1With the emergence of the Hollywood screwball comedy genre in the early 1930s, a particular kind of funny woman entered the popular imagination: a woman whose sense of humor revealed itself as much in the verbal sophistications of wit as in a playful attunement to the comical as found in a given situation. If I use the singular here, it is to stress the generic element within individual instantiations of funny women across screwball comedies made in the 1930s and 1940s. The combination of the actors’ off-screen personae and the characters they played coalesced into a style of inhabiting femininity that allowed for being funny without being the object of the joke. The women played by Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, Myrna Loy, Barbara Stanwyck, Rosalind Russell, and Katherine Hepburn are at once quick-witted and eccentric. They are as much inclined to engage in verbal banter as to turn an ostensibly serious situation into a comedic one by interacting with their environment in unexpected or highly unconventional ways.

2Their wit and their sense of the comic are brought to the fore above all through their interactions with the opposite sex and are thus crucial components of the screwball comedy’s staging of the so-called battle of the sexes. The most characteristic feature of this type of romantic comedy is a fast-paced, witty dialogue in which a woman and a man exchange verbal punches (Glitre 9-41; Schatz 150-184). If this battle is ultimately fought over the terms of a heterosexual partnership, it involves the upsetting of a social order that by default grants men authority in handling words and situations alike. Thus, as I will demonstrate in this article, women protagonists—the eponymous “screwballs” of the genre (cf. Glitre 25-26)—function as active agents who set the comedic plot in motion by spinning the words of their male counterparts and turning their world upside down. In making this argument, I follow the incongruity theory of humor, according to which comic effects stem from the violation of expectations grounded in conventions or standard patterns of perception (cf. Morreall 8). The funny woman of the screwball comedy is the agent who disrupts the conventional order of things by playing with the expectations of how gender is to be performed.

1. Screwball Comedy and the Creation of a New Woman

3My discussion of funny women in screwball comedies takes inspiration from Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness (1981), whose philosophical reflections on the films he calls “comedies of remarriage”—a subset of the genre—offer points of departure for exploring the issues of interest here. Writing about screwball comedies, Cavell proposes that the genre partakes in the “creation of a new woman, or the new creation of a woman” (16). For Cavell, the films, made at a period of time not long after women had been granted the right to vote in 1920, are about the consciousness of a new woman in the sense that women have a new consciousness, men have to develop a new consciousness of women and that there is a new consciousness regarding women in society at large. Thus, according to Cavell, by negotiating the new role of women in American society, this period of Hollywood cinema bridges the first and the second wave of feminism and in this sense can provide data for the “inner agenda of a culture” (17). As many critics have noted, film genres are collective texts, shaped by “the interaction of artists, audience, and society” (Grindon 69; cf. Cawelti). This is particularly true for Hollywood genres in the heyday of the studio era, which were, as Thomas Schatz points out, “produced and consumed collectively” at a time when films were the most popular form of entertainment (12).

5Just as much as the actors portrayed a new kind of woman, they also embodied it. Each of the women actors who repeatedly starred in screwball comedies left their own imprint on the genre by giving a particular nuance to their performance of gender. Both Rosalind Russell and Katharine Hepburn, for example, combine physical agility with verbal quickness, as DiBattista points out. Hepburn often brings athletic skills (Bringing Up Baby, Pat and Mike) and upper-class sophistication (Bringing Up Baby, Philadelphia Story, Woman of the Year) to her roles. Russell’s height and strong build (sometimes accentuated by high hats and voluminous garments) allow her to visually dominate the screen as her characters assert themselves in male dominated professional milieus. Many comedies, such as Four’s A Crowd, His Girl Friday or Take A Letter, Darling introduce Russell’s character by showing her confidently walking up to and then entering a room to confront a man. Such elements of the actors’ gendered performances are at once part of their individual signature and of the genre’s signature type of a woman protagonist.

