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Quick-Witted Eccentrics: The Genre and Genders of Screwball Comedy

2024; European Association for American Studies; Volume: 19-3; Linguagem: Inglês

10.4000/12avh

1991-9336

Magda Majewska,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Focusing on the type of funny woman that came to life in the Hollywood screwball comedy genre of the 1930s and 1940s, this article explores the intersections of genre and gender. The particular type of female comedic performance associated with the screwball comedy is characterized by an accelerated speed of dialogue, in which the woman demonstrates rhetorical skill, wit, and quick intelligence, as well as eccentric behavior that leads to comical situations. By taking a closer look at specific scenes from canonical screwball comedies, such as Bringing Up Baby, The Lady Eve, and His Girl Friday, as well as less widely known films, such as Four’s a Crowd and Take a Letter, Darling, the article demonstrates how the comic effect stems from the incongruity between the woman’s gender performance and conventional scripts of femininity, without however making the woman the object of the joke. Instead, the woman’s actions serve as the motor of the comic by radically disrupting the man’s sense of authority and the patriarchal order, by extension. The article argues that by featuring women as agents who disrupt the established or conventional order of things, the screwball comedy genre makes possible the emergence of a new way (or ways) of inhabiting femininity.