The 15 Best Screwball Comedies Of All Time

The screwball comedy has a unique place in Hollywood history: When times were tough, audiences sought escapism. What was less interesting to audiences during the Great Depression was celebrations of wealth and extravagance, as the purse strings were tighter than ever before. Enter the screwball, comedies that regularly delighted audiences by transporting them with ridiculous and often nonsensical scenarios featuring the brightest stars of the day. Performers like Carole Lombard, Gene Kelly, Claudette Colbert, Jean Arthur, Irene Dunn, and Gary Cooper regularly lit up the screen. The genre exploded in the 1930s, and while there's no consensus as to the first screwball, "Twentieth Century" and "It Happened One Night," both released in 1934, are often credited with initiating the genre.

Filled with piercing class criticism, relentless optimism, and high spirits, screwball comedies dominated the 1930s and early 1940s. Directors like Preston Sturges, Ernst Lubitsch, and Howard Hawks made many great screwball comedies, and while the output of the genre has decreased massively since the 1940s, there were still great screwballs made later. In celebration of one of cinema's most delightful genres, here are the 15 best screwball comedies of all time.

Frank Capra's "It Happened One Night" has become the stuff of legends. It was the first film in Oscar history to win all of the five biggest awards — Best (Adapted) Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and, of course, Best Picture. In the Academy's 90-plus-year history, only two other films have accomplished the same feat. The movie stars screen icons Claudette Colbert as Ellie Andrews, an heiress on the run from her father so she can pursue romance against his wishes, and Clark Gable as Peter Warne, a recently axed newspaperman who finds Ellie on the run and pursues her, hoping for the exclusive story on her disappearance.

A key component of the screwball comedy often finds people from different classes encountering each other, and that all starts with "It Happens One Night." The film's influence is extraordinary: In one key sequence, Peter undresses in front of Ellie, and it's revealed that he isn't wearing an undershirt. This reportedly sent shockwaves through America, and there were reports that the undershirt industry was left devastated as a result. Though there isn't actually evidence of this, it was a widespread belief at the time, speaking to the film's incredible impact. While the film gets plenty of deserved credit for being charming and hilarious, what it doesn't get nearly enough attention for is just how beautiful it is. Joseph Walker's cinematography is breathtaking, and nighttime sequences sparkle with expressive and dynamic lighting.

Many great comedies begin with a meet-cute: a quirky occurrence that causes our two eventual lovers to meet. "Easy Living" takes off with something of a meet-fall, after an extravagant fur coat seemingly falls out of the sky onto the unwitting Mary Smith (Jean Arthur). The coat did indeed come from above, and it's thrown off the balcony of an extravagant New York City penthouse by J.B. Ball (Edward Arnold), one of the wealthiest men in America. After a heated argument with his son, John Ball Jr. (Ray Milland), he discovers his wife spent an eye-watering $58,000 on the sable coat, and it's not long before the coat falls onto Mary. It's such an exquisite coat that everyone seems to know it was purchased by Ball and assumes that Mary is his mistress. Suddenly, she's treated like the wealthiest woman in town.

Mitchell Leisen is a director whose work is rarely mentioned amongst the greats, but he's a vastly underrated filmmaker. As a gay man, he was also a trailblazer, and his relationship with Billy Daniels was something of an open secret in Hollywood. Working off a script by the tremendous Preston Sturges (who directed multiple films on this very list), Leisen had a great handle on the outrageous material, making a rather ludicrous farce feel completely believable. "Easy Living" is certainly one of the screwiest screwball comedies you can find, with some wonderfully choreographed hijinks — especially the fantastic automat sequence — paired with Sturges' whipsmart dialogue.

Legendary four-time Oscar-winning actress Katharine Hepburn shines as the madcap clutz Susan Vance in Howard Hawks' masterful "Bringing Up Baby." Susan is your prototypical screwball dame: a free spirit, rather absentminded, and delightful, delivered with a knowing wink that someone like Hepburn brings with such effortlessness. David Huxley (Cary Grant) is a scientist attempting to bring together the skeleton of a brontosaurus over the last several years, and finds himself one bone short, causing him great stress. With just hours to go until his wedding, he meets Susan, and his life will never be the same again. I'd say more about the plot, but if you haven't seen it, the surprises of the film are more than worth experiencing naturally. (Let's just say, the titular baby isn't a baby at all.)

The cast is uniformly terrific, and Grant plays the straight-man to Hepburn's kooky heiress, though he certainly gets his moments to shine. The image of his character wearing a fluffy robe while jumping in the air is permanently etched in my mind, and it deserves to be in yours, too.

