The romcom's family tree runs back to Greek fertility rites
The lighthearted love story with a guaranteed happy ending is older than cinema by millennia. Its roots reach through Restoration marriage-market comedies and medieval tales of knights serving ladies to the fertility rites of ancient Greece. Declared endangered in the 2010s, the genre found fresh life through streaming services such as Netflix.
Comedy in ancient Greece grew out of fertility rituals and satyr plays, so sexual and social themes were baked in early. The word romance, though, originally described chivalric adventure: a knight's deeds performed for a lady. Only when medieval Europe developed a literary culture of romantic love did the term shift towards love affairs, a change already visible in Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, by Chrétien de Troyes. For the classic examples, the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms points to Shakespeare's late-1590s comedies, including A Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It, as the classic examples.
The modern form owes much to 18th-century Restoration comedy, whose plots turned on high society's intricate rules for finding a spouse, as in William Wycherley's The Country Wife, and to 19th-century melodrama, with its gestures, chases and songs. Hollywood then spun off sub-genres in step with social change. Screwball comedy answered Hays Code censorship in the 1920s and 1930s; career-woman pictures such as Woman of the Year with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy followed the Second World War; Rock Hudson and Doris Day popularised the sex comedy.
A staple device is the meet-cute, a contrived first encounter full of awkwardness, clashing views or mistaken identity. Roger Ebert summed it up as boy meeting girl in a cute way, citing Lost and Found, where the leads crash cars in Switzerland and later collide again on skis.
Recent films bend the formula: Warm Bodies gives the hero a zombie's condition, while 500 Days of Summer denies its couple a happy ending. Writer Scott Meslow argues that streaming platforms favour exactly the traits that deterred traditional studios and are more willing to tell stories beyond the rich, white, thin and straight.
Source: Romantic comedy