6As Lauren Berlant proposes in The Female Complaint, “femininity” itself can be understood as a genre in the sense of “an aesthetic structure of affective expectation” (3). The term “structure” needs to be understood both in the sense of a regulatory principle that renders individual performances as either intelligible or unintelligible and as something that does not exist independently of individual instantiations. Thus, gender performances can be unintelligible or cause irritations if they violate such expectations, and, as I will show later, within the diegesis of the screwball comedies, this is indeed the case. However, inasmuch as popular genres play an important cultural role in mediating conventions of femininity, one could say, following Berlant, that the genre of the screwball comedy responded to a need of coming to terms with new roles for women within American society by instantiating a new genre of femininity and allowing it to enter the cultural imaginary.

2. Romance as Comedy

7Screwball comedies belong to the larger category of romantic comedy (cf. Cavell; Glitre 24-33; Schatz; Grindon). The heroine’s doings—provocative or eccentric as they might be—are set largely within a (heterosexual) love plot that concludes in marriage or the prospect of marriage. As Glitre convincingly points out, however, the happy ending is “determined by generic convention rather than narrative logic” (16). It is, as Glitre puts it, “unavoidable” rather than “inevitable” (16; cf. MacDowell 1-16). Concurring with the romantic comedy convention that romance itself leads to comical situations, in screwball comedies the most striking instances of wit and the most inspired moments of fun on the woman’s part are integral to her pursuit of a viable partner.

8In many screwball comedies, it is the woman who actively pursues the man of her choosing, albeit decidedly not by adhering to any traditional scripts regulating either courtship or “femininity.” As DiBattista writes, “[t]he conventions of screwball comedy permit, when they do not outright ordain, the most outlandish postures and unrefined gestures” (277). In The Lady Eve, Barbara Stanwyck throws an apple on Henry Fonda’s head the moment she sees him; in Bringing Up Baby, Katharine Hepburn takes hold of Cary Grant’s golf ball. Both actions mark the beginning of a series of actions that disrupt the man’s sense of control. I suggest that in screwball comedies this element of disruption is central to both the comical effect and to the workings of the romantic plot.

9One of the romance plot’s most essential features is that the man has to prove a fit companion for the heroine by undergoing a process of transformation that eventually sets the partners on equal footing. Speaking of Henry Fonda’s character in The Lady Eve, Cavell remarks that “he must show that he is not attempting to command but that he is able to wish, and consequently to make a fool of himself” (32). Of course, in The Lady Eve, Henry Fonda’s Charlie is assigned the role of “a fool” from the beginning of the film, as Barbara Stanwyck’s Jean persistently has the upper hand. In a way typical of the screwball comedy genre, the female protagonist here is a worldly, sophisticated woman whose wit surpasses that of the man. While in most screwball comedies the women are always one step ahead of the men, Stanwyck’s Jean, a card trick player and a con artist, is even more so. Charlie’s foolishness consists not only in believing himself in command where he is not—for example by not understanding that he is not courting, but is being seduced—but, more importantly, he fails to recognize, after he and Jean have fallen in love, that there is no essential difference between the “good girl” (respectable heiress) he took her for and the “bad girl” (con artist) he finds her out to be. In other words, he fails to see Jean apart from the categories he has learned to apply to women, making his love dependent on the category she falls into. For Charlie to fully realize his foolishness, Jean must first teach him a lesson by making him fall for her again (barely) disguised as another rich heiress—the Lady Eve of the film’s title—only to disappoint his assumption that the designation “lady” guarantees sexual propriety. Not until Charlie’s pretentions to command the rules that apply to courtship and women collapse can he and Jean reunite.

10The requirement that the man is ready to make a fool of himself applies to screwball comedies more generally. Beyond the willingness to lose control or to risk embarrassment that is integral to romantic love, the logic of the films demands that the man lose the stability of the position granted him on account of his gender. Screwball comedies often achieve this symbolically—and comically—by making the man literally (and repeatedly) trip and fall. In The Lady Eve, Barbara Stanwyck’s character Jean makes Henry Fonda’s Charlie trip over her extended leg, thus initiating their first meeting, but he will fall numerous other times in the course of the movie. Becoming a fool is not least predicated upon the man stepping out of his comfort zone and adapting to the woman’s sense of adventure and fun.

