Stepping on the Laugh: Grégoire Halbout’s Hollywood Screwball Comedy

Good writing about cinema emerges from the critic’s particular experience of viewing a film that they seek to sustain and preserve, writing so as to elevate the particular experience to a critical judgment that the reader feels compelled to share. Stanley Cavell’s writing about film, from the more theoretical The World Viewed to his attention to the individual movie in Pursuits of Happiness is exemplary in this respect.¹ Although Grégoire Halbout’s Hollywood Screwball Comedy claims to be inspired by Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness, the distance between the two approaches and styles is vast. Indeed, despite Cavell’s “overwhelming and lasting influence” (p. xiv), Halbout aims to distinguish his approach, as if Cavell’s intensive attention to the particular were a symptom of frivolity.

Cavell’s project in Pursuits of Happiness, which is the constant background for Halbout’s own book, is not an exhaustive recounting of a genre. Despite Halbout’s suggestion that Cavell was not interested in genre per se, Cavell achingly justifies the narrow selections that form “remarriage comedies.”² The inclusions are guided not simply by formal or narrative features but by judgments of quality. The films have to bear the pressure of the analysis to which they are subjected. Halbout’s volume frays because it leans heavily on minor – even poor – films, at the expense of exemplary instances. Unlike Cavell’s philosophically-inflected argument regarding the relationship between romantic comedy, marriage and American democracy, Halbout’s broader points fall flat. Halbout’s efforts to avoid “the subjective appreciation and fetishism of the collector” (p. 9) mean the book lacks the enthusiastic partisanship of the good and important over the average. Perhaps strangely, it is Halbout’s reservations about subjective experience that mean the book lacks the critical distance that characterises good judgment and instead becomes a parading ground for endless enumeration.

Without Cavell’s deep analysis of exemplary films, the book delivers a flurry of instances that do not cohere into the broader point. In fact, because of the breadth of Halbout’s “genre,” what he lays bare is more the inconsistency in cinematic treatments of these themes. The purported ideological unity of Hollywood’s studio fare is just a banal truism demonstrated by mediocre films. Halbout’s exhaustive, quasi-systematic genre study manages to tell us far less about any particular film and more to attempt to conjure a cinematic milieu, shaped by socio-political context, industry-specific factors and intra-generic features distilled, or rather aggregated, from a swollen corpus. The “three-tiered” organising principle identifies 136 “screwball comedies,” of which he selects 40 for “in depth” focus, and 14 for a section analysing the effects of the Hays Office on the genre. 

Screwball comedy can be summarised by formulas, for Halbout. The genre he constructs is shaped – in stark contrast to Cavell – more by similarity than by significance. This may seem intuitive: what constitutes a genre is what films that belong to it share. However, as Cavell makes clear (and Halbout merely acknowledges in passing), the life of a genre is sustained by the transformations it can withstand without losing its integrity. This means remarriage comedy can accommodate films that do not, in fact, contain a “second” marriage (like It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934)). Halbout’s version of the screwball genre is partly defined by its reflection on the couple, whether in marriage, courtship or divorce. The key feature of “playfulness and eccentricity” (p. 7) does not rub off on the analysis, as Halbout saps the humour from the films even as he argues that it is what marks them tonally. But perhaps a stronger feature is the brand-identity. Halbout makes much of the relationship between the film industry, screwball comedy and the mass market commodity, and it shapes his analysis so that the films are defined less by their self-referential integrity and more by their intertextual and theatrical catering to audience expectations (including surprises and deviations).

Screwball comedy developed, for Halbout, in a moment of tension between Hollywood and the emerging middle-class audience. It reflects the maturation of Hollywood’s self-identity insofar as early examples parody prominent genres like the romance or detective story. Halbout emphasises the professional setting in many of the films, including the new role of women in work. The tastes of the middle-class audience, however, were hard to pinpoint for the movie industry. Socially liberal mores of middle-class professionals co-existed with more conservative values. The individual, for example, was the epitome of freedom and yet also required the disciplining constraints of the family or romantic partner for polite, productive society. Halbout’s categorisation of the characters and audience as middle class is, however, undermined by his occasional references to them as “stand-ins for the working class” (p. 250). This class ambivalence is characteristic of American economic identity, which seeks to reconcile independence with conformity.

Halbout is particularly attentive in parts to the internal workings of the industry. Alongside the more visibly branded stars, the screwball genre was shaped by canny directors and screenwriters, whose role (like that of the journalist, a figure which populates many screwballs) resembles that of the professional in its pursuit of creative freedom within corporate culture. The corporate culture of Hollywood was notoriously shaped by the industry’s voluntary adoption of the Production Code, allowing oversight from the Hays Office. While “censorship” is the common way of referring to the role of the Production Code, it operated as a form of internal regulation, much like any other industrial regulation of the era. By exacting internal regulation, the industry avoided too much external scrutiny, and leveraged its freedom “to maximise cinema turnout and, accordingly box-office revenue” (p. 135). Yet, as Halbout astutely remarks, the “pursuit of profit demands a certain measure of perversity” (p. 224). Despite the code’s more Puritan, conservative values, audiences responded profitably to scandalous narratives and Hollywood’s marketing campaigns amplified the salacious subtext of the plots.

