Romantic Comedy Research Articles

Pliable facts and rigorous fictions: the cognitive persuasions of contemporary Latin American science fiction

ABSTRACT According to literary critic Darko Suvin, science fiction demonstrates a “supposedly factual” approach to imagining new worlds. In Latin America, however, the factual basis of lived experience from which such fictions are crafted has not always been taken as a given. This essay shows how contemporary Latin American science fiction makes use of the tensions derived from the encounter between the pliable nature of fact and the supposed rigor of cognitive logic through an analysis of two contemporary texts from the Hispanophone Caribbean: Puerto Rican writer Pedro Cabiya’s (1971) novel Malas hierbas (2010) and Cuban director Arturo Infante’s (1977) film El viaje extraordinario de Celeste García (2018). A fragmented zombie tale whose narrator may or may not be a zombie, Malas hierbas explores the science of zombification even as it draws upon both folklore and the corpus of zombie literature and film. El viaje extraordinario engages the genre conventions of romantic comedy and the Cuban emigration film, using the familiar landscape of these genres in the story of a group of Cubans who are invited to visit a distant planet. Cabiya’s and Infante’s texts keep the reader or spectator suspended in the liminal zone where truth is an open-ended series of multiple possibilities. As they reveal the constructed nature of facts and the narratives that support them, these texts illuminate the ways in which the possibilities around us are already the work of constructed fictions.

Exploring Genre-Specific Thought Patterns Through Real-Time Experience Sampling of Movie Clips

Understanding cognition during media consumption is crucial to understanding how individuals process complex stimuli in everyday life. This study employed multi-dimensional Experience Sampling (mDES) to capture real-time thoughts as participants viewed 2-3 minute movie clips across various genres. By utilizing movie clips, this study bridges real-world scenarios with the control of a laboratory setting; revealing how different movie genres uniquely shape thought patterns. I conducted Principal Component Analysis to identify the underlying structure of participants' thoughts. The analysis revealed four distinct thought components, named based on their loading structure: (1) Narrative Comprehension, (2) Episodic Knowledge, (3) Intrusive Distraction, and (4) Sensory Engagement, replicating components found in earlier mDES movie-watching studies (Konu et al., 2021; Wallace et al., 2024). To examine how subjects’ thoughts differed based on the genre of the movie clip, I conducted a series of linear mixed models comparing component scores for each component across genres. The analysis indicated certain thought patterns differed by genre. In Intrusive Distraction, Comedy clips scored significantly lower than Drama clips (p <.001), Romantic Comedy clips (p = .007), and clips of an unspecified genre (other) (p = .010). In Episodic Knowledge, Thriller clips scored significantly lower than Action clips (p = .002), Comedy clips (p <.001), Drama clips (p <.001), Family clips (p <.001), and Romantic Comedy clips (p <.001). Altogether, this study replicates the component structure found in earlier movie watching mDES studies, showing consistency across samples. Additionally, this study makes a significant contribution to the field of ongoing thought research by being the first to empirically establish that individuals’ internal experiences systematically differ based on movie genre. These findings suggest researchers should consider genre-specific influences when designing future movie-based tasks in psychology and neuroimaging studies. However, the small sample size (N=15) warrants caution; larger studies are needed for improved reliability and validity.

MAN AND WOMAN - A CREATION FOR RELATION IN AUSTEN’S NOVELS

Jane Austen as a realist writer put genuine efforts to connect her characters with real life situations and circumstances to establish her as recognised socially realistic author. The selected novels of this chapter - Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, & Mansfield Park – are clear representation of real social lives of early 19th century. However, the representations are so knitted that it provides a bliss of reading romantic comedies. The romance, the love affairs, the restrictions for expressing love, expressions of male chauvinism or chivalry, good fortune, decent suitors, maintenance of dignity by the lady, are some of the keys induced by Jane Austen in all her narrations. The purpose remains static and it is make to feel the personal, emotional and social lives of the characters. It is like living the age with the characters and having bonds with their emotional experiences. This is a narrative technique of Jane Austen that makes her novels not only romantically successful, but also identified as socially real entities.

