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THE DESCENT OF WOMAN

Whatever you thought of "Sex and the City 2", one thing is clear: we've come an awful long way, baby, from the dignified wit of the heroines in classic screwball comedies. Remember Katharine Hepburn in "The Philadelphia Story" or Irene Dunne in "Together Again"? Remember Barbara Stanwyck as Sugarpuss O'Shea teaching Gary Cooper to conga in "Ball of Fire"? Or daintily knocking over a rubbish bin in "Meet John Doe"? Compare the comic arsenal of these dames to the final scene of "Sex and the City 2", in which Kim Catrall's Samantha finds herself in comical coitus against the hood of a Hummer while fireworks blast overhead. The vulgarity would be forgivable if the scene were funny. Alas, it was not.

In light of this—what? devolution?—it seems exactly the right moment to cast a glance backward at what exactly those screwball heroines stood for, and for whom they paved the way. Elizabeth Gumport writing in this month's issue of the Believer, does just that in an essay called "Laughing a Lot, and Often Over Nothing Much". She takes as her subject Elaine Dundy, a novelist, free spirit and one-time wife of Kenneth Tynan, and offers an astute (and long overdue) critical appraisal of her work. Dundy, who died of a heart attack in 2008, aged 86, is heralded by Gumport not as the matriarch of chick lit, but as the genre's wicked stepmother.

New York-born and bred, Dundy was a self-proclaimed acolyte of screwball heroines: "I will never forget my utter relief when I first came upon these characters," she wrote. "I knew at once I would have to be like them because I could not be like anyone else." Her first book, "The Dud Avocado", went on to become a bestseller and cult classic. It also earned Dundy the wrath of Tynan. "Except for the screwball comedies," she later wrote, "where women were allowed some equality in regard to jobs, professions, and careers, we females were taught by endless example never to seem to have even the appearance of competing with our husbands."

Though Dundy's vital, flawed heroine in "The Dud Avocado" has been compared to Holly Golightly, Daisy Miller and, indeed, Carrie Bradshaw, she's a far cry from the four caricatures swanning across the screen in "Sex and the City 2". Dundy's girls were messy but they weren't desperate. Most importantly, they had plenty of sass but never edged into diva territory.

Of the characters who populate Dundy's novels, Gumport writes, "Theirs is the talk of the first generation to be raised on talkies, in particular the rapid-fire, ricocheting dialogue of screwball comedies." As in "The Dud Avocado", Gumport's essay departs from the picaresque escapades of the young woman in question to explore larger truths about romance, self-hood, and the importance of strategic pratfalls. "Comedy is serious business," Gumport writes, "for being amused—amusing ourselves—is a way of insisting on ourselves, a way of resisting what is forced upon us. Fun is freedom."

Elizabeth Gumport's "Laughing a Lot, and Often Over Nothing Much" appears in the June issue of the Believer magazine. Gumport has also written about Jane Austen's unwieldy legacy for More Intelligent Life.

~ MOLLY YOUNG