A list of 10 screwball comedies that will delight your eyes with the Art Deco sets, assault your ears with the witty, fast dialogue, and tickle your funny bone.
A beautiful young woman in a gorgeous lamé gown and fur coat enters a pristine white Manhattan penthouse, but before she can make it through the door she trips and falls, high heels over head. What you are now picturing in your mind is a screwball comedy. This article will guide you through the wacky world of screwball comedy, with a personally curated list of 10 screwball comedies you will want to watch. Screwball comedy is not a genre unto itself, but a style, tone and attitude. It was most prevalent during the Great Depression of the 1930s, but can still be found in movies today. Sean Baker’s recently released Anora was frequently referred to as a screwball comedy by film critics. Most of all, screwball comedies are fun to watch. It’s incredibly delightful to watch beautiful people make idiots out of themselves.
On with the laughs!
1. Top Hat (1935)
Director: Mark Sandrich
The screwball style is flexible enough that it can be applied to many other genres. In the case of Top Hat, that is the musical. The fourth out of nine collaborations between Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Top Hat is a luxuriant bon mot of a movie with a cheeky script, gorgeous Art Deco production design, and such famous numbers as “Cheek to Cheek” and “Isn’t It a Lovely Day?”. Astaire stars as dancer Jerry Travers who is mistaken by Dale Tremont (Rogers) for the spouse of her friend Madge through various delightfully ludicrous misunderstandings, making their mutual attraction terribly complicated. The plot is thin, leaving all the more room for charm, wit and exquisite dance numbers.
2. Libeled Lady (1936)
Director: Jack Conway
The more convoluted the romantic entanglements and the more unbelievable the misunderstandings all the better for a screwball comedy. When the heiress Connie Allenbury (Myrna Loy) is accused of being a homewrecker by the New York Evening Star, she sues the newspaper for $5 million dollars ($113 million in 2024). Editor Warren Haggerty (Spencer Tracy) sets up a scheme with his fiancé Gladys (Jean Harlow) and friend Bill Chandler (William Powell). Bill and Gladys will marry, and then Bill, the suave ladies man, will romance Connie, and publicly reveal her to be a husband-stealer. Then the suit will have to be dropped! A flaw in Warren’s plan develops when Bill and Connie fall in love and wish to marry, and Gladys falls in love with Bill and refuses to consent to a divorce. The legendary chemistry between Loy and Powell is as sharp and sparkling as a diamond in Libeled Lady, with an especially charming moment coming when Connie is the one to propose marriage to Bill.
3. Nothing Sacred (1937)
Director: William A. Wellman
Few actors helped to define the tone and attitude of the screwball comedy as the mischievous and elegant Carole Lombard. Nothing Sacred afforded Lombard one of her greatest roles, that of Hazel Flagg, a naive country bumpkin who is mistakenly diagnosed with a radium poisoning and decides to ride the wave of sympathy to tabloid fame in New York City. Underneath the goofy slapstick, Nothing Sacred is a rather bleak satire of tabloid journalism and the desire for “five minutes of fame.” In her performance as Hazel, Lombard is vibrantly funny, effortlessly maintaining the high intensity energy of the plot mechanics, and admirably keeping the audience on her side no matter how unscrupulous Hazel’s actions.
4. Easy Living (1937)
Director: Mitchell Leisen
Easy Living, a bubbly Cinderella story directed by Mitchell Leisen from a script by Preston Sturges, begins when a sable coat is thrown out the mansion window by millionaire J.B. Ball (Edward Arnold). The coat lands on the head of the recently fired Mary Smith (Jean Arthur). Due to Mary’s possession of the coat, others believe that she is Ball’s mistress, allowing her access to the finer things in life, including cars, jewelry, and a beautiful Art Deco hotel room. Mary is unaware of the innuendo, but she cheerfully accepts the gifts and toys. At the same time, she is falling in love with Ball’s rebellious son John Jr. (Ray Milland), whom she met when a food fight broke out at an automat.
5. Bringing Up Baby (1938)
Director: Howard Hawks
Bringing Up Baby is a prime example of the screwball comedy. Cary Grant plays the befuddled, bespectacled paleontologist Dr. David Huxley, who is on the brink of marrying the severe Miss Swallow and completing the skeleton of a brontosaurus. He only needs the intracoastal clavicle bone. David’s repressed, well-ordered life is disrupted by a tornado of a woman, the heiress Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn), who is determined to have him. David and Susan race around the Connecticut country searching for his missing bone (the sexual innuendo is intentional), encountering pet leopards and all manner of eccentrics. “In moments of quiet I am strangely drawn to you, but, well, there haven’t been any quiet moments,” David tells Susan at one point, perfectly summing up romance in a screwball comedy.
