The genre of the romantic comedy is long lasting and stable, reaching back to Menander, and currently available in great numbers in contemporary screening services. The basic idea of all of them is that a couple meets cute, which can also mean conflicted or troubled by their natures or their circumstances, the two becoming emotionally involved, amd then the story concerns how they deal with or unravel the conditions of how they met so that they can live happily ever after at least until they die, which in “Romeo and Juliet” not all that long after they met, and so treated as a romantic tragedy rather than a romantic comedy. That love obtains, and often triumphs, over the corpus of literature, suggests that love is a deep thing and that alterations in this perennial story reveal a good deal about how cultural ages themselves alter, love given as the standing parameter, not altered until very late, in Jane Austen’s time, when love becomes a mutual appreciation and involvement of personalities and not just a matter of sexual attraction, as that happens, as best we know, of Paris and Helen and Samson and Delilah.
There are any number of flawed romantic comedies to be found in streaming services, viewers just never getting tired of them. A flawed version is when couples who meet cute and quickly become devoted to one another and readily deal with or disregard their circumstances, the interest of the story less in how the couple fits into its surroundings and so the love story provides a witness into the way of life in which the two people are enmeshed. The flawed romantic comedy is therefore akin to the murder mystery that is less concerned with who done it than with the way of life where a village or a neighborhood or an area of the country is explored when the cop or the detective or the investigator is going through the adventure of finding the culprit, whether that is Cornwall or Brighton or Oxford though rarely, for some reason, the east or west side of Central Park-- ‘Law and Order” that exception. I want to contrast the failed and the more successful types of romantic comedy so as to explore more deeply a topic which never has gone out of style, ever since antiquity, even though the western and the chronicle and the epic poem seem to have been used up.
A good example of the flawed comedy, which does not mean unsatisfying or unengaged, even if the story is
unfulfilled, is the recent one where the title character of starts out meeting her therapist about being so smart that she doesn’t know how to deal with people and so is to learn that, but that premise is quickly overtaken by the fact that she meets three bright people-- an MIT scientist, a professor of literature and a musician and musicologist, one of them a cad, for him to consider as a boyfriend, and she is to boot able to also find a female friend. No therapist really required. What the story is about is which of the three guys are the real thing, all the while wandering around Manhattan. Entertaining, especially the heroine, but neither deep nor cutting. No working out of the original premise that a smart girl would have trouble finding a guy.
A bit more heft is found in Reese Witherspoon’s “Home Again” from 2017 which is her star’s continued exploration of what a modern, reconstructed romantic relationship should be. In this case, a forty year old finds three twenty something men join her household which includes her two children on some pretext or other, presumably on a very temporary basis, but finds out that, as a friend of her overtly says, having sex, tech support and a child minder is not a bad idea. She decides to finalize her divorce, in that life without a husband can still be pretty good. The setting is middle class life in Los Angeles so people are engaged in the comic cliches of finding a producer as well as going to the school play. Endearing, but that may be the result of the fact that Witherspoon forms her face into so many emotions.
A serious romantic comedy engages in both the characters and the circumstances so that the love is seen as making sense, as finding its part within or in opposition to the circumstances. Here are some easy enough works that place a romantic comedy as serious. In “Sense and Sensibility'', the cuteness of the situation is that the two eligible daughters have been left with a cottage and little money when they had grown up with wealth and education and so should have had good prospects for marriage but have had their ambitions dashed. How will the two girls work out of this? How will they meet anyone at all who is suitable for their prior rather than their present circumstances? One of the two eligible daughters is taken with a rich man who decides to marry someone else who also has money and, after a time, comes to admire and marry a man who had courted her for a long time and was considerably older. You do what you can do and call it love. The other daughter is taken with a man who had been very attendant and then disappeared only to show up much later, women always waiting while men went off to business or war or whatever their concerns, and she was patient and he turned up explaining that he had to get rid of previous arrangement with which he had to dispense before proceeding with her, never having told her of what was about, perhaps not dishonorable to even mention that he had been entangled. Reticence is honor and perhaps it has always been. Not to whine or explain shows dignity.
“Pride and Prejudice” is also a serious romantic comedy. The couple meet cute, in that they face considerable and daunting obstacles when the two first meet. Darcy is arrogant and condescending and says early on that Elizabeth is not all that pretty and she hears him say it. Elizabeth is outspoken and controversial and not well mannered, insulting men when she says that men condescend to women by approving of them for minor accomplishments not worth such mention. She is embarrassed early on by her family. Not an auspicious meeting and so humorous, as are many first meetings, because a future for them is so inauspicious. Both have to overcome their early meetings, come to recognize their strengths, and in this particular case it takes years.
