Screwball Comedy: A Genre of Madcap Romance

(Hardback)

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According to Gehring, screwball comedy is a film genre much different from traditional comedic forms--e.g., the antiestablishmentarian antics of the Marx Brothers or W.C. Fields. Gehring places much emphasis on the origins and evolution of the comic anti-hero, and provocatively presents and analyzes the relation between comedy and the anti-hero comedian. The change from the capable to the incompetent comic hero, the author contends, was due to relevance: in a world that is more irrational, the anti-hero faces perpetual frustration. Frank Capra receives much attention.... Among those directors Gehring discusses are Hawks, McCarey, Sturges, and LaCava; among the performers, Grant, Lombard, Dunne, Hepburn, Arthur, Douglas, and MacMurrary.... Public libraries and university collections.-Choice
"According to Gehring, screwball comedy is a film genre much different from traditional comedic forms--e.g., the antiestablishmentarian antics of the Marx Brothers or W.C. Fields. Gehring places much emphasis on the origins and evolution of the comic anti-hero, and provocatively presents and analyzes the relation between comedy and the anti-hero comedian. The change from the capable to the incompetent comic hero, the author contends, was due to relevance: in a world that is more irrational, the anti-hero faces perpetual frustration. Frank Capra receives much attention.... Among those directors Gehring discusses are Hawks, McCarey, Sturges, and LaCava; among the performers, Grant, Lombard, Dunne, Hepburn, Arthur, Douglas, and MacMurrary.... Public libraries and university collections."-Choice