Laughing Out Loud Page 9
Add Groucho's frequent asides to the audience (that is, the camera), which he learned from working live audiences, and we have yet another key element of anarchistic comedy since Aristophanes. Groucho put it this way:
On the stage, I frequently stepped out of character and spoke directly to the audience. After the first day's shooting on Cocoanuts, the producer ... said, "Groucho, you can't step out of character and talk to the audience." Like all people who are glued to tradition, he was wrong. I spoke to them in every picture I appeared in. (Sometimes they answered back. This I found rather disconcerting.) Nevertheless the movie industry went on just the same, turning out its share of good and bad pictures, and nobody seemed to care whether I stepped out of character.
(Memoirs of a Mangy Lover, 172)
Groucho is the eiron, the ironic wise guy always mouthing off at a rapid pace. Chico is the womanizing braggart alazon, always in trouble, while Harpo is both a trickster figure and a poet with a harp-that is, a clown. And, finally, Zeppo, whose presence is not heavily felt in most of the films, is the "killjoy" straight guy.
To replay a Marx Brothers film from time to time is to help recharge our anarchistic batteries as writers.
I personally feel deep regrets that I never got to see American vaudeville on the stage. However, I saw the British equivalent, the pantomime shows, when I was a kid, and for over twenty years now I have thoroughly enjoyed the Greek counterpart, called the "epitheorises." But what about the legacy of such anarchistic comedy today? The echoes are felt in such films as Wayne's World, Animal House and Blues Brothers. Yet as we shall explain more fully in chapter 6, while these kinds of films are driven by an anarchistic energy and focus, their origin is much more clearly from stand-up comedy and television rather than a living tradition of vaudeville. In spirit, however, such films represent a similar joyful send-up of all authority and rigidity of social positioning, including romance, politics and family values.
I never imagined that mere physical activity could be so stimulating.
Katharine Hepburn to Humphrey Bogart in John Huston's The African Queen
To a very large degree, sound comedy has meant romantic comedy, and in the United States romantic comedy can be identified as screwball comedy in one form or another. Let's take a closer look at what writers of comedy should know about this vibrant genre.
"You make me want to be a better man." It's Jack Nicholson playing Melvin Udall, the rich and famous sixty-something New York romance author who happens to be a recluse and a wicked misanthrope in his real life. "That's maybe the best compliment of my life," says Helen Hunt portraying Carol Connelly, a struggling single parent and waitress in her thirties with a sick son. "Well, maybe I overshot a little," rejoins a slyly smirking, slow-eyed Nicholson, "because I was aiming at just enough to keep you from walking out." Together these two are fire and ice, oil and water-seemingly complete opposites. But by the time James L. Brooks's award-winning As Good As It Gets (1997) is over, a quirky romance is under way, as the old cliche-opposites attract-is given fresh, memorable and very funny new coinage in a script by Brooks and Mark Andrus.
Silent film comedy leaned heavily to anarchistic and physical humor, as we explored in chapter 4. But once sound appeared, Hollywood imported New York playwrights, and that meant dialogue comedy, more specifically contemporary ironic comedies of manners and the battle of the sexes, especially among the idle rich. As a basis of what has become known as "screwball romantic comedy," we should review the points made about Shakespearean romantic comedy, for the tradition does trace back that far and beyond. We noted that Shakespeare was not afraid to be experimental, that he explored the complexity of relationships caught in the jaws of blind passion and idealized love, that he made use of sparkling dialogue, that he often went for straight-on farce both for the fun of it and to highlight the reality of the love stories, that he created strong female characters who were as bright as or brighter than the male figures, and he was not afraid to use touches of magic or the fantastic.
American screwball comedy embraces all of the above and one more important element: the romantic couple come from very different social backgrounds. More specifically, one is usually of the upper or wealthy class and the other of the middle or lower class. It is no surprise that this American version of romantic comedy developed in the 193os, not only as sound came to the movies but as America was working its way through the Depression and thus reevaluating its very values. As film scholar Thomas Schatz comments, "By restructuring the fast-paced upper-crust romance, the screwball comedy dominated Depression-era screen comedy and provided that period's most significant and engaging social commentary" (151).
