In baseball a screwball is a pitch that moves in the opposite direction of a curveball; in film a screwball is a character who acts unpredictably. The term was first used by movie critics to describe Carole Lombard’s portrayal in My Man Godfrey (1936) of the airheaded heiress Irene Bullock, who thinks that being carried into a bathroom and forced under a running shower is a sign of love. The “screwball” label was in vogue from 1936 to 1938 and, according to the scholar Jane Greene, “often held a negative connotation” of “failed attempts to make up for a lack of clever dialogue and plotting.” Reviewers who called Bringing Up Baby (1938) screwball did so in a spirit of exasperation at antics such as chasing leopards around the woods of Connecticut.
When the term was resurrected in later decades, it had become a mark of quality describing films—The Awful Truth (1937), His Girl Friday (1940), The Lady Eve (1941)—that felt fresher than other comedies from Hollywood’s golden age. A number of common traits were agreed on: prominent romantic relationships treated unsentimentally and humorously, time of production (between 1934 and the early-to-mid-1940s), setting (contemporary, almost always urban and upper-class), defiant female leads, farcical plotlines, and a fast-paced mix of physical and verbal gags.
One of the strengths of Hollywood Screwball Comedy, 1934–1945 is that it clarifies the effects of censorship on the development of the genre. In 1934 the studios, prompted by backlash to Mae West’s salacious films, implemented the Motion Picture Production Code, which was enforced by the Production Code Administration (PCA). The PCA sought to minimize explicit treatment of sexual themes, and its censors scoured scripts for offensive language and gestures. The critic Andrew Sarris, who called the screwball genre “the sex comedy without sex,” imagined the dilemma filmmakers faced:
Here we have all these beautiful people with nothing to do. Let us invent some substitutes for sex. The wisecracks multiply beyond measure, and when the audiences tire of verbal sublimation, the performers do cartwheels and pratfalls and funny expressions.
Wit and physical confrontation became the chaste manifestations of desire.