ABSTRACT
The screwball comedy extends beyond the typical romantic comedy of boy meets girl/boy loses girl/boy gets girl back. Scholar Wes Gehring calls screwball comedy the old "boy meets girl" formula gone topsy-turvy. Where the romantic comedy brings in the bridegroom to woo and win his bride, even as Jesus loved the Church, the screwball comedy traces the uneven trajectory of love between peculiar people. The primary differences between the romantic and screwball comedies are at least fivefold. If one wanted to trip into the Elysian Fields of comic romance, one need travel no further than one of the grand masters of screwball comedies, writer/director Preston Sturges. The screwball comedy opens up romantic relationships and invites its participants to laugh with even more hilarity, even as the lovers get old and cranky. Chesterton, in another moment of utmost clarity, remarked that there is in screwball comedies, nothing is simultaneously so comic, so humiliating, and so wonderful.
