[1] The play's single set is the dingy press room of Chicago's Criminal Courts Building, overlooking the gallows behind the Cook County Jail.

The reporter realizes this bewildered, harmless little man was railroaded — just to help the crooked mayor and sheriff pick up enough black votes to win re-election.

[6] The play popularized the image of American journalists as fast-talking, wisecracking "hard-boiled" types, excessively fond of alcohol and hard living in general, who would go to any lengths to get a story on the front page of their newspapers.

[8] The character of Williams also was at least partially based on the case of Thomas Mooney, a radical leftist sentenced to death on the basis of questionable evidence.

Commenting on the play's seeming veracity, New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson wrote, "The authors and directors have packed an evening with loud, rapid, coarse and unfailing entertainment.

The 1986–87 revival was produced at the Vivian Beaumont at Lincoln Center, directed by Jerry Zaks and starred Richard Thomas as Hildy and John Lithgow as Burns.

[16] John Guare's theatrical adaptation of the film His Girl Friday was produced at The La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, California, in 2013, directed by Christopher Ashley.

[24] John Varley's 1991 science fiction novel Steel Beach takes the story — and the change of sex — to another level; the plot includes a sex-change by a male reporter named Hildy Johnson.

Additionally, Hecht and MacArthur's story for the 1939 film Gunga Din recycles their basic plot of trying to dissuade someone from leaving his job, in this case Douglas Fairbanks Jr.'s character attempting to resign his post in the British army and comrades Cary Grant and Victor McLaglen conniving to prevent it.

[26] Set among the highly competitive banana plantations of Central America, it stars James Cagney as the invaluable employee, Pat O'Brien as the amoral boss who will stop at nothing to keep him from leaving, George Tobias as a revolutionary awaiting the firing squad, and Ann Sheridan as love interest, with snappy dialogue provided by Richard Macaulay and Jerry Wald.