According to Freud, the censor operates to keep repressed material safely bound in the unconscious while allowing it through to consciousness (or dreams) in distorted form.³ The mind is called to censor its own intolerable thoughts, and it does so by transforming them into tolerable material. Similarly, Hollywood self-censorship operated by modifying rather than eliminating forbidden content. As Halbout suggests, censorship poses a particular problem for comedy, for which social convention and authority are often a source of laughter. Screenwriters and directors developed an array of techniques for mentioning the unmentionable, including screwball staples like alcohol, divorce and extra-marital sex. “Linguistic extravagance, triumphs of understatement, euphemisms … A complex, allusive language developed” (p. 204) that in its suggestiveness (rather than explicitness) could end up being more scandalous than the original. Halbout details a number of transformations during the production process of various films in the genre. The Hays Office staff worked as a priestly cadre, he proposes, interpreting the scripture of the Production Code and representing the industry’s “responsibility of the elites towards the masses” (p. 146).

As Halbout points out, the purpose of the voluntary subjection to conservative pressure was made in service of market principles. Yet the mass audience and those responsible for marketing to them knew what they wanted. What Halbout calls “commercial pragmatism” fought against “narrative normalisation.” In his analysis of the influence of the Hays Office, Halbout argues that religious and social conservatives aligned themselves with financiers to shape the industry in order to fend off moral degeneration. They recognised what the Code called “the importance of entertainment and its value in rebuilding the bodies and souls of human beings” (p. 147). Despite his sometimes painstakingly close attention to the fate of various (minor) scripts (the detail on Preston Sturges’ The Palm Beach Story (1942) script is perhaps an exception), it is not clear whether how screwball genre in particular was shaped by the Production Code, as opposed to Hollywood cinema more broadly. Halbout’s work in drawing broader conclusions about “tensions between the vision of American cinema as a democratic and socially unifying medium and that of Hollywood as a reactionary manifestation of the American cultural industry” (p. 229) is not firmly grounded in the detailed analysis of individual movies.

Nevertheless, the screwball genre’s effort to delicately toe the line between transgression and conformity shapes the plots in various ways. In particular, Halbout focuses on sexual morality and its containment by the institution of marriage. Disillusioned with involvement in collective projects (in the context of the New Deal), middle-class professionals sought to retreat to the safety of the private couple. Critics, in the tradition of ideology critique, have seen in the marriage plot a romantic mystification of social antagonism. Yet Cavell defended marriage as the symbol for (the ideal of) social equality and mutual recognition. Marriage plots (at least the good ones) play out the social tensions that ideology critique claims are mystified. By combining sophistication with slapstick, screwball comedy found a place for a barely concealed violence that forthrightly mustered social tension. Similarly, slapstick antics could stand in for frankly sexualised encounters, mastered by the likes of Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. Halbout effectively contextualises the marriage plot within sociological transformation in gender and sexuality.

Screwball comedies, for example, exiled parental figures to the edges of the courtship rituals. This reflects a different relationship to authority. Marriage was an unstable institution, caught between fulfilling competing social demands. As such, it was “the crucible and laboratory” for re-evaluating the self-conception of America. Halbout attempts to a version of Cavell’s tribute to the ideals of American democracy, but it lacks Cavell’s passionate and poignant identification with those ideals. Halbout never finds a middle ground between high-minded idealism and socio-historical reality that might accommodate the immanent self-critique of America promised by the films. He wavers between the “messianic vision” of American freedom and happiness, and the “apparatus of belief” that sordidly promotes the vision (p. 307). Describing America as having an “exceptional destiny,” as Halbout does, suggests a belief in the transcendent fate of particular nations. This puts screwball comedy at a distance from contemporary values, in tension with Halbout’s attempt to make them fit into a slow progressive arc towards social liberalisation. 

The middle-class professional subjects of the films represent a particular relay between mass audiences and the elite, for Halbout. Hollywood sought to mediate political conflict while broadcasting promotional visions for the status quo. In doing so, individual expression was prized above all else as compatible with corporate values and a safely contained form of freedom kept at arm’s length from politics. Nevertheless, in distancing itself from convention, the genre played authority figures (like fathers, policemen, or politicians) as both despotic tyrants, and as haplessly impotent. This account can also be translated into generational terms, with younger couples supplanting older, less deserving elites in a newly democratised aristocracy. While Cavell tracked the Tocquevillian question of whether aristocratic virtues could survive democratic conditions,⁴ in Halbout’s account it is less their virtues and more their elevated status as a ruling class that is now sanctioned less by natural law and more by market value.

This hews too closely, I think, to the kind of ideology critique that tends to obscure the particular significance of one or another film. Treated in Halbout’s comprehensive way, the films lose their particularity and become mere samples of a genre. For Halbout, the genre was summoned into existence by the financial crisis in the 1930s, and was beached on the urgency of political unification during the war years of the 1940s. It thrived in a period of relative instability, by both reflecting and channelling that instability into the possibility of re-ordering, re-committing and reviving the national ideal. Screwball was too delicate an instrument for Cold War propaganda, too sentimental and innocent perhaps to withstand a post-war culture. 

This would be to forget its specific character of adaption and evolution, “invasion and evasion, destruction and renewal. And behind the laughter, the games, the fights, and the disguises lurks the constant question of extinction or metamorphosis” (p. 88). In his conclusion, Halbout comments on the legacy of screwball, citing the romantic comedies of Mike Nichols and Nora Ephron. Something of the edge, however, has been lost. The post-war period’s consolidation of American power and capitalism delivered different cultural imperatives, detached from the incipient democratic ideals of the 1930s. We might say, following Nancy Fraser, that in the feminism of the Cold War era separated itself from questions of social equality.⁵ The anarchic slapstick and barely concealed threat of violence in some of the better examples of screwball comedy are cast off from romance, leaving it always at risk of being saccharine. What the screwball couple confronts us with is not only the question of commitment, but also the question of where we are willing to have our pleasures.

Grégoire Halbout, Hollywood Screwball Comedy, 1934-1945: Sex, Love and Democratic Ideals (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).

Endnotes