How to Use screwball in a Sentence

screwball

1 of 2 noun

• She really did that? What a screwball.
• It’s sort of a screwball thriller, if there is such a thing.
  — Brian Tallerico, Vulture, 25 Feb. 2021
• Aronson has the look of a guy who can do a good screwball turn.
  — New York Times, 11 June 2019
• Henderson could play the clown, but was not a screwball.
  — Bill Swank, San Diego Union-Tribune, 3 July 2023
• Castillo struck out Brito on a wicked full-count screwball.
  — Bill Plaschke, Los Angeles Times, 8 July 2022
• But this screwball switcheroo still has a long way to go before it’s a safe Broadway bet.
  — Frank Rizzo, Variety, 7 June 2022
• Brewer had a vicious screwball and ended up striking out the side to earn the win.
  — Houston Mitchell, Los Angeles Times, 19 Sep. 2022
• Wilder made that formula his own in his great string of black comedies and screwball tragedies.
  — Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 8 Aug. 2022
• These scenes belong in some 1940s screwball romance, with Cary Grant as the clueless male.
  — Celia Storey, Arkansas Online, 29 May 2023
• This could be the political screwball true story that HBO hasn't had in quite a while.
  — Evan Romano, Men's Health, 28 Jan. 2022
• As in a classic screwball comedy, the contrivances were part of the pleasure.
  — Rachel Syme, The New Yorker, 19 June 2023
• In a game against Joliet Catholic on May 7 last season, Kaiser stood in the batter's box as a screwball approached home plate.
  — Rich Mayor, chicagotribune.com, 9 May 2017
• His best pitch was a screwball, which breaks in the opposite direction from that of a curveball.
  — BostonGlobe.com, 4 June 2021
• Robert Castillo was dispatched to teach Valenzuela the screwball.
  — Los Angeles Times, 15 Sep. 2021
• Their exchanges have real swing to them, a screwball quality with a punk twist.
  — Jennifer Senior, The Atlantic, 9 Feb. 2022
• The screwball has fallen out of favor with most modern-day pitchers.
  — Washington Post, 2 June 2021
• The jokes, one-liners and gags come fast and furious in Preston Stuges’ madcap 1942 romp, one of the all-time great screwball comedies.
  — Los Angeles Times, 9 June 2022
• Guests are constantly looking around them, and often above them, to pick up on the screwball hijinks.
  — Todd Martens Game Critic, Los Angeles Times, 16 Apr. 2021
• More than anything, though, this wholesome-romance moment reminds me of the vogue for screwball comedies in the 1930s.
  — Time, 11 Aug. 2023
• This is pretty close to a classic screwball-romance equation, of course.
  — John Defore, The Hollywood Reporter, 13 Mar. 2022
• It's very inspired by the screwball comedies of that period.
  — Devan Coggan, EW.com, 2 Nov. 2022
• Michael Cohen is, famously, a lowlife and screwball who’s made his living as an enforcer, liar and thug.
  — Peggy Noonan, WSJ, 28 Feb. 2019
• Seehorn and Odenkirk had great chemistry, less romcom than screwball.
  — Darren Franich, EW.com, 16 Aug. 2022
• Last fall, UO clocked her screwball at 68 miles per hour last fall -- roughly equivalent to the reaction time of a mid-90s pitch in baseball.
  — Andrew Greif, OregonLive.com, 1 June 2017
• It is described as a screwball whodunnit set in the upstairs, downstairs, and backstairs of the White House, among the eclectic staff of the world’s most famous mansion.
  — Joe Otterson, Variety, 7 Mar. 2022
• The small-town Mexican kid with the funny delivery and vicious screwball overcame the odds again.
  — Los Angeles Times, 4 Feb. 2023
• Though elements of these movies live on, classic screwball comedies fizzled out by the mid-1940s.
  — Leah Asmelash, CNN, 29 Aug. 2021
• All of them get the chance to show their moxie via Sorkin’s patented rat-a-tat, screwball dialogue, and several of them get a righteous speech or two.
  — David Fear, Rolling Stone, 10 Dec. 2021
• Why does screwball comedy paired with smart writing feel like such a rarity in TV comedies at the moment?
  — Nina Metz, San Diego Union-Tribune, 10 Sep. 2023
• Both are lightning-fast actors, delivering the spiked screwball banter and — important for this movie — the toxic insults with airy aplomb.
  — Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 21 Dec. 2023

