Mast, Gerald. The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.
Shumway, David. Modern Love. New York University Press. 2003.
Sklar, Robert. Movie-Made America. Vintage, Rev Sub edition, 1994.
