Screwball comedies of the 1930s are hard to judge. They live within their own unique construct where people spout earnest nonsense all at once. Roles are overturned, conventions twisted, love springs from the oddest of places. Lessons are not learned; rather they are flouted.
A first-rate screwball comedy freezes time as brilliantly as a Grecian urn. Check out Bringing Up Baby, My Man Godfrey, and The Lady Eve, all of which spoof familiar romantic tropes, spit dialogue like rappers on Ritalin, and retain the power of laughter nearly a century on.
Then there is You Can’t Take It With You, a rare comedy that won an Academy Award for Best Picture. Even before that happened, it was a Broadway comeback hit for playwrights George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. Here is a screwball comedy where time has not been so kind.
Somewhere in Manhattan, “just around the corner from Columbia University, but don’t go looking for it,” is the home of Martin Vanderhof, a 75-year-old retiree who takes life as it comes. He and his extended family of rat-race refugees follow their own muses, whether by writing bad plays, dancing ineptly, printing up random slogans for fun, raising snakes, or lighting off homemade fireworks.
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| The stage is set for a production of You Can't Take It With You, here performed at Carnegie Mellon University, 2013. Bad dancing by daughter Essie on one end of the stage, bad painting by mother Penny on the other. And it just keeps going on and on... Image from https://www.emilychalmersdesigns.com/you-cant-take-it-with-you-1 |
When his youngest, least eccentric granddaughter is courted by the scion of one of Wall Street’s richest families, she worries how her prospective in-laws will take to her bohemian nestmates. But her attempts to clue her family in on her concern falls on deaf ears:
PENNY: Why don’t you both stay to dinner?
ALICE: No, I want him to take you in easy doses. I’ve tried to prepare him a little, but don’t make it any worse than you can help. Don’t read him any plays, mother, and don’t let a snake bite him, Grandpa, because I like him. And I wouldn’t dance for him, Essie, because we’re going to the Monte Carlo ballet tonight.
GRANDPA: Can’t do anything. [ACT ONE, scene i]
A problem with screwball comedies is they can test the patience of an audience by being more screwy than funny. At least that’s how I find You Can’t Take It With You. Every character has a gimmick, every situation a ready one-liner. So diaphanous are the moments of crisis that they are forgotten upon the entrance of another character.
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| While not as famous as the movie adaptation, You Can't Take It With You has been revived for the stage many times over the decades. Above, James Earl Jones plays Grandpa in a 2014 Broadway production, with Annaleigh Ashford. Image from https://ronfassler.medium.com/you-cant-take-it-with-you-12bcba86a485 |
In one scene, it is revealed Grandpa is in arrears to the Internal Revenue Service for never having paid his income tax. Grandpa has no intention of paying it; it’s a matter of principle:
HENDERSON: How do you think the Government keeps up the Army and Navy? All those battleships…
GRANDPA: Last time we used battleships was in the Spanish-American War, and what did we get out of it? Cuba – and we gave that back. I wouldn’t mind paying if it were something sensible. [ACT ONE, scene i]
A core principle in screwball comedies is keeping the characters in constant motion. For Kaufman and Hart, this is done literally. The oldest granddaughter, Essie, is constantly practicing dance steps while her husband accompanies her on xylophone. A Russian dance instructor hurls the prospective father-in-law to the floor. G-men raid the house because messages being printed inside turn out to be accidentally subversive.
Silly things happen a lot in screwball comedies, but in You Can’t Take It With You what is striking is how much it tries to be a philosophy lesson. The title is its message, or rather a more careless variant on that theme: Live now, enjoy yourself, and don’t worry about tomorrow.
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| Paul (John Middleton) likes blowing things up in the house, which somehow doesn't bother the kittens used by wife Penny (Angela Timberman) as paperweights while writing her plays. A scene performed at the Jungle Theater in Minneapolis, MN. Photo by Kerri Pickett from https://playoffthepage.com/2015/06/review-of-you-cant-take-it-with-you-at-the-jungle-minneapolis-mn/ |
Grandpa is the main expositor of this idea. If you aren’t tuned into his don’t-worry-be-happy mindset, he can be hard to take. Or in my case, is hard to take:
GRANDPA: Oh, the world’s not so crazy, Kolenkhov. It’s the people in it. Life’s pretty simple if you just relax.
KOLENKHOV: How can you relax in times like these?
GRANDPA: Well, if they’d relaxed there wouldn’t be times like these. That’s just my point. Life is simple and kind of beautiful if you let it come to you. [ACT TWO]
Call me a crank, but this is ridiculous. No person who treats life by laughing off pending crisis lasts very long. They sure wouldn’t be living in a big house in Manhattan with no visible means of support other than not paying taxes and selling the odd bottle rocket or two.
If the authors spoofed this point of view, or played against it realistically or even surreally, it might be funny. It wouldn’t be screwball, but the concept seems wrong for screwball, anyway, whose characters are often so rich they can afford to be silly. Instead, the play becomes a forum for Grandpa’s philosophy to be upheld at every turn. Granddaughter Alice may sob when her marriage gets called off, but Grandpa just chuckles and plays darts, knowing it will all work out. Which it does.
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| The original cast of You Can't Take It With You, 1936, with Henry Travers as Grandpa (seated) and Josephine Hull to his left as Penny. According to the site this image came from, the play was conceived that Memorial Day and on stage by December. Image from https://gevajournal.wordpress.com/2012/07/12/grandpas-other-snake/ |
In the final act, he confronts the rich tycoon whose son poor Alice has all but given up hope of marrying, basically pointing out how hollow life is when it is spent working for a living:
GRANDPA: Well, what I feel is that Tony’s too nice a boy to wake up twenty years from now with nothing in his life but stocks and bonds.
KIRBY: How’s that?
GRANDPA (turning to MR. KIRBY): Yes. Mixed up and unhappy, the way you are. [ACT THREE]
The play could be worse. It is, in the form of the 1938 movie, starring James Stewart and directed by Frank Capra. It’s a revered film, one of only two screwball comedies to win the Best Picture Oscar. [The other, It Happened One Night, was also directed by Capra.] The movie doubles down on the lame comedy of the play, puts in some new characters, stages a big jailhouse singalong, and serves it up with generous helpings of speeches glorifying the common man, because it’s a Capra movie.
Collective uplift was never served up so forced.
If you like the movie, there is a strong chance you will like the play, which is a bit less antic (for one thing, you can’t blow up a stage every night like they did with a studio set) and doesn’t push its weak-sauce message nearly so hard. It’s practically staid in comparison.
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| In the movie You Can't Take It With You, James Stewart plays the tycoon's son as a cut-up, who plays tricks on his girlfriend Alice (Jean Arthur, with the sign on her bottom). He's about as obnoxious a character as Stewart ever played. Image from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0030993/ |
The romantic angle is not well done in either movie or play, though in the movie there is some conflict between the lovers. In the play, all Kaufman and Hart can do in the way of fleshing them out is have them coo about plans for seeing each other in every season, i. e. tying the knot. Otherwise, the conversation is basically about her worrying about how his family sees hers, and him convincing her its unimportant.
ALICE: I know they do rather strange things – I never know what to expect next – but they’re gay, and they’re fun, and – I don’t know – there’s a kind of nobility about them. That may sound silly but I mean – the way they just don’t care about things that other people give their whole lives to. They’re – really wonderful, Tony. [ACT THREE]
That
may be the problem with the play; not its zany characters, but the sober way
the authors assure us that these are good people at heart, with all the right
intentions. Other screwball comedies work by getting you to laugh; this one
wants to win you over to its screwy point of view.
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