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Humour can be theorised as integral to the genre even if there are some films that do not provoke laughter. Romantic comedy has been described as a narrative of the heterosexual couple with a happy ending in which humour does not necessarily play an important part. The comic, protective, erotically-charged space is the space of romantic comedy. This book proposes a revised theory of romantic comedy and then tests its validity through the analysis of texts, but these films must not be expected to fully embody the theory. It proposes a change of approach in two different but closely linked directions. On the one hand, a comic perspective is a fundamental ingredient of what we understand by romantic comedy; on the other, the genre does not have a specific ideology but, more broadly, it deals with the themes of love and romance, intimacy and friendship, sexual choice and orientation. The book discusses two films directed by two of the most prestigious figures in the history of Hollywood comedy: Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder. Lubitsch's
with one another. The romantic comedy of Rear Window is not all-pervasive or unstoppable, as it is in purer instances of the genre. Its encounter in this film with a non-comic genre such as the suspense thriller makes it more fragmentary, more intermittent, less confident in its celebration of specific sexual discourses than in the two comic films ana-lysed previously. Yet it defines Lisa as a character, accompanies her in
it has allowed within its boundaries. This chapter is, therefore, devoted to cases of texts in which romantic comedy interacts with other comic subgenres, such as marriage comedy, satire, comedian comedy, parody or metacomedy. Chapter 3 attempts to move beyond the borders of comedy and examine what happens when romantic comedy is combined with a non-comic genre such as the thriller. The aim here is to give an idea
) in allowing Florimell to be kept prisoner if this is the price of a titillating story about female concupiscence. Spenser’s comic lovers in context The comic side of love is everywhere in Renaissance literature. Comic plays and prose narratives revolve around lovers’ mishaps and reconciliations, epyllia wittily present mythological erotic vignettes, and romance – as we have seen in this and previous chapters – turns the spotlight on conflict between altruism and self-interest. Non-comic genres such as the lover’s complaint or sonnet cycle, moreover, created a
comedy as an ever-evolving genre directly linked with – although not the direct result of – social changes in intimate matters has allowed us to start telling a different story: while the purer instances of the genre during the various ups and downs of its Hollywood history may be an important part of that story, it is in the interstices of the genre’s frequent crosses with other comic or non-comic genres and with modes and
theatre alone, plays are full of rogues and fools empitomising religious hypocrisy and fanaticism (Malvolio, Zeal-of-the-Land Busy), mercantile culture and social mobility (Shylock, Winwife), pretension and pedantry (Jacques, Holofernes, Dogberry), and the unruly body (Falstaff, Ursula). The body is a universal and timeless comic subject, but in this period its consuming, excretory, and sexual aspects empitomised society’s anarchic energies as never before. 6 It has been well observed of the Renaissance that in practice the division between comic and non-comic genres