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screwball

2 of 2 adjective

• Which is when a screwball 1920s silent comedy breaks out.
  — Sam Eifling, Popular Mechanics, 6 May 2016
• The screwball shifts in tone somehow cohere into a biting parable of haves and have-nots.
  — The Economist, 15 Feb. 2020
• Cecile Monteyne draws on the screwball comedies of the past to bring out the laughs as Julia Budder, the party's hostess and dilettante producer of the new show.
  — NOLA.com, 12 June 2017
• Starring Bob Hope and Marilyn Maxwell, this screwball comedy is based off the short story of the same name.
  — Lilah Ramzi, Vogue, 6 Dec. 2018
• Cutting between this sequence and Millie and Obie’s screwball meet-cute over handcuffs is jarring at best.
  — Katie Walsh, kansascity, 26 Apr. 2018
• The Gay Bride: Carole Lombard stars as a sharp-tongued gold digger in this 1934 gangster screwball comedy.
  — Chris Ball, cleveland.com, 22 Apr. 2018
• Sturges’s best cinematic years line up almost perfectly with the heyday of the screwball comedy, that sparkling genre in which the battle of the sexes ends in a draw, or even a TKO for the woman in the ring.
  — Dennis Drabelle, Washington Post, 24 Oct. 2019
• For what seems like the umpteenth time, Schumer plays a crass woman whose life is weighed down by drinks and bad decisions, while Hawn, a screwball legend in her own right, seems to exist only to be Schumer’s straight woman.
  — Brian Truitt, USA TODAY, 11 May 2017
• Here's hoping Hart brings his trademark style of screwball humor but pairs it with some serious talk about changing the industry.
  — Katherine J. Igoe, Marie Claire, 5 Dec. 2018
• Viewing the Olympics through the prism of style can be a screwball proposition, since the pinnacle of sport is also pretty reliably the height of sartorial kitsch.
  — Guy Trebay, New York Times, 21 Feb. 2018
• At first glance, Renee might suggest one of Schumer's regulation girls gone wild, a screwball screw-up who blots out her disappointments with men and booze.
  — Justin Chang, latimes.com, 19 Apr. 2018
• Even that was more of a high-brow dramedy than straightforward screwball comedy.
  — Joanna Robinson, HWD, 3 Dec. 2017
• The best comic material in Last Christmas is of the sad screwball variety, as Kate bumbles through her work, home, and romantic life.
  — David Sims, The Atlantic, 6 Nov. 2019
• Reason to watch: You’re missing a rag-tag, screwball bunch of characters forced to play basketball against a vastly more talented squad.
  — Ryan Ford, Detroit Free Press, 14 Mar. 2020
• By the 1930s the grande dame was already becoming an archetype—the stock character duchess harrumphing through Agatha Christie mysteries and screwball comedies, clinging to a bygone era.
  — Sadie Stein, Town & Country, 20 Sep. 2016
• Jane, her abuela Alba, and her mother, Xiomara, relax by watching telenovelas, just as the Gilmore girls once watched screwball comedies.
  — Steven Strogatz, The New Yorker, 6 Mar. 2018
• This movie keeps a lot of balls in the air: generational and cultural conflict, hospital drama, screwball banter—and only rarely lets one drop.
  — Dana Stevens, Slate Magazine, 15 June 2017
• McDonagh is often at his best with quickfire banter, screwball comedy with a screw loose, and in the hands and mouths of Conway and Walley the pair's dialogue exchanges really sing.
  — Leslie Felperin, The Hollywood Reporter, 5 July 2018
• Some critics have applauded the movie’s screwball comedy and overly salacious scenes, but others weren’t impressed.
  — Sara Aridi, New York Times, 27 Mar. 2018
• Besides singing in one-person cabaret shows, Cooper has a particular gift for screwball comedy.
  — David Patrick Stearns, Philly.com, 20 July 2017
• Excepting for an expansive, deeply screwball interpretive dance that occupies the entirety of the stage, Sharp offers a masters’ thesis in the less-is-more school of acting.
  — Dominic P. Papatola, Twin Cities, 18 Aug. 2019
• Fee looked at other adaptations -- including Kate Hamill's pared-down, screwball retelling with a handful of actors playing multiple roles.
  — Andrea Simakis, cleveland.com, 4 Feb. 2018
• A beach read — if your beach has wifi — and very contemporary screwball comedy, this is a cheerful satire in which three people in Manhattan’s high-tech community collide.
  — Moira MacDonald, The Seattle Times, 16 May 2017
• But, when the coronavirus outbreak sent large swaths of the U.S. into self-quarantine last month, Jordan began recording slapdash, screwball videos from a spartan Airbnb in his home town, and noticed his following balloon.
  — Rachel Syme, The New Yorker, 6 Apr. 2020
• His career spanned documentaries, screwball comedies and tales of social justice.
  — Free Press News Services, Detroit Free Press, 26 Apr. 2017
• This romantic screwball comedy concerns an overworked employee, Billie, who quits her job — just before her nuptials with her wife-to-be — and concocts a seemingly hopeless plan to make an app that will pay the bills.
  — David Lewis, San Francisco Chronicle, 14 June 2018
• But after a pair of reporters (a human man in a pin-striped suit and a pig in a wedding dress, speaking like lovers in a classic screwball comedy) discover BoJack’s hand in Sarah Lynn’s death, his new stability begins to crumble.
  — Rachel Syme, The New Yorker, 5 Feb. 2020
• Stewart and Balinska have an infectious chemistry, while Scott demonstrates her skill for screwball comedy.
  — Tribune News Service, cleveland, 12 Nov. 2019
• A former couple’s chance meeting sets a masquerade in motion in a screwball comedy by Mexican writer-director Manolo Caro.
  — Sheri Linden, The Hollywood Reporter, 26 Aug. 2017
• And then there’s his inborn ear for every shade of human babble, here a transcendent four-hander, there a screwball travelogue, everywhere argot and idiolect and argument.
  — New York Times, 23 Apr. 2020

Last Updated: 5 Sep 2024