Sense and Madness in Screwball Comedy

You can go back further if you like, notably to Ernst Lubitsch’s gorgeously immoral and sexy 'Trouble in Paradise', but 1934 is usually thought the first year of screwball comedy, with the release of 'It Happened One Night' and 'Twentieth Century'. For the next ten years Hollywood produced a dazzling succession of screwball comedies. This illustrated talk will explore their enduring appeal.

The finest screwball comedies get an edge and urgency from their situation in the aftermath of the Great Depression. The personal can’t help being political in these stories across wealth divides, often splicing a millionaire with a working girl or working guy.

For all the mayhem, these films engage seriously with contemporary America, mapping responsibilities in love onto a wider understanding of civic place. These are romantic stories that also take on the big issues of the day. Is the New Deal the right way to go? Are countrymen the salt of the earth or does city life make them look slow-witted? Are the rich heels? Are newspapermen skunks?

The films feel optimistic not just in comedy’s happy endings, but in the vitality of the contemporary world on display, with its grit and its wit and dynamism. The wisecracking minor characters, for instance, are often smart and resilient, queer and individual; they make you think well of America’s human resources.

They are stories, too, that get a buzz from the gender inequality of the day; women are up against it in social terms, but not so far under the patriarchal thumb that they can’t fight it out. Screwball women are seldom ladylike.

They often talk as fast as Groucho Marx, and the films are alive with fresh imaginations of adult relationships under a new banner of equality. They optimistically imagine that people can cope with being derailed in their love lives and that in fact they welcome their lives being turned upside down; screwball protagonists have a capacity to reflect and change.

Love feels like a moral challenge in these films as well as a call to trust your feelings.

Followed by a drinks reception.

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