Screwball Comedy

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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.

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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.