This is the second of a series of blogs wherein I work to create a “literary toolkit” on writing the Romantic Comedy screenplay by analyzing Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Some Like It Hot. This is adapted from an assignment I worked on for my graduate degree at Southern New Hampshire University.
Content warning: I get a bit spicy.
Storytelling Elements: What are they?
Who the fuck knows? The elements that make a great story are nebulous. When you google the term “storytelling elements of romantic comedy,” you come up with this list (bang2write.com):
1) Something Fresh
2) The Protagonist
3) Understand Your Audience
4) Genuinely Funny Moments (whatever that means)
5) A Happy Ending
Thanks google. You know. For nothing. I would argue that this list is the same for any type of comedic fiction. So I’m left with trying to parse together a definition on my own. What are storytelling elements? They are the characters, the setting, the conflict, the theme, the narrative arc. We’re going to focus on that penultimate point (the theme) in its own section, so let’s focus on the two storytelling themes that I feel are the most significant for the rom-com genre.
The main expectation of the romantic comedy genre is that we anticipate a happy ending. The narrative arc should end on a high. People end up together, and they end up happier than they were before. At least for now. You should know, generally, what you are getting into when you pick up a romantic comedy. Some hijinks, some humor, and a happy ending where two people fall in love. Rom-com is generally not great literature or film. And that’s ok. Sometimes you want an emotional cup of cocoa. The world can be dark, and we need to counteract that with levity and silliness.
It also doesn’t really matter if this ending is shoehorned in. As long as the work is done during the body of the film, we can end with a time skip forward to get our characters together. Take Forgetting Sarah Marshall; our characters fall in love, but to get together, they just first do the work on themselves. Rachel must figure out what she wants to do with her life, and Peter has to… well, forget Sarah Marshall. He has to move on. So, at the end of the film, the two separate, Peter goes home, cleans up his house, puts on his Dracula musical, and Rachel, having moved back to California to continue college, shows up at a performance. The two get together right at the very end. We ultimately end on a happy note.
The second storytelling element most important to this genre are characters. You must write likeable characters. They honestly don’t even have to be realistic. In many rom-coms, the man or woman are “perfect” in all ways but their love life. But, ya’ know... they can’t be too perfect. The best rom-coms strike the perfect balance. Their characters are flawed but lovable. Popular flaws may include, but are not limited to:
Airheadedness
Clumsiness to the point of medical concern
Rejection of romance from prior painful experience
Fear of romance from prior painful experience
Being a workaholic/being career-driven
Being poor (and a musician. These two are almost never mutually exclusive, except in the case of Music and Lyrics.)
Being quirky and having a weird hobby (I’m looking at you, What’s Your Number?)
Having “severe” anxiety
Having strict parents
Class divides (I would separate this from being poor, as the dynamic is a bit different)
Being dead (seriously, what the hell, The Lake House????)
The characters in Some Like It Hot are flawed, but extremely likable. Jerry and Joe are poor, Jerry’s kind of dumb, Joe is a rake with a gambling problem, but they’re handsome and charming musicians. And, over the course of the film, through dressing like women, they become sensitive to the difficulties of what it is like to be a woman, thus they become increasingly likable to the audience. Plus they’re funny. Our romantic lead actress, played by Marilyn Monroe, is a standard gorgeous airhead who wants to marry a millionaire, but keeps falling for skeezy saxophone players.
SUGAR
Especially tenor sax. I don’t know what
it is, but they just curdle me. All they
have to do is play eight bars of “Come to
Me My Melancholy Baby” -- and my spine turns
to custard, and I get goose-pimply all
over -- and I come to them.
JOE
That so?
SUGAR
Every time!
JOE
You know -- I play tenor sax.
SUGAR
But you’re a girl, thank goodness.
JOE
Yeah…
In this scene, Sugar bluntly lays out for Joe her weakness, and ill-treatment from, saxophone players just like him. Earlier in the script, before he and Jerry had to go on the run dressed as women, we see Joe treat Nellie this way, using her to borrow money and her car, and standing her up on dates. He doesn't even say goodbye to her on screen, leading the audience to assume that he’s left her in the lurch.
The screenplay builds Joe up as a likable, charming rogue who changes his ways through the lessons of the film. In the end, he tries to get Sugar to give him up, even though he’s charmed her through lies, because he realizes that he’s just a “no-good saxophone player.” Everyone ends up together, happy. For now, at least.
In my own writing…
Applying rom-com storytelling elements to my own writing should prove easy. I like both happy endings, and I prefer to write characters who, while flawed, are likable. I struggle much more to write characters my readers are supposed to hate. I feel, personally, that characters who are unredeemable are either one-note villains (in which case, I almost feel as if they’re less character than setting/conflict for our characters to overcome), or must be carefully crafted to tug at the readers’ heartstrings by having reverse-flaws. Yes, they’re unredeemable, but it’s because they loved someone so much that their death drove them insane. I feel like these types of villains don’t belong in the rom-com genre, and thus writing standard likable characters is right up my comfortable alley.
Of course, I like the idea of coming up with character flaws that are a little more complex than those I listed above. All of those feel a bit tropey to me. I would prefer to find a way to play on these familiar flaws in new ways. I have no problem with writing Hallmark rom-coms; in fact, I think baking these gooey, chocolate chip-filled cookie films would be an absolute pleasure. But I also want to come up with original characters that feel good to me. I’m a bit sick of the small-town boy meets city girl films that have been all the rage recently. I want to turn out something different.
Brainstorm time: Quarantined By Love
Short film in which a small surgical team are quarantined in an operating room upon the discovery that the emergency surgery car-crash patient has been exposed, and is beginning to show symptoms of the bacteria bacterium Yersinia pestis -- also known as the Black Death! During their mandatory 24-hour quarantine, two single doctors who actively dislike each other (Lydia is a super upbeat “heal-through-positive-thinking” general surgeon and Marcus is a “medicine is hard science only” brain surgeon) are forced to eat, evacuate, and take decontamination showers together in the small, cramped quarters of the operating room, along with the anesthesiologist, Lydia’s good friend, and two male scrub nurses who Marcus hangs out and plays sportsball with. Over the period of the short film, we learn that Marcus’s grandmother died when she refused modern medicine in favor of spiritual healing until her early-stage breast cancer had progressed beyond the point of no return. Lydia, in the end, concedes that the first step is modern medicine, but through her own examples of families torn apart when positive thinking failed them and medicine succeeded, she and Marcus eventually reach consensus and mutual respect. The happy ending will come when everyone is asymptomatic by the end of the quarantine, and Lydia ends up successfully asking Marcus out to dinner.
Works Cited
“Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” By Jason Segel, directed by Nicholas Stoller, Apatow Productions, 18 April 2008.
Hay, Lucy V. “5 Important Elements of Writing a Romantic Comedy.” bang2write, 20 Mar. 2013, bang2write.com/2013/03/5-important-elements-of-writing-a-romantic-comedy-by-james-rogers.html.
“Some Like it Hot.” By Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond, directed by Billy Wilder, Mirisch Company, 29 March 1959.
“Theme.” Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, Incorporated, 12 March, 2020, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/theme. Accessed 22 March, 2020.
Wasson, Sam. “Some Like It Hot: How to Have Fun.” Criterion, The Criterion Channel, 19 Nov. 2018, www.criterion.com/current/posts/6048-some-like-it-hot-how-to-have-fun.