Screwball Comedy



No, this doesn't mean what you think.

The Screwball Comedy has a pretty precise definition: a comedy film -- usually in black and white, although some were made in color -- in which an uptight, repressed, or otherwise stiff character gets broken out of his or her shell by being romantically pursued by a Cloudcuckoolander (or a similar character type). It does not just mean "zany comedy." The Producers, say, is not a screwball comedy, although it is screwy, ballsy, and very funny. It is characterized by fast-paced repartee, farcical situations, escapist themes, and plot lines involving courtship and marriage and showing the struggle between economic classes.

In other words, a Parody of a Romantic Comedy.

Classic screwball comedy examples include (period 1934-1944):

 * The Awful Truth
 * Bachelor Mother
 * Ball of Fire
 * Bringing Up Baby
 * Dinner At Eight
 * Easy Living
 * Holiday
 * It Happened One Night
 * Its a Wonderful World (the film - page at the moment redirects to The World Ends With You)
 * It Started With Eve
 * His Girl Friday (A remake of the play/movie The Front Page)
 * The Lady Eve
 * Libeled Lady
 * Midnight
 * Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
 * My Favorite Wife
 * My Man Godfrey
 * Nothing Sacred
 * The Palm Beach Story
 * The Philadelphia Story
 * To Be or Not to Be
 * Top Hat
 * Topper, followed by two sequels. Based on two novels by Thorne Smith, who also wrote the book on which I Married A Witch is based.
 * Twentieth Century
 * You Can't Take It With You

Later and modern examples of screwball comedy include:
 * I Was a Male War Bride
 * What's Up, Doc?: Peter Bogdanovich's Homage to the genre
 * Switching Channels: A remake of His Girl Friday (which as noted above was a remake of The Front Page).
 * The Hudsucker Proxy: Another homage, written and directed by The Coen Brothers
 * Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day: A modern Pastiche of the genre
 * Arthur is about equal parts PG Wodehouse pastiche and screwball pastiche.
 * Oscar
 * Date Night
 * After Hours and Something Wild can be seen as darkly postmodern '80s variations of the genre.
 * The Runaway Bride
 * Conversely, the 1928 silent Marion Davies comedy The Patsy can be regarded as a sort of very early prototype for the genre.
 * Ticktock, a horror novel by Dean Koontz, is deliberately written as a Screwball Comedy.
 * Dharma and Greg
 * House Sitter
 * Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle is a non-romantic version, in which uptight, nervous Harold gets broken out of his shell by laid-back Kumar. And there's a big cat and everything.