11Speaking of the films he calls “comedies of remarriage,” Cavell suggests that in each of them the woman “is who she is in part because of her sense of fun” (60). Since this is also what draws the man to her, “[t]he question becomes what the conditions are—and first the requirements upon the man—under which that sense of fun can be exercised. So the conditions of the comic become the question of our genre of comedy” (60). This last remark indicates that screwball comedies self-consciously address the question of the “conditions of the comic” that are essential to the genre. Cavell’s own discussion of the films in question centers on their participation in the genre of comedy (particularly the comedies of Shakespeare) rather than on the notion of the comic as such. Indeed, as Ledger Grindon remarks, much scholarship on romantic comedy neglects the role of humor (70). However, inasmuch as the films fabricate comical situations, the question of the comic itself is central to understanding them. How do screwball comedies stage interactions between a man and a woman so that they become a source of the comic? If we take to heart the insight that in this genre the comic and the woman’s sense of fun are intricately linked, the question can be sharpened as follows: How are comical situations constructed so as to allow the woman to exercise her sense of fun rather than being made fun of?

3. Comical Situations

12Taking up the point made earlier that the main comical element in screwball comedies consists in the woman’s ability to turn the man’s world upside-down, I propose that the woman’s sense of fun and the funny are bound up with her enjoyment of the impact her actions have upon a world that assigns interpretative power and competency in handling situations to men. The comedic scenes are constructed in such a way that the viewers share in this enjoyment. Moreover, the woman’s gender performance—by seeming odd or eccentric from a conventional or traditional viewpoint—serves as the motor of the comic in that it relies on a sense of incongruity (cf. Morreall). Though on the diegetic level the woman may be perceived as acting “funny,” “crazy” or “odd,” within the narrative and comical logic of the film, the joke is ultimately on the man and by extension on the patriarchal order he initially stands for.

13I would like to develop this point by focusing on several examples, starting with a scene from Bringing Up Baby that shows the first encounter between David, played by Cary Grant, and Susan, played by Katherine Hepburn (00:05:11 – 00:08:22). She is the heiress to a great fortune; he is a paleontologist about to assemble the skeleton of a dinosaur and in desperate need of funding. They first meet on a golf course, where she seizes his golf ball and acts as if it were hers. As she determinedly walks to the next hole, hardly looking at him, he runs along, offering seemingly irrefutable logic in support of his claim to the ball: “I’m trying to prove to you that you are playing my ball. You see, a PGA has two black dots and a Crow Flight has a circle.” Unimpressed, and, again, not looking at him, Susan responds, “I’m not superstitious about things like that,” and adds, in a manner at once self-assured and slightly amused, “[w]hat does it matter, it’s only a game anyway.” Shortly afterwards, Susan is behind the wheel of Walter’s car, attempting to drive out of the parking lot, damaging his and other cars in the process. After some back and forth, Walter frantically exclaims: “This is my car!,” to which she responds in a mocking tone: “You mean this is your car?.… Your golf ball. Your car. Is there anything in this world that does not belong to you?”

14Initially, viewers may be inclined to perceive Susan as oblivious or absent-minded at best and as displaying a sense of entitlement at worst. And yet, within the logic of the scene, it is not Susan who is the object of the joke (or ridicule) but rather David, even though measured by standards of common sense his behavior is quite rational. Nevertheless, confronted with Susan’s propensity for playing with words and switching registers, his responses—fixated on the factual and the proper—seem rather inadequate. The full meaning of Susan’s words escapes David, but not the audience. Her apparent absent-mindedness notwithstanding, we may come to the conclusion that there is a method to Susan’s absurdity in that it aims at subverting a symbolic order in which not only golf balls and cars have their assigned proper place but also women.

