A Proper Dash of Spice: Screwball Comedy and the Production Code

Most studies of screwball humor focus on the slapstick violence and eccentric behavior of the lead couple: imperturbable butler Godfrey tossing his scatterbrained charge Irene Bullock into the shower fully clothed in My Man Godfrey (1936); newspaper reporter Wally Cook declaring his love for malingering small-town girl Hazel Flagg before socking her in the jaw in Nothing Sacred (1937); madcap heiress Susan Vance and her reluctant companion, Dr. David Huxley, tumbling down hills, falling into ponds, and dangling from a Brontosaurus skeleton in Bringing Up Baby (1938).

The antagonistic nature of the romantic relationship and the emphasis on physical comedy are generally seen as an outcome of the suppression of explicit sexuality under the Production Code Administration (PCA) after 1934. Created by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), the Hollywood industry’s trade organization, the PCA reviewed scripts and films in light of the Production Code. The Code, a series of guidelines for monitoring film content, was written by industry personnel in cooperation with external reviewers and moral reformers. The major studios submitted scripts and completed films to PCA censors, who worked with filmmakers, suggesting changes or deletions to ensure that films would not encounter any difficulties with viewers, critics, or state and local censorship boards.

It is now widely accepted that screwball comedy’s characteristic verbal and physical battling are linked to these changes in regulatory policy. Andrew Sarris, channeling a screenwriter from the 1930s, writes, “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 audiences tire of verbal sublimation, the performers do cartwheels and pratfalls and make funny expressions” (13). As Sarris’s remarks suggest, the eccentric behavior of the screwball couple is often explained via a lay psychoanalytic reading: the sexual energy suppressed under the watchful eye of the censor finds its expression in an acceptable physical and verbal looniness. By this line of reasoning, the wisecracks, cartwheels, pratfalls, and funny expressions of screwball comedy are both a replacement for and symbolic of sexual desire—for example, William K. Everson’s contention that “Code comedies couldn’t admit to the existence of sex, particularly among unmarried couples, [so] exaggerated comic violence frequently took its place” (17).¹

It is true that the producers of romantic comedies could not explicitly represent a sexual union or reunion and therefore found alternative ways to demonstrate a couple’s suitability and desire. Changes in the administration of the Code in 1934 encouraged the production of films that celebrated marriage and promoted conservative values. The types of slapstick gags mentioned previously essentially killed two birds with one stone, allowing producers to demonstrate the couple’s compatibility in a nonsexual manner while introducing some comic lunacy into films that might otherwise be overly sentimental, serious, and pedantic.²

Physical comedy and eccentric antics do play an important role in the initial screwball films, which I refer to as the “insane cycle.” This term, borrowed from the trade press, reflects the cycle’s reliance on slapstick antics and physical comedy. However, around 1938, there was a shift in the screwball comedy genre. After four years of adjusting to the PCA regulations, filmmakers began to develop gag structures that circumvented the Code, and slapstick antics were increasingly buttressed by a suggestive style of gagging. As I show in this article, by the late 1930s, filmmakers were no longer replacing sex with cartwheels, and the PCA struggled to rein in writers and directors who had essentially discovered a loophole in the Code, developing a style of comedy that satisfied the letter of the law but defied its spirit.³

The “Insane Cycle” and the Origins of Screwball Comedy

Like the term “film noir,” “screwball comedy” has been retroactively applied to any number of films from the classical era. Very generally, it is considered a unique form of Hollywood romantic comedy that emphasizes the eccentric behavior of the lead couple.⁴ It is often contrasted to romantic dramas, in which the lead couple plays a serious role, and comedy...