一见钟情、旋风式的婚姻、分手、离婚、再婚……是什么解释了20世纪30年代好莱坞疯狂喜剧的持久成功？
由喜剧大师（霍克斯、拉卡瓦、莱森、鲁格斯……）执导以及十年来最具标志性的明星（科尔伯特、邓恩、格兰特、赫本……），这些电影设定了未来几十年的浪漫喜剧标准。怪诞喜剧承担了两项具有挑战性的任务：取笑既定的社会规范，破坏对性别角色的刻板描述，提出一种假设男女平等可能性的论述。
格雷戈尔·哈尔布特（Grégoire Halbout）对怪诞喜剧的重新审视提供了这一（子）类型的全面概述，避开了自闭主义的方法，包括以前从未通过怪诞喜剧的视角分析过的“次要”作品。他的书通过大胆的情节、言语幽默和闹剧技巧，解释了这些古怪的故事如何满足了蓬勃发展的美国中产阶级渴望道德自由化的期望。
在卡维尔、奥尔特曼和盖林的工作以及国际和法国学者的基础上，哈布特的调查分三个部分展开。他首先通过对好莱坞怪诞喜剧的社会历史背景的横截面分析和对该类型的深入研究，确立了好莱坞怪诞喜剧的定义。然后，他将怪诞喜剧与制度背景联系起来。一项对档案材料的独家研究解释了一种怪诞美学的出现，其目的是通过转移注意力和缓解情绪的语言和视觉修辞，颠覆1934年《好莱坞生产守则》的禁令。最后，哈尔布特探讨了该流派将浪漫亲密关系置于公共领域和民主辩论中心的社会功能，证实了怪胎怪癖支持美国的创始价值观：言论自由、自由同意和契约参与。
Hollywood Screwball Comedy 1934-1945: Sex, Love, and Democratic Ideals (PDF)
Love at first sight, whirlwind marriages, break-ups, divorces, remarriage… What accounts for the enduring success of the Hollywood madcap comedies of the 1930s?
Directed by masters of comedy (Hawks, LaCava, Leisen, Ruggles…) and featuring the decade’s most iconic stars (Colbert, Dunne, Grant, Hepburn…), these films set romantic comedy standards for decades to come. Screwball comedy embarked on two challenging missions: to poke fun at established social norms and to undermine stereotypical depictions of gender roles, putting forward a discourse that postulated the possibility of equality between men and women.
Grégoire Halbout’s reexamination of screwball comedy provides a comprehensive overview of this (sub)genre, eschewing the auteurist approach and including “minor” works never before analyzed through the screwball lens. His book explains how these screwball stories met the expectations of a booming American middle class eager for the liberalization of morals, with daring plots, verbal humor and slapstick techniques.
Building on the work of Cavell, Altman and Gehring, as well as international and French scholarship, Halbout’s investigation unfolds in three parts. He first establishes a definition of Hollywood screwball comedy through a cross-sectional analysis of its socio-historical context and an in-depth examination of the genre. He then situates screwball comedy in relation to its institutional context. An exclusive study of archival material explains the emergence of a screwball aesthetic meant to subvert the prohibitions of the 1934 Hollywood Production Code through a verbal and visual rhetoric of diversion and mitigation. Finally, Halbout explores the social function of the genre’s placement of romantic intimacy at the center of the public sphere and the democratic debate, confirming that screwball eccentricity upholds America’s founding values: freedom of speech, free consent, and contractual engagement.
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