15In the course of the film more things and creatures will be misplaced, of course, due to Susan’s disregard for the rules of conduct that would ensure their proper placement. This includes the bone of a Brontosaurus (the missing piece necessary to complete the reconstruction of the skeleton) as well as a leopard sent to Susan by mistake by her brother: both get lost in the green landscape of Connecticut. The series of misplaced things also includes the sentences spoken by a psychiatrist Susan accidentally meets in a restaurant. They were spoken with the intention to offer professional expertise, but Susan drives them out of context until they seem to hang mid-air and become quite nonsensical. It includes even David himself, who embarks on the mission of catching a leopard in Connecticut rather than assuming his assigned place at the side of his fiancée. The series of events instigated by Susan (both willingly and unwillingly, it seems) turn David’s world upside down, jeopardizing his career, forestalling his plans of marriage, and making him question his sanity. Their final embrace literally brings the dinosaur skeleton meticulously assembled by David to fall.

16The comic moments in Bringing Up Baby stem above all from the confrontation between Susan’s seemingly erratic behavior and David’s as well as other male characters’ seemingly rational course of action. It is, however, not Susan whom we laugh at but rather the rigidity with which her male counterpart sticks to his perception of what’s rational. Her unconventional behavior gives rise to comical situations because by insisting on their version of reality (that is, on their version of probability, of how events hang together) the men confronted with her cannot accommodate her actions and her way of reasoning into their world.

17If we follow the insights of Henri Bergson on the nature of the comic outlined in his famous essay on laughter, where he asserts that the chief source of the comic is “something mechanical encrusted upon the living” (49), including a perceived inelasticity in a person’s behavior, we may attribute the comic effect of the situations that Susan provokes to the inflexibility and rigidity of the men. Susan is the agent that sets a series of unpredicted events in motion while behaving as if she were perfectly rational. Every one of her actions subverts what the men perceive to be the rational order of events, leaving them utterly confused and helpless. Thus, rather than laughing at Susan, I suggest that we laugh at the rigidity of the man that is exposed in such situations.

18Bergson’s perspective can be integrated into the more widely shared notion of the comic as an effect of incongruity (cf. Morreall; Berlant and Ngai 233-234). Situations such as the one from Bringing Up Baby rely on the comic effect produced by the incongruity between the men’s assumption that their notion of predictability, rationality, propriety, or expertise be confirmed and the chaos that they are thrown into. In the course of the film, Cary Grant repeatedly voices what we may call the “male complaint”: the complaint that the woman is irrational. He says as much when, in midst of a confusion over a misplaced handbag, he cries out in exasperation, “No, no, my dear sir, it never will be clear as long as she’s explaining it” (14:30-14:35). But being irrational in the world of the screwball comedy comes down to a woman acting according to her own agenda, which just happens not to fit into the male universe. When Susan, after having taken possession of Walter’s golf ball and then his car, responds to his protest: “Your golf-ball, your car. Is there anything in the world that does not belong to you?,” she is of course wrong in the particular sense but right in the more general sense, and it is through this discrepancy between the man’s sense of entitlement and righteousness and Susan’s playfully destabilizing force that the joke is ultimately on him and by extension on the patriarchal order.

19Hepburn’s character Susan Vance surpasses all other screwball heroines in her capability to produce chaos wherever she goes (with the exception perhaps of Carol Lombard in My Man Godfrey). This is often the outcome of her acting out of a state of absent-mindedness. Bergson uses the term absent-mindedness in an analogous sense to inelasticity (9). Here, however, this absent-mindedness serves subversive purposes. Susan defies social conventions, and, in specific situations, her actions and reasoning violate what counts as rationality. At the same time, Hepburn’s delivery of her lines allows viewers to perceive Susan as at once wholly oblivious of, indifferent to, and deriving pleasure from the befuddlement she produces. Susan’s kind of absent-mindedness is characteristic of one variant of the screwball heroine portrayed by Hepburn in movies such as The Philadelphia Story or Holiday, namely the heiress. As DiBattista describes this type, the heiress as comic heroine is a woman to whom all pleasures are socially and financially available (23). She can therefore use her socially privileged position to disrupt the power dynamic inherent in gender relations (cf. Glitre 25).

