No, this doesn't mean what you think.
The screwball comedy is a very strict story form, first developed during The Golden Age of Hollywood: a comedy film — usually in black and white, although some were made in color — in which an uptight, repressed, or otherwise stiff character gets broken out of his or her shell by being romantically pursued by a Cloudcuckoolander (or a similar character type). It does not just mean "zany comedy". The Producers, say, is not a screwball comedy, although it is screwy, ballsy, and very funny.
Screwball comedy is characterized by fast-paced repartee, farcical situations, escapist themes, and plot lines involving courtship and marriage and showing the struggle between economic classes. In other words, a parody of a Romantic Comedy.
Compare Farce.
Classic screwball comedy examples include (period 1934-1944):
- The Awful Truth
- Bachelor Mother
- Ball of Fire
- Bringing Up Baby
- Carefree
- Christmas in July
- The Devil and Miss Jones
- The Divorce of Lady X
- The Doctor Takes a Wife
- Double Wedding
- Easy Living
- Four's a Crowd
- The Gay Divorcee
- Hands Across the Table
- His Girl Friday (A remake of the play/movie The Front Page)
- Holiday
- If You Could Only Cook
- It Happened One Night
- It Happened on 5th Avenue
- It's a Wonderful World
- It's Love I'm After
- It Started with Eve
- The Lady Eve
- Libeled Lady
- Love Before Breakfast
- Love Crazy
- Love Is News
- The Mad Miss Manton
- The Major and the Minor
- Midnight
- The Miracle of Morgan's Creek
- The More the Merrier
- Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941)
- Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
- My Favorite Wife
- My Man Godfrey
- Nothing Sacred
- The Palm Beach Story
- The Philadelphia Story
- Shall We Dance?
- Stand-In
- Theodora Goes Wild
- Third Finger, Left Hand
- To Be or Not to Be
- Too Many Husbands
- Top Hat
- Topper, followed by two sequels. Based on two novels by Thorne Smith, who also wrote the book on which I Married a Witch is based.
- True Confession
- Twentieth Century
- You Can't Take It With You
Later and modern examples of screwball comedy include:
- After Hours and Something Wild can be seen as darkly postmodern '80s variations of the genre.
- Arthur (1981) is about equal parts P. G. Wodehouse pastiche and screwball pastiche: With the help of a Servile Snarker valet, a Fun Personified Lonely Rich Kid being pushed into a stuffy Arranged Marriage finds true love with a working-class woman who loves him for himself.
- Benny & Joon: A subversion where both people in the romance are loony, and the straight man whose life is turned upside down is Benny, Joon’s brother.
- Date Night
- Dinner for Schmucks
- Due Date
- The Hangover
- Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle is a non-romantic version, in which uptight, nervous Harold gets broken out of his shell by laid-back Kumar; in other words, if the standard screwball comedy is a parody of the romantic comedy, this one is a parody of a Bromantic Comedy. Also, there's a big cat and everything.
- Housesitter
- The Hudsucker Proxy: Another homage, written and directed by The Coen Brothers.
- I Was a Male War Bride
- Kiss Me, Stupid
- Mans Favorite Sport
- Monkey Business: the Cary Grant/Marilyn Monroe one, not the Marx Brothers one.
- Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day: A modern pastiche of the genre.
- One, Two, Three
- Oscar
- Pineapple Express
- The Proposal: An uptight woman pretends that she is going to marry her relaxed male assistant.
- The Rocky Horror Picture Show and its remake feature a straight-laced couple being seduced by a transsexual, alien scientist.
- Runaway Bride
- The Seven Year Itch
- Some Like It Hot
- A Song Is Born: A 1948 remake of Ball of Fire.
- Spring Dreams: A Japanese version of the format from 1960, with a blustering oaf of a dad, three addle-minded children with complicated love lives, a secretary who makes an Anguished Declaration of Love, bumbling mobsters...
- Switching Channels: A remake of His Girl Friday (which was a remake of The Front Page (1931)).
- Unfaithfully Yours
- What's Up, Doc?: Peter Bogdanovich's homage to the genre.
- Who's That Girl draws heavily from the genre, right down to to the big cat riffing Bringing Up Baby 20 years before Harold and Kumar.
- The Patsy is a 1928 silent comedy starring Marion Davies that can be regarded as a sort of very early prototype for the genre.
- Ticktock, a horror novel by Dean Koontz, is deliberately written as a Screwball Comedy.
- Dharma & Greg is a TV sitcom version.
- My Dark and Fearsome Queen combines Screwball and Black Comedy with fantasy adventure.
- Strangers in Paradise
- John Belushi co-wrote an unproduced screenplay called Noble Rot, a Genre Throwback to the Screwball Comedies of The '30s.
- The manga and its anime adaptation Maison Ikkoku by Rumiko Takahashi features a college student infatuated with a sweet-tempered, yet widowed boarding house manager, while having to put up with the madcap tenants. It's like if Howard Hawks created a manga turned into an anime.
- Gimme, Gimme, Gimme is a non-romantic example (mostly because the male character is homosexual) but has many moments of the two main characters having to Break the Haughty out of the other. The male character is a snobbish middle-class struggling actor, and the female character is an under-class ugly Fag Hag, and the two of them fight over attractive men.
- Schitt's Creek updates many of the tropes from classic screwball comedy, especially in the unfolding romances of Cloud Cuckoolander Alexis and David and the class-comedy that comes from the Roses' fish-out-of-water antics. One key update is allowing pansexual and flamboyant David to be a protagonist, rather than just a Camp Gay side character whose sexuality goes unnamed. David's romance with Patrick, in fact, has all the hallmarks of the genre with David breaking the more uptight Patrick out of his shell and much comic bickering between them. There's even an onscreen Shout-Out to the genre when Moira gives David a pep talk in the voice of a 1930s screwball heroine.
Moira: Ah say, don't be a dewdropper. Throw some concealer under those peepers, make like a swell and go put on the ritz.
