A Brief History Of The Screwball Comedy, A Micro-Genre Hollywood Spun Out Of Control

In 1938, at the height of the screwball comedy’s popularity, Katharine Hepburn palled around with a colossal cat in “Bringing Up Baby.” She needed to deliver the leopard to her aunt in the Connecticut countryside, so she dragged a docile paleontologist with her, thinking he was a zoologist (and hoping to bang him, because he was portrayed by Cary Grant). A cycle of mishaps and ludicrous misunderstandings followed: The pair landed in jail, fended off a second leopard, chased after a troublemaking terrier, dismantled a collection of dinosaur fossils and broke up the paleontologist’s engagement so they could be together ― all in less than two hours’ runtime.

We tend to think of the screwball as a relic of Hollywood’s Golden Age, specifically the Depression-era ’30s and ’40s, when romantic comedies blended the silent era’s slapstick bombast with breakneck repartee and ever-escalating plots that would be at home in action movies.


Source : huffingtonpost