By contrast to “Pride and Prejudice”, where the comedy plays out by Austen giving total fidelity to the way people say and do things, and so come out at the end of the story having earned their love for one another, the romantic comedies of Nora Ephron can be said to be half serious in that the initial premise is so farfetched and just an excuse to separate them’ less about character than coincidences that allow people to become quickie smitten with one another, that the story is about loving to be loved, the person to be loved an afterthought. In “Sleepless in Seattle”, Meg Ryan hears on radio a widow sorrowful of the loss of his spouse, and having a vute pre-teen son to raise. Meg Ryan flies to Seattle from Baltimore so as to get the story and she approaches but does not confront the widow, which is not the case when Fred Astaire meets the various Ginger Rodgers, confronting the women he meets with an early declaration of love, even though he gets a slp in the face to show that the girl, whether a divorcee or a show girl, is a good girl. He never gives up because he just knows how certain he is that she is the girl for him right away, which is a wonderful image of true love or what is taken to be that. Ryan breaks up with her boyfriend so she can rush off to the promised meeting at the top of the Empire State Building. Unlike in Astaire-Rogers, it was in the Nineties ok for girls to have trial romances with their boyfriends. It shows they are mature enough now to get involved with a serious figure rather than nive about the relations of men and women, though , for some reason, Rodgers is aware enough of how to deal with men, women maybe preternaturally equipped, so as to manage them.
The films made by Nora Ephron are halfway serious romantic comedies because they are so well situated in places. I can attest that the Upper West Side of “I've Got Mail” is absolutely accurate. I lived there for fifty years. It provided the feel whereby a big merchandiser who lives on his yacht might well come across a small shopkeeper and run across one another in a bistro, Very different lives that can be arranged to intersect with one another. “Sleepless in Seattle '' makes sense because the ways of life between east and west coast are not that different and also because they intersect at the top of the Empire State Building, familiar to everyone on both coasts and in between. The producers went to the trouble of filming the real place rather than providing a substitute. But the first meetings of both films are cute in that they are arbitrary, one couple encountered because the widow spills his troubles on a nationwide radio talk show, the other because of anonymous email correspondence.,The seriousness of both couples is restored in the way the couples build their relationships, in Seattle through snooping, and in Manhattan through correspondence and the guy being a pest, and so a more completely realized of the triplet of films, the couple in “When Harry Met Sally” evolving over time from friends to lovers.Relationships mean work even though, magically, they are fated from the beginning.
The most perfect romantic comedy I know is “Much Ado About Nothing” and I will offer just how the play satisfies its nature. Beatrice is engaged in disparaging even before she is reunited with Benedict who has just returned from war, but the audience can quickly see that these are disparaging jokes rather than deeply cutting and so there is much to be seen as to how the relationship of the two will unfold. Any dullard can see that she is too much interested in him for him not to be of interest to her. The other couple is also now serious about courting because he says that he had noticed her but put that aside until the war business was over, and so reminiscent for later readers who learn that two bachelors settling in a new house are out for finding wives, as in “Pride and Prejudice” and that ex sea captains in Austen’s “Persuasion” are also apt to settle down. Remember that people have to get paired off when the boys come home from war in “The Best Years of Our Lives”. This is a natural rather than unnatural sequence, a kind of compensation for having been to war,and so something to be happy about even if there is a period of adjustment that is both amusing and sad until the vital sparks are reignited and humanity itself restores its nature as people become loving rather than warlike.
Whether than look at the imponderable questions of how romantic comedy is embedded into reality, so that the genre reflets that love is akin to an addiction or a religion or just the power of sex to change the quality of human experience, let us remain concerned with theliterary questions concerning the genre, particularly with the differences between the beginning and the end of these stories and not with the shortened versions of romantic songs, which emphasize the pains, such as being forlorn or dumped, and the pleasures of romance, such as intimacy and adventure. Most strikingly is the fact that the opening gambit, the way the couple meet , is so various, while the end of the story is so uniform. People in romantic comedies meet because of their differences, such as Darcy and Elizabeth, or because of coincidence,like those in “Sleepless in Seattle” or because of untold reasons, like Beatrice and Benedict, or from improbable setups, as in “I’ve Got Mail”, when people usually meet in more ordinary fashion, as meeting at a party or arranged by a relative, where people find themselves attractive and so move forward to think of their meeting as lucky and less important than the bond that has been soon developed. The romance is added to the relationship while in romantic comedy the initial condition, whatever it is, lingers on until the story is resolved, and then what happens is marriage, except where there are serious jolts, so that, at the end Rick tells Ilsa to go so as to save the world, that unsettling event noble and sad and not at all a romantic comedy but a romance in the context of war.
Why is marriage so essential to romantic comedy? It can’t just be prudishness in that modern romances allow for exes on both parties. Maybe a love affair could end so that the pair could go off to each of their careers, as happens to the woman in “Titanic’ but that is not treated as a comedy rather than a tragedy because he had died when the ship went down. Marriage is an end because it is so different from what has come before . It involves settling down and having children. What was fetching in “The Thin Man” series was that Nick and Nora remained lively rather than just devoted. They had other adventures, and also they drank alot and so were under a permanent haze. Nevertheless, only strange circumstances allow people to do something other than consummate a usual marriage. The only reason “Random Harvest” is unconsummated, the girlfriend, just secretary and business manager fo Ronald Coleman, the guy she loves, is because he has amnesia about his past love with her, though that is no reason the two of them, aside from the past, couldn’t have gotten involved emotionally with one another in that, after all, they had the same characters that brought them together before he lost his memory. Maybe, the laws of romantic comedy may be changed, but their long lasting qualities suggest that this species of storytelling is here to stay, at least until the time when people will live to be two hundred and are freed three or four times in their lives to have new romances.