6. The Lady Eve (1941)
Director: Preston Sturges
One of the wonderful things about the screwball comedy style is that it allows women to play very interesting, commanding, funny characters. Few screwball leading ladies are as captivating as Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck), a sharp-minded con artist that sets her sights on the dopey, snake-obsessed rich boy Charles Poncefort Pike (Henry Fonda) when the two meet on a cruise ship. Originally only intending to fleece Pike out of his large fortune, Jean finds herself falling in love with him.
The chemistry between Fonda and Stanwyck is sizzling, and a particular scene between the two in a stateroom is steamier than many modern day sex scenes. No sooner are the two engaged than Pike finds out about Jean’s illegal activities, and breaks off the romance. Her pride hurt, Jean re-enters Pike’s life, masquerading as the British-accented Lady Eve Sidwich, and sets about systematically tormenting the young man. Romance is all a game of lies and manipulation in The Lady Eve, and Preston Sturges’ prankish direction never lets you figure out what will happen next.
7. Mr and Mrs. Smith (1941)
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Mr. and Mrs. Smith is, in my opinion, an unfairly maligned and overlooked screwball comedy due to its outsider status in Hitchcock’s filmography, as it is one of his very few non-thriller movies. Mr. and Mrs. Smith is a droll, cynical look at love, marriage and divorce, with sparklingly clever dialogue and uproarious physical comedy. Robert Montgomery and Carole Lombard are the title characters, David and Ann Smith, who are surprised to learn that their marriage was never legally valid. Embarrassed by the revelation, the two split and pursue other romantic entanglements, but find they cannot stay away from the other for long.
8. What’s Up, Doc? (1972)
Director: Peter Bogdanovich
What’s Up, Doc? Is the rare piece of homage that is strong enough to stand alongside the art that it is referencing. Practically a remake of Bringing Up Baby, it marries the frenetic, tilt-a-whirl speed of screwball comedy with the shaggy, seemingly improvisatory style of comedy favored in the 1970s, creating a pleasurable viewing experience all its own.
Dr. Howard Bannister’s (Ryan O’Neal) life gets thrown upside down during a trip to San Francisco with his fiancé Eunice Burns (Madeline Kahn) for a convention at which he will present his research into the musical properties of igneous rocks and compete for a sizable grant. While checking into the hotel he meets the Bugs Bunny-like free spirit Judy Maxwell (Barbra Streisand), who sets her sights on winning Bannister over romantically and helping him get the grant. At the same time a man hides out in the hotel after stealing government secrets, and attempts to evade the federal agent sent to recover them.
9. After Hours (1985)
Director: Martin Scorsese
Screwball comedies move fast, the plots spend very little time on exposition and set-ups, and dialogue is delivered as breathlessly as a sports color commentator, but with After Hours Martin Scorsese ups the pacing to that of a panic attack. Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), a computer data entry worker, enters a waking nightmare after he meets the scatterbrained Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) at an all-night diner. The two connect, and Paul is invited to join her at her SoHo Apartment. On the cab ride over, he loses his $20 dollar bill out the window, starting the chain of events that will lead Paul on a Kafkaesque journey through the New York City night, encountering kooks and eccentrics played by such people as Teri Garr, Catherine O’Hara, John Heard, and Cheech and Chong.
10. Step Brothers (2008)
Director: Adam McKay
It is not only a romantic couple that can find liberation through playing together in a screwball comedy. As 2008’s Step Brothers demonstrates, it can also be platonic, familial relations. Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly deliver performances that are both broadly comic and warmly touching as the slackers Brennan Huff and Dale Doback who, despite nearing forty are both unemployed and living with their single parents (Mary Steenburgen and Richard Jenkins).
When the parents meet and fall in love after bounding over having moochers for children, Brennan and Dale are forced to move in together and share a bedroom. The two initially butt heads, but become “best friends” after recognizing many similar interests. Step Brothers is built around Brennan and Dale’s relationship, following them as they take their first steps into boring, soul-crushing adulthood, before, in true screwball fashion, realizing that play is what’s truly important in life.