There are, for starters, four characteristics that writers of comedy need to know about screwball romance:
1. The genre is both the most popular form of American screen comedy and the most enduring.
2. The genre builds on the traditions that have gone before but proves itself very adaptable to changes in cultural norms and perceptions.
3. The genre is a fascinating reflection of the state of male-female relationships at the time the film is made.
4. The genre can't help but offer social commentary as well.
These points hold for classics we will mention such as Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932), Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934), Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby (1938), George Cukor's Dinner at Eight (1933) and Preston Sturges's script for The Good Fairy (1935); for 1950s films such as Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot, John Huston's African Queen and John Ford's The Quiet Man; for more recent examples such as Woody Allen's Annie Hall, Sydney Pollack's Tootsie, Garry Marshall's Pretty Woman, Susan Seidelman's Desperately Seeking Susan, Penny Marshall's Jumpin' Jack Flash, Nora Ephron's Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail, Michael Lehmann's The Truth about Cats and Dogs and Australian P. J. Hogan's My Best Friend's Wedding and Muriel's Wedding); and for more offbeat films such as Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies and videotape, Jeremiah Chechik's Benny and loon, Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy, and Bobby and Peter Farrelly's There's Something about Mary.
Screwballs in the 1930s
The 1930s were the heyday of screwball comedies, and I highly recommend that writers of comedy view and review films by Ernst Lubitsch and George Cukor, "pre-screwball" directors of sophisticated comedies, and by the golden screwball filmmakers, Frank Capra, Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges, for starters.
Frank Capra has deservedly been celebrated for kicking off the genre with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night. Colbert is the rich girl running away from home to experience the "real" world who hooks up with newspaper reporter Gable. As they fall in love, he educates her to the ways of the world; she catches on quickly and even surpasses him from time to time. In one scene, after he has explained how to hitchhike, she goes him one better by sticking out her leg and pulling up her dress a notch. Result: an instant ride from the first car passing by. This Academy Award-winning box office hit sends out a clear populist message that became Frank Capra's trademark: good old American middleclass common sense is a whole lot better than all the money and crazy ideas of the rich, powerful and famous.
Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby pushes the genre further. Katharine Hepburn is the spoiled Connecticut heiress with a pet leopard, "Baby," who turns completely upside down the life of Cary Grant, an absent-minded zoologist whose project is to find the missing bone for a dinosaur skeleton he is assembling in the Museum of Natural History in New York. Scripted by the great Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde from one of Wilde's stories, Hawks's film has won the praise of numerous critics, including Leonard Maltin, who calls it "the definitive screwball comedy and one of the fastest, funniest films ever made" (171).
While Capra's film is grounded in realism-a couple on the road in Depression America-Hawks's comedy, embracing leopards and dinosaurs, is much farther "out there" as a nutty, fairy-tale kind of comedy. The dialogue crackles, the situations (including their brief time in jail) a
re completely absurd, and the mileage of putting a pet leopard (not to mention an escaped leopard from a local circus) in between this bumbling couple simply multiplies the laughter. Both "lovers" are innocents here, though each is an expert in his (dinosaurs) or her (idle rich) own territory. Neither functions well at all in the "real" world, creating a hilarious comedy of cross-purposes.
The final embrace scene is one of my all-time favorites in American comedy. We end where we began, with Cary Grant up on the scaffolding in the museum with his beloved dinosaur. In comes delightful but air-headed Hepburn, climbing up a ladder to speak with Grant. When the ladder starts to fall, Grant literally embraces Hepburn, and the crashing ladder totally destroys his life's work: the huge dinosaur skeleton comes crashing down, leaving, in long shot, Grant holding Hepburn. We laugh and realize that this couple will do fine forever after, since Grant does not express anger, nor does he let go of Hepburn in revenge! This long-shot embrace is love if there ever was love.