20But Hepburn played also a different brand of the screwball heroine—the professional woman working in a milieu dominated by men (a lawyer in Adam’s Rib, a journalist in Woman of the Year, and a professional athlete in Pat and Mike). While both the heiress and the professional woman share common features, such as resourcefulness, quick wit, and verbal dexterity, the second type of the screwball heroine is a woman whose role as a destabilizer of the gender dynamic subtending the social order lies in her competence and professional skill. I suggest that the refusal to assume a “proper,” that is already assigned, place within the symbolic order might register as eccentricity even in the case of protagonists who are representing common sense—or a hands-on competence—in the films.

4. The Eccentricity of Competence

21Screwball heroines are eccentric not just by deviating from conventional scripts of conduct in particularly odd or whimsical ways but also by deviating from the conventional scripts for proper gender performance (by not following the established pattern or style). The star repeatedly portraying the professional type was Rosalind Russell, who impersonated company executives (This Thing Called Love, Take A Letter, Darling), a federal judge (Design For Scandal), and journalists (Four’s A Crowd, His Girl), among others. Russell plays women who are accomplished, self-confident, and successful in business, never short of words, nor easily impressed by whatever their male counterpart has to offer. Russell’s most iconic role is journalist Hildy Johnson in Howard Hawke’s His Girl Friday, “the fastest of the fast-talking dames of American screen comedy” (DiBattista 269).

22In one of the opening scenes of the film, she steps into the office of her ex-husband and editor-in-chief of the newspaper she works for (Cary Grant) to announce that she is going to remarry and to quit her job (00:11:50 – 00:12:56). He urges her not to quit the newspaper business by reminding her: “You’re a newspaperman!” The designation “newspaperman” is clearly at odds with the fact that Hildy is a “woman.” At first, this might be taken as a joke about a woman’s pretense to be men’s equal in a “male” profession. But Hildy’s response rules that out: “That’s why I’m quitting. I want to go someplace where I can be a woman.” We may take this to mean that she readily accepts “newspaperman” as a category that fits her (which is supported by the further course of events) but that being a professional in a man’s world is at odds with the conventional implications of the category “woman,” such as motherhood and domesticity.

23Part of this scene’s joke is the film’s self-referential comment on the fact that in the Broadway play The Front Page (1928) by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur that Hawkes based his script on, Hildy (Hildebrand) Johnson is a man. As DiBattista observes, Russell’s Hildy represents “a new female mutation” (271) of her male prototype. If “newspaperman” used in the affirmative sense denotes qualities such as professionalism, inventiveness, integrity, risk-taking, and calmness under pressure, then Hildy is actually the only person in Hawkes’s film to whom it properly applies. The film makes this abundantly clear by repeatedly depicting her male colleagues as inadequate to the tasks at hand. All men in the film are incapable of keeping pace with her, in particular to match the record speed of her verbal outpour and to grasp the full meaning of her words—with the exception of her ex-husband, who thereby proves right for her (cf. Grindon 103) and to whom she will return. Hildy navigates a world in which the qualities that make her a good reporter and the qualities expected of a woman cannot be easily squared. As Grindon writes, “to become the new woman of screwball comedy she had to remake herself endowed with male privilege” (105). The film, by denying her neither career nor romance, allows for the possibility to adapt the category “woman” to Hildy rather than the other way around.