There's an incredible true story behind "The Philadelphia Story," surrounding the extraordinary star, Katharine Hepburn. In the late '30s, the actress — who had already won her first Oscar — was called "box office poison" by the Independent Theatre Owners Of America. Hepburn didn't sit back quietly at the report. She took things into her own hands by exiting her RKO contract, and, after starring in the hit Broadway play "The Philadelphia Story" — which she helped finance — Hepburn obtained the film rights for the story. She got the rights via an affair with Howard Hughes, which allowed her to take creative control, bringing on dear friend George Cukor to direct, and attaching herself to the lead role. The gamble paid off beautifully, as Hepburn's performance as Tracy Lord is quite possibly her most memorable role of all. As you can see, Hepburn wasn't just an actress; she was a fearless pioneer and trailblazer.

The film stars Hepburn alongside fellow screen legends Jimmy Stewart (who won his only Oscar for the film) and Cary Grant. Fuelled by a wondrous screenplay co-written by Donald Ogden Stewart, "The Philadelphia Story" finds Hepburn's Tracy Lord, a big-time socialite up against her ex-husband (Grant) whose keen to upend her upcoming nuptials, and a tabloid reporter (Stewart) sent to cover the much talked about the wedding. Cukor's film is fast-talking, wise-cracking, and a sumptuous delight that stands as one of cinema's great romances.

While stars like Carole Lombard and Claudette Colbert took the reigns of the screwball in the 1930s, Barbara Stanwyck helped usher the genre into the 1940s. She's absolutely, positively divine in "The Lady Eve," co-written and directed by Preston Sturges. Despite considerable censorship in 1940s Hollywood, Sturges' sly script manages to subtly circumvent expectations, thereby allowing one of the sexier films of the era to get through censors. Just watch the scene where Stanwyck's Eve brings Charles (Henry Fonda) back to her cabin, and he becomes intoxicated by her perfume. "You ought to be kept in a cage," Eve nimbly remarks as Charles seems unable to keep his hands off of her.

The fiery chemistry between Fonda and Stanwyck informs much of "The Lady Eve." While Charles, heir to a significant fortune, finds himself irrepressibly drawn to Eve, her name is actually Jean Harrington, a con artist looking to make away with his fortune. As Jean, her advances are spurned, but when she returns as Lady Eve, Charles finds himself unable to resist. Famed critic Andrew Sarris famously defined screwball comedy as a "sex comedy without sex," and that's rarely more evident than in "The Lady Eve."

Screwball comedies are generally considered light, fluffy affairs that don't require much in the way of introspective thought, and that's certainly a great deal of their charm. In 1942, Ernst Lubitsch gave us "To Be or Not to Be," the darkest screwball you can find. The film takes place in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, where an acting troupe, led by Maria (Carole Lombard) and Joseph Tura (Jack Benny), find themselves at the center of an effort by Polish soldiers to take down a German spy. While it doesn't sound like the setup of your typical genre fare, "To Be or Not to Be" is indeed thoroughly screwy, with brilliantly funny dialogue and a luminescent performance from Lombard, along with a career-best turn by Benny.

"To Be or Not to Be" is genuinely brave, personal, and heroic filmmaking. The film openly makes a mockery of Nazi Germany and even Hitler himself in the heat of World War II. The film was directed by Ernst Lubitsch, a German Jewish filmmaker who left Germany to make films in Hollywood in the early 1920s. It was Lubitsch's success in America that led to many other German artists leaving Germany entering Hollywood, especially with the rising threat of Nazism. "To Be or Not to Be" certainly deserves a place alongside Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" as some of the most daring films made in America during the war. It doesn't hurt that it's also darkly comic, romantic, hilarious, and completely winning.

Though the screwball comedy was at its peak from the mid-1930s through the 1940s, Billy Wilder's glorious romp, "Some Like It Hot," released in 1959 and proved the genre was far from dead. The setup is well known: two male musicians (Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis) witness a hit and disguise themselves as women to hide in an all-female band. It's there they meet Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe), and fall head over heels.

"Some Like It Hot" is outrageous in all the best ways, featuring plenty of cross-dressing, and is rife with subtle and explicit references to homosexuality. It's a legitimately groundbreaking film, and one I couldn't believe was made during the era of the Hays Code, in which films had to follow a remarkably strict code of conduct. Homosexuality, amongst other things, was explicitly outlawed. Turns out, "Some Like It Hot" actually played a large role in decimating the power of the Hays Code, which had been weakened somewhat already since its introduction in 1934. Hollywood's relentless self-censorship was coming to an end, and the shift to the MPAA rating system finally came in 1968. To top it all off, "Some Like It Hot" has the single best ending in cinematic history, which, in case you haven't had the immense pleasure of seeing the film before, we won't spoil here.