“After all, in moments of quiet, I’m strangely drawn toward you, but – well, there haven’t been any quiet moments.”

Bringing Up Baby is regarded as one of the best screwball comedies ever made, but its reception upon its release was lukewarm at best — it flopped at the box office. Director Howard Hawks blamed the initial failure on the zaniness of its characters: “There were no normal people in it. Everyone you met was a screwball… they were all way off center.” In the same interview, Hawks noted, however, that famous silent film comedian “Harold Lloyd told me … that he thought it was the best-constructed comedy he had ever seen.” History is more on the side of Lloyd than on the audience of the time.

The zaniness of the characters in Bringing Up Baby is far from a fault. It’s what makes the movie so hilarious and enjoyable to watch, and what makes us accept the ridiculousness of the plot at every turn. The characters are unpredictable, so the randomness of the scenarios that they find themselves in makes sense, after a fashion.

Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn’s character), for example, is introduced to us as a totally carefree — and scattered — spirit. We meet her on the golf course, where she switches golf balls halfway through a hole. Then, she drives herself home in a car she steals without guilt or shame — after scraping it up against another car while absentmindedly driving it away from the course. She’s the type of person who walks up to a stranger’s table in a fancy restaurant and grabs an olive off of their plate without asking to show them a trick that she learned minutes prior. She’s impulsive and chaotic and does whatever she wants when she wants it.

Knowing that that’s who she is, we don’t question events later as she reveals that she’s housing a leopard named Baby in her Manhattan apartment, or when she steals David’s (Cary Grant’s) clothes while he’s showering in her aunt’s home in Connecticut for no reason other than she thinks that it’s funny and she wants him to stay there with her.

It’s true that including a “normal” character in an absurd story is usually a good idea; it gives the audience a “relatable” person to latch on to and helps us see ourselves in the story. But Bringing Up Baby doesn’t need more normalcy… for a few reasons. First, to introduce a “normal” character meaningfully would just slow down the pace, and second, a grounded character acting as a proxy for the audience would pass too much judgment on the other characters’ actions, which would cut into the comedy and fun of it all. Third, enough judgment is passed on David and Susan by the supporting cast that we’re fully reminded of the absurdity of what is unfolding before us.

Lastly — and most importantly — the movie sets up what the alternative to these zany shenanigans would look like for our protagonist David Huxley in its opening scene… and we know immediately that we don’t want that to be his reality. In just a few brief lines of dialogue, David and his fiancée Alice are established as a boring, uptight couple — “As soon as we’re married, we’re coming directly back here and you’re going on with your work,” Alice tells him, shutting down the possibility of a honeymoon outright so that they can focus on finishing a brontosaurus skeleton that David has been constructing for four years. She doesn’t want their marriage getting them into any “domestic entanglements of any kind.” Realizing the gravity of that statement, he meekly protests, saying that he might want to have children. Alice points to the brontosaurus and earnestly replies, “This will be our child.”

“I see our marriage purely as a dedication to your work.”

Alice, like the rest of the characters, may be just slightly “off center,” to quote Hawks. But what she represents — a mundane, cold, methodical life without spontaneity or play — isn’t zany at all. This conversation is dire enough for us to immediately dislike her.

David, meanwhile, is portrayed as innocent and excitable; he’s the kind of man who jumps up and down with giddiness about the prospect of getting a dinosaur bone in the mail. We instantly like him.

These first two character impressions are all that we need to get into the story. We’re immediately invested and rooting for David to get all of the adventure that he deserves out of life, even if it means upsetting his prudish, dispassionate fiancée.

Alice is rigid and proper. Susan is devilishly fun. Katharine Hepburn’s performance is joyful; there are moments when it seems like she nearly breaks character laughing because she’s having so much fun. Virginia Walker (as Alice) does not have those moments, to say the least.

These two women represent a choice for David — not just in terms of who he’d want to be in a relationship with long-term, but in terms of how he wants to live his life. The entire story therefore is about David grappling with this decision: he is naturally inclined to crave stability and give 100% to his work, but he’s drawn toward a life of spontaneity and excitement. The choices are personified in the characters of Alice and Susan. His inner conflict is externalized as humorous indecision and panic at every turn.

The scenarios that David finds himself in with Susan derive from this conflict and these character traits. And so, even when silliness occurs, the plot still feels cohesive and intentional.

It’s joyful to watch him live a little for once, so we go along for the ride.

In the end, we’re happy to see the symbol of his old life come crashing down, and to see him not care about it.

Bringing Up Baby contains so many memorable, hilarious sequences — the ripped clothes in the restaurant, the chicken feathers after the accident, David and Susan singing to get Baby off of the roof at night, “Because I just went gay all of a sudden!”, the dry wit of exchanges like Susan and David debating whether or not Baby and the dog George will get along.

The dialogue, too, is brilliantly crafted not just for its wit, but for its abundance of double entendres; “Alice, I think this one must belong in the tail” / “Nonsense. You tried it in the tail yesterday, and it didn’t fit,” may very well have been intended to be about more than a brontosaurus bone, and that’s just in the opening scene.

The film may have not been a success upon release — at least not in a financial capacity — but we return to it almost 100 years later because of the joy of its absurdity, the intelligence of its comedy deriving from the main character’s internal conflict, and its immense wit. Bringing Up Baby is, still, an absolute pleasure to watch.