24The motif of a woman escaping or destabilizing existing categories once she enters a profession dominated by men can be found in several of Russell’s films. In Michael Curtiz’s Four’s A Crowd, released two years prior to His Girl Friday, she plays a journalist who takes it into her hands to save the newspaper she works at from being closed. In the opening scene, Russell’s character refers to herself as a “newspaperman.” By doing so she claims know-how of the journalistic profession as opposed to the inexperienced man who inherited the newspaper. The scene (00:02:19 – 00:04:00) shows her storming into the office of Pat Buckley (Patric Knowles) as he is fastening the collar of his white shirt: “So you’re Mr. Buckley. Oh, I expected something old and soft. You’re more the cobweb behind the ears type.” The shot shows Mr. Buckley’s lower body behind a large bucket of flowers. “I just want my pants,” he says. To which she responds: “Mr. Buckley, I don’t wear pants, but I am a newspaperman. So was my father. He helped your father build this newspaper.” As soon as he steps from behind the flowers, we see that he is not wearing pants. And after his butler hands him a pair, Russell’s character grabs them. While she does not wear pants, neither in the literal nor the metaphorical sense of decision-making, she literally holds them and by implication is able to fill them, as it were. The pants, visually dissociated from the body of its “rightful” wearer, become just an accidental attribute, and the power that they represent turns into an object of contention. As she helps Buckley into the pants, she means all business, remarking: “I’m not allowing a pip-squeak of a great man to ruin [the newspaper].” The joke of the scene is that “a pip-squeak” can claim a position of authority not by virtue of his professional competence but just by accidentally finding himself in the category of people who by convention wear pants.

25In the case of the characters played by Russell it is less erratic behavior that causes comic disturbances, but rather their display of professional competence and practical skills that either makes the behavior of the men around her seem incongruous with the demands of a specific situation or causes men to resort to unconventional behavior. In Take a Letter, Darling, directed by Mitchell Leisen, Russell plays a partner in an advertisement agency who has to hire male secretaries to accompany her to business dinners. The premise of the film is that she constantly has to fire her male secretaries because they get wrong ideas when working late hours with her. In one scene (00:09:50 – 00:11:56), Russell’s character sits down with her business partner, who promoted her from her initial position of secretary. As he appreciatively looks at her, she inquires: “Why the look?” He reminisces: “I was just remembering you, eight years ago. It’s a pity you had to become my partner, you were one of the best secretaries a guy ever had.” He recalls that he was in love with her once. She mentions her problems with hiring a male assistant, guessing: “The setup is deceiving. I guess it’s the night work.” To which her partner replies: “No, I don’t think it’s the night work. It’s just that they don’t know the difference between a woman and a …” “And a what?” “Oh, I don’t know, there’s no name for you yet.”

26Echoing the motif present in the two previous films discussed here, Take A Letter, Darling faces Russell’s professional woman with the problem of not quite fitting into the category “woman” as defined by her environment. As her business partner’s remark indicates, there is a perceptible difference between “woman” in a conventional sense and the way in which the character played by Russell—and other screwball heroines—inhabit this category. Thus her eccentricity—her oddness and peculiarity—lies in her deviation from the conventions applying to her gender. What the genre of the screwball comedy makes possible then is the emergence of this new way of inhabiting the female gender—or of performing gender.

5. Conclusion: Gender as Genre

27If we regard gender in terms of genre, we may say that the film genre of the screwball comedy adds to the genre of femininity new features that were hitherto not part of it. To understand femininity as a genre, as Berlant proposes, means to see it as a “structure of expectations” (Berlant 9) that mediates between the singular and the general. “Performativity” (understood in Judith Butler’s sense) allows for variations within a conventional expectation that can either succeed or fail: individual performances can be perceived as belonging to the genre or not. At the same time, as John Frow explains with regard to genre in general, the shaping of genre as “a set of conventional and highly organized constraints” (10) involves both the element of “being shaped by” and “shaping of,” so that enactments (performances) and structures work upon and modify each other (Frow 10).

28In the screwball comedy genre, the comedy stems from the irritations and disruptions that the woman’s new kind of gender performance causes in her social environment. And it causes, in turn, her male counterparts to leave their comfort zone, effecting an incongruity between their actual actions and what might be expected of men. If we accept Bergson’s idea that social life requires constant mutual adaptability, then screwball heroines, by acting out of script, have the principle of life on their side. This same principle allows for the mutability of gender categories. By acting in accordance with it, they revise available genres of gender. The implications here are large, for they move beyond just one side of the battle of the sexes. Ultimately, the screwball comedy does not just rewrite the genre of woman but also that of man.