American Film Comedy

1. American Film Comedy Screwball Comedies of the 1930s

2. Themes • Comic 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.

3. Themes, continued • Comic 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.

4. Silent Era • Charlie Chaplin: “Little Tramp” character at odds with machines, authority. • Buster Keaton: deadpan features and inventive response to change. • Harold Lloyd: the middle-class striver who never gives up; anxiety about fitting in.

5. Screwball Comedy • Screwball 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.

6. Screwball Comedy, continued • Goal: 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

7. Screwball Comedy, Continued • 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.

8. Conventions of Screwball Comedy • Post-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)

9. Settings • Contemporary, often settings of wealth: ocean liners, country clubs, luxurious homes • Often a movement from urban setting to the country (like Shakespeare’s “green world” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) • Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda, The Lady Eve (1941)

10. Settings, Continued • Often a movement from the world of one protagonist to the other, which causes a movement between classes as well. • Stanley Cavell: screwball comedies often are set in Connecticut. • Settings sometimes incorporate the innocence of childhood: a playroom, a toy store, an attic with children’s toys.

11. Other Conventions • Cross-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

12. Other Conventions, continued • Comic 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

13. Other Coventions, continued • A 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