Pre-Code Hollywood - Comedy

Comedy

In the harsh economic times of the early Depression, films and performers often featured an alienated, cynical, and socially dangerous comic style. As with political films, comedy softened with the election of FDR and the optimism of the New Deal. Characters in the Pre-Code era frequently engaged in comedic duels of escalating sexual innuendo. In Employee's Entrance, a woman enters the office of another scoundrel played by Warren William and he remarks, "Oh, it's you—I didn't recognize you with all your clothes on." Racial stereotypes were usually employed when ethnic characters appeared. Blacks in particular were usually the butt of the wisecrack, never the author. The most acknowledged black comedian was Stepin Fetchit, whose slow-witted comedic character was only meant to be successful in an unintentional manner, with himself as the punchline.

The New York stage was filled with ribald humor and sexually offensive comedy. And when movie producers started to put wisecracks in their sound pictures, they sought New York performers. Popular comics such as Mae West and the Marx Brothers got their start on Broadway in front of live audiences. Censors complained when they had to keep up with the deluge of jokes in pictures in the early 1930s, some of which were designed to go over their heads. The comic banter of some early sound films was rapid-fire, non-stop, and frequently exhausting for the audience by the final reel.

Mae West had already established herself as a comedic performer when her 1926 Broadway show Sex made national headlines. She was tried and convicted of indecency by the New York City District Attorney, and served eight days in prison. West carefully constructed a stage persona and carried it over into her interviews and personal appearances. Despite her voluptuous physique, most of her appeal lay in her suggestive manner. She became a wordsmith in the art of the come-on and the seductive line, and despite her obvious appeal to male audiences, was popular with women as well. Over the cries of film censors, West got her start in the film Night After Night (1932), which starred George Raft and Constance Cummings, as a Texas Guinan-esque supporting character. She agreed to appear in the film only after producers agreed to let her write her own lines. In West's first line on film, after a hat check girl remarks "Goodness, what beautiful diamonds", West replies, "Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie." Raft, who had wanted Texas Guinan herself for the role that went to West, later wrote, "In this picture, Mae West stole everything but the cameras." She went on to make She Done Him Wrong in 1933, which became a huge box office hit, grossing $3 million against a $200,000 budget, and then nine months later wrote and starred in I'm No Angel. She became such a success that her career saved Paramount from financial ruin.

The arrival of sound film created a new job market for writers of screen dialogue. Many newspaper journalists moved to California and become studio-employed screenwriters. This resulted in a series of fast-talking comedy pictures featuring newsmen. The Front Page, later re-made as the much less cynical and more sentimental His Girl Friday in 1940, was adapted from the Broadway play by Chicago newsmen, and Hollywood screenwriters, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. It was based on Hecht's experiences working as a reporter for the Chicago Daily Journal.

The Marx Brothers had been stage performers since the early 1900s. By the 1930s, their act consisted of wisecracking leader Groucho, the chronically silent Harpo, the overly ethnic Chico, and the strangely normal Zeppo. The plot of the seminal comedy Duck Soup (1933) is quite convoluted. Groucho's plebeian character is named king of the fictional Freedonia, and he is pursued by two bumbling spies played by Chico and Harpo. Zeppo plays a typically normal secretary. Groucho's con artist character leads Freedonia into war with neighboring Sylvania. The plot essentially exists to provide a framework to fit several comedic bits and long sketches into. The film was unsuccessful at the box office, and the anarchic zaniness and subversive nature of the comedy in the film would be unmatched in the brothers' post-Code work, which was more standardly burlesque.