Love vs. Laughter

"He was not in love with her. One does not fall in love with a girl whom one has met only three times. One is attracted, yes; but one does not fall in love.

A moment's reflection enabled him to diagnose his sensations correctly. This odd impulse to leap across the compartment and kiss Joan was not love. It was merely the natural desire of a good-hearted young man to be decently chummy with his species."

- P.G. Wodehouse, Something New

One of the revelations I had while reading P.G. Wodehouse is this, and it's a surprising thing: I love romantic comedy. I'm one of these people who will read any genre, kind of like those people who listen to whatever's on the radio. But romantic comedy had never really showed up on my radar before, and suddenly I'm realizing that it's one of my favorite things. (It's actually kind of like a romantic comedy. "I loved you this whole time and I never knew!")

Maybe I never figured it out until now because romantic comedy is so rarely done right. Either it's romantic, but it isn't funny, or it's funny, but it isn't romantic, or neither. I don't blame the innocent genre, bless it; I blame its parents, Romance and Comedy. They used to be the happiest of couples, and now they've strayed so far from themselves and from one another that their poor child doesn't know where to turn.

This review of New Moon introduced me to one of my favorite C.S. Lewis quotes, a critique of the modern portrayal of romance: "the rapt, the intense, the swoony-devout; seldom a hint of gaiety". The Twilight films are famous for featuring characters who a) epitomize love and b) don't ever crack a smile, as if their love is a thing too serious to be happy about. They'd sooner giggle in a Puritan church service than they would in the presence of their Adored Object.

The romantic comedies of old, meantime, saw love as inherently funny. Guys would make fools of themselves going after girls; girls would misunderstand guys and thus, more subtly, make fools of themselves right back. The idea was that it might have been a sort of beautiful game for the parties involved (or not), but for any third party, such as a reader, it could be severely amusing. At any rate, there's a touch of the ridiculous to any good romance, and once you drain it out, it runs the risk of becoming a staring contest.

So now we know what happens when you deprive romance of comedy (Twilight happens), but what about robbing comedy of romance?

Comedy these days is supposed to be just like Shakespeare's Benedick--loveless, mocking and mean. I guess comedy writers forget that we laugh at gallows humor because we're afraid of the gallows; they've gotten to think they have to string people up just to get some giggles going. And, though you have to look a bit closely for it, there really is a difference between laughing over a bruised shin and actively seeking other shins to bruise, that you may laugh. My point is that, in a modern romantic comedy, when a man starts delivering a sweet declaration of love, we're naturally expecting him to become the stooge of the movie, if he even exists past half a frame of a montage about bad dates. That's not funny. What's funny is when the guy gets made a fool of and somehow, after much trial and error (all of which is entertaining), gets the girl anyway.

You know, this whole thing makes me want to pull the Much Ado About Nothing plot on Comedy and Romance. The real reason they act so distant and treat each other with such disgust is that, deep down, they're nothing without each other.