According to Voytri and Petra “comedy allow[s] us to laugh at ourselves and our situation. It’s rooted in truth the world we live in” (65). I believe this may be true for most types of comedy but I do not believe it is true for the romantic comedy. If there are simple problems that everyone can relate to in the romantic comedy, people will know how it will turn out and they will not be interested. There have to be bigger obstacles that most people could not relate to. The audience will know that in mostly every case, the two people will get together in the end. The audience will simply be waiting to see how the two people will get together so they might get bored with this. Almost every romantic comedy goes the same way. In most romantic comedies there is some small obstacle such as one person is rich and the other is poor. It even states in he book “most romantic comedies have the tradition guy gets girl, guy looses girl, guy gets girl and lives happily ever after.” (102) There are one or two exceptions to this. The audience knows how it is almost always going to end.

In the  scene attached (starting from 6:40- 9:40) from Some Like It Hot, Joe is talking to Sugar on the train dressed as Josephine. There is more than just a small obstacle. Sugar is telling him that she always falls for saxaphone players and they are all the same and they all hurt her. She says that she does not want to be with saxaphone players anymore. Josephine is a saxaphone player and he has feelings for Daphne. He wants to tell her but he can’t because he is disguised as a girl. He cannot tell her because he and Jerry need to stay in the band in order to make money and stay away from the gangsters. The audience believes they may not get together at the end because there is more conflict then just being from different worlds. There is more than just the fact that Sugar doesn’t like saxaphone players and Joe is a saxaphone player. The audience cannot see any way that Joe can tell Sugar that he is a man because then he and Jerry would get kicked off the train and not have any money. It makes it more interesting for the audience if they think there is a chance that the two people will not get together in the end.

 

Talene M.