Bringing Up Baby to His Girl Friday to Some Like It Hot. The 1930s-40s American comedy form that talked faster, ran longer, and stayed sharper than anything since.
Screwball comedy is the American comedy form that emerged in the early 1930s after the Production Code restricted explicit sexual content. The form's specific gift was speed — dialogue delivered at roughly twice the contemporary rate, with overlapping speech, witty repartee, and verbal-spar work that the censors could not easily object to because it was, on the surface, simply fast conversation.
The genre is, by general critical consensus, one of the highest-functioning comedy traditions in cinema history. The films from its peak (roughly 1934-1944) hold up better than almost any other comedy era because their humour is structural rather than topical — the comedic substance is the characters' specific verbal-and-physical relationships rather than period-specific gags.
The two directors most-identified with the form are Howard Hawks (Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, Ball of Fire, To Have and Have Not, I Was a Male War Bride) and Preston Sturges (The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, Hail the Conquering Hero). Hawks's films tend to be slightly more visually-controlled; Sturges's films tend to be slightly more verbally-baroque. Both directors were working at the upper level of the studio system and were given significant creative latitude.
The directors produced, between them, roughly half of the screwball canon. Other major contributors: Frank Capra (It Happened One Night), George Cukor (The Philadelphia Story, Holiday), Mitchell Leisen (Easy Living, Midnight), Ernst Lubitsch (Trouble in Paradise, To Be or Not to Be), and Leo McCarey (The Awful Truth).
The genre's last canonical entry is, by general critical consensus, Some Like It Hot (1959). The film is in some ways a late-period screwball — the rapid dialogue, the verbal repartee between Lemmon and Curtis, the wedding-themed third act — but it operates under significantly relaxed Production Code conditions. The gender-comedy material at the film's centre would not have been possible in the genre's 1930s peak.
The form has been revived periodically since (Peter Bogdanovich's What's Up, Doc? in 1972, the Coen brothers' Intolerable Cruelty in 2003, various Wes Anderson films in their dialogue patterns), but the revivals are recognisably revivals — homages to a form whose original commercial-aesthetic conditions no longer exist. Screwball is, structurally, a 1930s-1940s American form.