Preston Sturges became Hollywood's first screenwriting director, winning an Oscar in 1944 for his anarchistic, half-screwball comedy Hail the Conquering Hero. But before he began directing in 1940, he had written some of America's best stage comedies, such as Strictly Dishonorable, and a string of sparkling screen comedies for other directors, such as Easy Living, Diamond Jim, If I Were King and Remember the Night. Watch any Sturges film for the dialogue, the fine line between character and caricature, the completely nutty premise of the film, the bevy of entertaining minor characters and the sheer comic "density" of each scene. His script for Easy Living (1937, Mitchell Leisen, director) is a Sturges screwball comedy at its best. Mary (Jean Arthur) is a working gal who, by chance, happens to be in the way when a billionaire Wall Street investor (Edward Arnold) throws a mink coat off his Fifth Avenue apartment balcony. Two unlikely worlds are suddenly joined, as Arthur naively tries to return the coat and winds up being involved in a world she never dreamed of, as this fish-out-of-water tale joins her with the billionaire's son (Ray Milland), who is trying to earn his own way through life as a waiter. Somehow the film manages to be a seamless light romantic comedy and, at the same time, a very funny satirical look at the stock market, the superrich and American capitalism in general.
Screwball Variation: Comedy of Remarriage
We usually think of romance as the coming together of young lovers, full of innocence and enthusiasm, their futures spread out before them like a fairy tale of "happy forever after." But many of the most memorable screwball comedies are what Stanley Cavell (in Pursuits of Happiness) aptly labels the "comedy of remarriage," about couples, married or not, who separate and then rejoin, finally accepting each other for who and what they are.
Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday (1940), from a Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer script, is a memorable example of such a comedy. Actually a remake of The Front Page (1931), itself based on the highly popular stage comedy that Hecht wrote with Charles MacArthur, with the gender of one character switched, His Girl Friday traces the hilarious recourtship and remarriage of a newspaper editor (Cary Grant) and ace reporter (Rosalind Russell). In the opening scene, Russell barges into ex-husband Grant's office to announce she is marrying a man from Albany, New York (Ralph Bellamy). As they share a meal and begin to fight in familiar ways again, we (and then they) realize they cannot live without each other. What Hecht and Lederer do so well in this take on screwball comedy is demonstrate both how the second time around can be even more fun and how two people can be drawn closer to each other by sharing their profession, in this case the newspaper business.
The ending has the perfect ironic wink that comedies of remarriage tend to have. Hildy and Walter have just been remarried and are about to take their honeymoon. (Part of what broke them apart to begin with was that they never had a first honeymoon, because of deadlines they had to meet on big stories.) Just as they are leaving for that long-postponed time together alone, the phone rings. Another big story is breaking: they look at each other, smile, and there is no doubt this time. The honeymoon will have to wait, once more! This time, however, they joyfully go off to cover it together. An embrace ending with a wry and knowing "we've been there before" smile.
Stretching the Boundaries of Screwball
The adaptability and flexibility of the genre appears endless. Consider two examples:
John Huston's The African Queen (1951), with a script by Huston and James Agee from the E. M. Forster novel, thrusts Humphrey Bogart (who won an Oscar for his performance) and Katharine Hepburn together in World War I Africa. He is the gin-guzzling Canadian adventurer and man of the world; she is the completely innocent sister of a frustrated British missionary (Robert Morley), who dies of a stroke once the Germans burn his church and the African village. Forced to flee with Bogart, Hepburn comes into her own and matches Bogart's worldweary cynicism with her single-minded anarchistic energy and true derring-do. Hepburn is transformed by her circumstances and the challenge of the African river in a small boat, while Bogart is transformed by his contact with Hepburn, who leads him to give up booze and attempt, against his better judgment, to attack with a homemade torpedo the German gunboat patrolling the large lake at the end of the river.
