Romantic Comedies Essay

557 Words3 Pages
Romantic comedy films (abbreviated as rom coms or romcoms) are films with light-hearted, humorous plotlines, centered on romantic ideals such as a true love able to surmount most obstacles. Romantic comedy films are a sub-genre of comedy films as well as of romance films and often have elements of screwball comedies and stoner comedies. Romantic comedy can also be used to describe some television series. The basic plot of a romantic comedy is that two protagonists, usually a man and a woman, meet, part ways due to an argument or other obstacle, then ultimately reunite. The ending of a romantic comedy is meant to affirm the primary importance of the love relationship in its protagonists' lives, even if they physically separate in the end (e.g. Shakespeare in Love, Roman Holiday). The basic format of a romantic comedy film can be found in much earlier sources, such as Shakespeare plays like Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night's Dream. History Comedies since ancient Greece have often incorporated sexual or social elements. It was not until the creation of romantic love in the western European medieval period, though, that "romance" came to refer to "romantic love" situations, rather than the heroic adventures of medieval Romance Shakespearean comedy and Restoration comedy remain influential. The creation of huge economic social strata in the Gilded Age combined with the heightened openness about sex after the Victorian era and the celebration of Sigmund Freud's theories, and the birth of the film industry in the early twentieth century, gave birth to the screwball comedy. As class consciousness declined and World War II unified various social orders, the savage screwball comedies of the twenties and thirties, proceeding through Rock Hudson–Doris Day-style comedies, gave way to more innocuous comedies. This style faded in the 1960s, and the genre lay
Open Document