Comedy is a very interesting genre in movies, it’s probably the most diverse and accessible variety of movies that can range from any age group and virtually any style. Think about it, you’ve got a comedy of manners, slapstick, screwball, parody, anarchy, fish out of water, gross out, black-comedy or romantic comedy, then you’ve got the limitless hybrid genres that allows comedy to integrate itself with virtually any kind of film such as action, horror, fantasy, drama or science fiction. Today most of these deviations of comedy are still alive and kicking in cinema today, some may not have their own genre anymore and are merely combined with other forms of humour but for the most part each aspect of that is still present in our modern movies.
However, some of the ones I listed appear to be completely dead and buried and would need a complete overhaul or a great comedic mind to bring them back. This is something I’m going to look at with these articles. The first one seems to be the screwball comedy. Early pioneers of cinema like Howard Hawks and Frank Capra shined in the genre, but today no one seems to make them anymore, the closest thing you’ll find is homage or an assimilated form. What happened?
The screwball genre is defined as being ‘fables of love masquerading as hostility’. Many have drawn parallels with film noir as well, except screwball distinguishes itself with a number of elements such as its comedic tone and its escapist and farcical themes. It’s also a reversal of the stereotypical positions of power put forward by gender roles and social classes. During the Great Depression, there was a general demand for films with a strong social class critique and hopeful, escapist-oriented themes.
All of this basically means that in screwball, the woman dominates the relationship. It challenges the masculinity of the man and makes way for a comedic battle of the sexes involving romance, courtship, bedroom farce and marriage. The question that one may ask here is, why mask those themes under a comedy or film-noir style, why not just make a drama involving them? Three reasons, one was that this was all taking place during the great depression and audiences wanted escapism, not heavy handed emotional rollercoasters. Secondly, women’s suffrage had ended and they now finally had the right to vote so someone immediately had the brilliant idea of capitalising on this by placing the women in their films in positions of power. Thirdly, you had the Hayes Code. This prohibited films touching on the subjects of violence, religion and especially sex. To incorporate the more risquĂ© elements of their films, studios used the genre as a disguise to appease the censorship boards.
How? They used the verbal sparring between two genders as a metaphor for the physical sexual tension between them, a sex comedy without the sex. It was subversive and superbly executed. As time went on though censors began to latch on to what these writers and studios were doing and tried to crack down on them, meaning that the creative minds behind the pictures had to think of increasingly inventive and ingenious ways of conveying innuendo and euphemism without the censors catching on. In other words the screwball writers always had to remain one step ahead of the censors while still making an artistically viable picture and ensuring that it would entertain audiences so it could generate a profit and allow them to do it all over again, talk about a busy workload.
So the style evolved and developed as any successful genre does. Perhaps the most successful screwball director was Ernst Lubitsch, who crafted many of the standouts of the genre such as ‘Trouble in Paradise’, ‘If I Had A Million’ and ‘That Uncertain Feeling’. Then you had ‘The Philadelphia Story’ or ‘Bringing Up Baby’ and ‘His Girl Friday’. Even legendary director Alfred Hitchcock dabbled in the screwball genre with ‘Mr and Mrs Smith’.
Then a new generation came to take up the genre and the biggest name of this screwball era was Billy Wilder. He basically built his early career off of this genre, especially with his very first American movie ‘The Major and the Minor’. This movie revolved around a young woman that quits her career to return home but only has enough oney for a child’s ticket and therefore does the logical thing of posing as a schoolgirl only to become entangled with a Major who is increasingly worried by his attraction to what he believes is a young schoolgirl. So as the word Major in the title takes on a different meaning you can already guess what its accompanying noun was referring to, let’s move on before this becomes any more awkward. Wilder even used screwball in his more dramatic work like ‘Sunset Boulevard’ in which a struggling screenwriter agrees to assist an aging actress get her career back on track.
Wilder then made a direct return to the genre in 1959 with ‘Some Like it Hot’, the greatest cross dressing film of all time (sorry ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show’). Named by the American Film Institute as the greatest comedy movie of all time and the quintessential screwball comedy, Wilder even set it twenty years ago during the thirties in order to make the environment more in tune with the screwball themes. Two musicians witness a gangland murder and must hide out by disguising themselves as women, though it pretends to have commentary on violence and greed, make no mistake, this movie is about sex. It’s only become more obvious as time goes on, becoming blatantly subversive (contradiction in terms) and starred the ultimate iconic sex symbol herself Marylyn Monroe. Trust me, watch the movie and make it a fun drinking game by taking a shot with every euphemism and innuendo you see.
So with the genre this successful, why did it die? Simply because as Bob Dylanput it the next decade, the times they are a changin’. Censorship in movies is a thing of the past by the time the 1960s roll around and now filmmakers don’t need to disguise the sexual tension in their movies, they can just outright show it. Nothing was off limits any more, with rating systems it meant that appropriate audiences could see appropriate films so there was no need to have a sex comedy without sex. So the screwball comedy is well and truly dead.
That’s not to say that the genre is completely buried. There are still various homages and tributes to the type, the work of Billy Wilder can still be watched and appreciated today and most of the individual artistic choices are still being used today in some form. The genre died out not because audiences grew board with it or the quality began to dip, but the change in cinematic society rendered it irrelevant.
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