Screwballs of the silver screen: a treasured comedy genre turns 70: the 1934 releases of "It Happened One Night" and "Twentieth Century" launched Hollywood into an era of madcap zaniness that endures to this day.

• Author: Gehring, Wes D.
• Position: Entertainment - Critical Essay

SCREWBALL COMEDY turns 70 this year. While clown comedy has existed since the earliest days of cinema, the screwball variety arose during the Great Depression. One might liken it to an innovative brand of farce, where the old boy-meets-girl formula was turned on its ear, producing free-spirited heroines who gave as good as they got.

The pioneering screwball movies from 1934 were director Frank Capra's "It Happened One Night" and Howard Hawks' "Twentieth Century." The former chronicles the comic misadventures of Claudette Colbert as a runaway heiress and Clark Gable as a wise-cracking reporter who battle themselves into an unexpected romance. "Twentieth Century" also is a picaresque picture, with a flamboyant Broadway producer (John Barrymore) attempting to convince a former protege/lover (Carole Lombard) to star in his next play as they cross America on the famous train Twentieth Century Limited.

These two movies, and screwball comedy in general, were predicated upon several developments then taking place in 1930s America. First, the genre was tied to a period of transition in American humor that had gained great momentum by 1934. The dominant comedy character type had been the capable crackerbarrel folk hero of Will Rogers; it now became an antihero best exemplified by The New Yorker writing of Robert Benchley and James Thurber, or by the film short subjects of Leo McCarey's Laurel and Hardy. Screwball comedy traded upon this antiheroic element, such as the ritualistic humiliation of the male, be it Gable's inability to make his hitchhiking techniques work, or the extremes to which Barrymore will go to raise money for a play. The screwball approach dressed up the surroundings and added beautiful people, but this was more a reflection of the need to mass market feature films than a substantive difference from Benchley and Thurber, or Laurel and Hardy. The zany outcome essentially was the same--an eccentrically comic battle of the sexes.

There is no easy explanation as to why the transition from capable to incompetent comic hero took place. Yet, if one were attempted, it probably would focus on an issue of socio-economics--the Depression. In a world that seemed more irrational by the day, the antihero suddenly was more relevant than the omniscient philosopher type.

A second period characteristic was the proclivity of screwball comedy to embrace the Depression-era fascination with the upper classes. Escapism by movie audiences hardly is...