What makes a screwball comedy?
The Angel Next Door is a romantic screwball comedy based on Ferenc Molnar’s A Play at the Castle. But what makes a play a “screwball” comedy? The term has been around since the early 1930s when this style of comedy became popular during the Great Depression. Explore the genre with this fabulous excerpt from Cine Collage:
The word screwball denotes lunacy, craziness, eccentricity, ridiculousness, and erratic behavior. Screwball comedies combine farce, slapstick, and the witty dialogue of more sophisticated films. In general, they are light-hearted, frothy, often sophisticated, romantic stories, usually 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, 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.
Characteristics
In screwball comedy, the romantic couple at the center of the story are eccentrics, often portrayed through slapstick. The films are usually set among wealthy people who can, despite the hardships of the Depression, afford to behave oddly. 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. However, after a twisting and turning plot, romantic love usually triumphs
Like farce, screwball comedies often involve mistaken identities or other circumstances in which a character or characters try to keep some important fact a secret. They also involve a central romantic story, usually in which the couple seem mismatched and even hostile to each other at first, and “meet cute” in some way.
Another common element is fast-talking, witty repartee (You Can’t Take it With You, His Girl Friday). This stylistic device did not originate in the screwballs (although it may be argued to have reached its zenith there): it can also be found in many of the old Hollywood cycles including the gangster film, romantic comedies, and others.
Screwball comedies also tend to contain ridiculous, farcical situations, such as in Bringing Up Baby, in which a couple must take care of a pet leopard during much of the film. Slapstick elements are also frequently present (such as the numerous pratfalls Henry Fonda takes in The Lady Eve).
Romantic comedy VS A Screwball
Screwball comedy is often confused with romantic comedy, but while the two genres share some elements, screwball comedy is a parody of romantic comedy. Romantic comedy’s earnestness regarding love, as found in the impassioned conclusions of When Harry Met Sally … (1989) and As Good As It Gets (1997), is entirely absent from screwball comedy. Such sentiments would immediately be subject to satirical rebuke. For example, in the screwball What’s Up, Doc?, the traditional love interest (Madeline Kahn) observes, “As the years go by, romance fades, and something else takes its place. Do you know what that is?” The devastatingly funny put-down from her fiancé (Ryan O’Neal, star of the earlier Love Story (1970), no less), is “Senility.” The screwball genre always accents the silly over the sentimental.
Avoiding serious and/or melodramatic overtones, screwball comedy instead shows irreverence for love and an assortment of other topics, including itself. The crazy characters of screwball comedies contrast sharply with their realistic romantic counterparts.
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, screwball comedy’s normally quick pacing escalates even more near the finale.
Interested in taking a deeper dive into the subject? Explore CineCollege’s full blog post here for a list of examples, and an exploration of the screwball comedy genre!
cinecollage.net/screwball-comedy.html
