Part 4: Comedy notes

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Audiences have long found squabbling lovers to be very funny, either on stage or in the pages of books.

Keeping sex out of romantic film comedy was therefore nearly impossible.

What the Code did, in spite of itself, was to force American comedy to take a new form.

The Code succeeded in forcing comic characters to put their energies to a distorted end - bickering, screaming, and, whenever necessary, slapping and punching.

The Code prevented characters from engaging in sexually suggestive dialogue, let alone explicit onscreen sex.

Some screwball comedies resolve these tensions by establishing stability through a new social order; It Happened One Night is the classic example.

Restrictions on comedy were only one aspect of the Code, but this aspect was crucial to the development of Hollywood comedy. As the Code put it flatly, adultery “is never the subject for comedy.”

Unfortunately for the Code, adultery, sexual confusion, and violent jealousy, have often been the subjects of comedy throughout western culture - especially romantic comedy.

In Hollywood, one of the most important turning points of the 1930s was the institution of an enforceable Production Code in 1934.

In the era of There’s Something about Mary, it’s hard to imagine severe restrictions on the content of Hollywood films, but in fact the Production Code was extremely restrictive.

Without getting into the question of whether men and women are ever able to get along with each other - it is necessary to look not at the Great Depression per se but some specific events of that era.

Screwball comedies are fascinating for this reason: the line between conflict and resolution is blurry.

Most Hollywood movies expect a so-called happy ending.

In many of these, the happiness in question is the institution (or re-institution) of marriage.

But in screwball comedies, happy endings often make even less sense than usual, given what we’ve seen earlier in the film.

It was imposed to stop what the nation’s conservatives thought was the rising tide of wickedness in Hollywood movies in the early 1930s.

It is therefore no coincidence that 1934 was also the same year that witnessed the birth of the screwball comedy with such films as It Happened One Night, Twentieth Century, and The Thin Man.

The result of more than a decade of protests by members of the clergy and conservative politicians, the Production Code forbade explicit sex, adultery, and homosexuality from the screen.

Part 4: Comedy notes - Screwball Comedies

https://www.wichitafilms.com/en/films/screwball-comedy-when-hollywood-went-mad/

Others may seem to like stability by way of a final marriage or kiss, but actually call such stability into question.

For instance, heiress Katharine Hepburn and paleontologist Cary Grant finally stop fighting and hug each other at the end of Bringing Up Baby, but just at that moment the brontosaurus skeleton Grant has been laboriously constructing collapses into chaos.