Huston and team push the boundaries of screwball by mixing in action, history and adventure, and by placing the whole unfolding romance in Africa. He also took a chance by making it a romance of a couple over forty! The results are still fresh, and who can forget the look of pure rapture on Hepburn's face as she steers them through battering rapids, the surprise embrace and kiss once they survive the rapids, and the wonderfully ironic ending as they are married by the German officer on the gunboat, who having condemned them to death as spies, ends by saying, "I declare you man and wife, now proceed with the execution." Of course they survive, and they succeed in the torpedoing of the ship. This romance was made, if not in heaven, in the leech-infested waters of the Belgian Congo.
Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy (1997) pushes the genre further than it has ever gone in treating bisexuality. We should mention that one hit of 1997, My Best Friend's Wedding, was memorable in large part because of Julia Roberts's friendship with her gay editor, George (Rupert Everett), who helps her through the ordeal of her best (male) friend's wedding. But Kevin Smith, who gave us the no-budget surprise independent hit Clerks (1994), absolutely follows the premise that in love, war and comedy nothing is sacred, as straight cartoonist Holden McNeil (Ben Affleck) falls for lesbian Alyssa Jones (Joey Lauren Adams). What follows is magnificent dialogue and scenes that are very funny and very real at the same time, as Holden goes through every possible mental and emotional state in dealing with Alyssa as well as his own identity and sexuality. The film reflects the complexity not just of any relationship, but of changing American times as well. Not a perfect film by any measure, but an exciting and daring one, and admirable for that alone.
The ending, in which they finally do not get together again but become more caring and wiser individuals because of their encounter, is perfect.
Close-up on Screwball: As Good As It Gets
As Good As It Gets is not a pale contemporary imitation of a golden thirties screwball comedy. It is an absolutely vibrant, outrageously timely take on postmodern end-of-the-century romance that thrives in part because it functions knowingly and joyfully within the tradition of screwball comedy. James L. Brooks and Mark Andrus practice what I have urged throughout: they know their comic history and traditions, and they allow themselves the total freedom to explode mimes of any sort that pleases them.
Let us run the film through the basic screwball codes to see how it plays creatively with the tradition:
i. The "lovers" come from different backgrounds and social classes. Jack Nicholson plays Melvin, a rich snob living cut off from the "real" world, and Helen Hunt plays Carol, a working woman, simple but very smart.
2. One of the "lovers" is a screwball. Look at Melvin's trail of nutty acts and his list of quirky beliefs and habits, beginning when he drops a poodle
down a garbage chute and continuing with his obsessive-compulsive behavior about eating, washing and walking along the sidewalk (avoid all cracks!)-and also his acts of generosity, such as providing a top specialist on a house call for Carol's asthmatic son.
3. The female character is as bright as or brighter than the male lead. Richard Corliss's description of Helen Hunt is also a summary of Carol in the film:
She doesn't ratchet her I.Q. down 15 or 20 points to make the boys feel better. She refuses to play the little girl or the doomed diva. Or the perfect woman, either, for she knows that flourishing at the end of this millennium is an art and a craft, and not many are up to it. But she has the grit to try. She attracts men, and appeals to other women, by being her own complicated self. Determined woman, staunch friend, strong mate: the sensible siren [emphasis added].
("Mad about Her")
Carol is the one who finally cuts through Melvin's defensive curmudgeon posture and is clever enough both to handle him and to appreciate his "screwball" humanity inside.
4. The film captures the complexity of relationships caught between passion and idealized love. Nothing would seem more unlikely than the coming together of these two. She has been badly wounded in love and has a child to prove it and to provide for. He was damaged long in the past, but it is to Brooks and Andrus's credit that we are never given any simple explanation as to why or how Melvin became such an insult-hurling misanthrope. And yet his fortune has been made writing about idealized love, even if he appears to shun it in his own life. Carol's actions are a winning mess of contradictions as well. One of the best scenes is surely when she runs over to his place in the rain to tell him she will never sleep with him just because he has provided a top specialist for her son. When she finishes her speech at his door, she catches on to what we and Melvin have seen all along: the rain has made her blouse quite transparent. While at first Melvin shows only mild annoyance, he now appears impressed with her vitality and physical beauty.