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.