The scripted audience in Roman comedy

Abstract Despite the prevalence of audience-centred drama criticism, very little is actually known about the composition or nature of theatre audiences in antiquity. Metatheatrical passages in Plautus’ and Terence’s comedies in which the audience is described or addressed are usually treated as historical evidence for real-life theatre audiences in Republican Rome. This article argues that it is preferable to treat the comic audience as a fictional character. The scripted audience is recurrently portrayed by the comedians in a far-fetched and anti-realistic manner: it can be treated as a stereotype, along the other ‘stock’ characters of Roman comedy.

ANALYSIS OF CODE-SWITCHING (ENGLISH-BALINESE) UTTERANCES IN THE TICKET TO PARADISE MOVIE

An American romantic comedy, Ticket to Paradise Movie, provides a unique context for investigating code-switching. It portrays a divorced couple collaborating to disrupt their daughter’s wedding in Bali. Beyond its entertaining storyline, the movie features a multilingual phenomenon, with characters utilizing the Balinese language for authenticity. This study aims to analyse the types and Reasons for Code-Switching. This study uses a qualitative approach. The primary data was collected from film transcripts and secondary data from literature reviews. The result of this study reveals the types and reasons for code-switching utterances in the Ticket to Paradise Movie. This study can contribute to broader language use comprehension in multilingual settings by exploring code-switching in this cinematic context.

Expressive Speech In “To All The Boys: Always And Forever”

This study explores how expressive speech acts are used in the teen romantic comedy movie "To All the Boys: Always and Forever," directed by Michael Fimognari. Using Searle's theory of expressive speech acts and Yule's framework for direct and indirect speech acts, the study analyzes the female main character's speech acts through a descriptive qualitative approach. The study identifies few instances of expressive speech acts, with doubting speech being the most frequent. It also discovers that direct speech acts are more widely used than indirect ones. These findings contribute to the understanding of expressive speech acts in film, specifically how emotions and attitudes are conveyed through conversation.

Deafness, Kinship, and Formal Possibility in Bollywood

This article focuses on two films in popular Hindi cinema (Bollywood) – Koshish and Barfi! – that put Deaf protagonists at the center of romantic comedies. It moves beyond typical studies of disability as a device of characterization and locates meaning instead in under-analyzed elements of filmic production. These include sound production, plot structure, and their unique entanglement in Bollywood through the picturized song-sequence. Songs pose a special challenge for stories about Deaf protagonists, one which Koshish treats as a problem requiring "accommodation," and Barfi addresses as an opportunity for "Deaf gain." At a deeper level, Bollywood "provincializes" some key assumptions within the primarily Eurocentric field of disability studies and its frequent association with another Eurocentric field, queer theory. While crip theory follows queer theory's opposition to the "reproductive" time of conjugality, this stance flattens differences between the two communities, and depends on a misunderstanding of what "reproduction" entails. Bollywood romantic comedies, by contrast, create a space to rethink disabled kinmaking. Here the films are reversed: Koshish, though older, offers a more radical negotiation of social reproduction, while Barfi! is somewhat more conventional in its imagined future for disabled families.

‘What if Nora Ephron wrote a sports film?’: Ted Lasso and the intertextual frame of romantic comedy

‘What if Nora Ephron wrote a sports film?’: Ted Lasso and the intertextual frame of romantic comedy

Exploring critical reception and thematic trends: A corpus-based analysis of critic reviews for 'While You Were Sleeping'

This study presents a corpus-based analysis of 51 critic reviews of the romantic comedy "While You Were Sleeping", sourced from RottenTomatoes, to explore the linguistic nuances, thematic focuses, and sentiment orientation in film criticism. Employing corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis, the study systematically examines the language and thematic patterns in these reviews, aiming to understand the broader dialogue about cinema and its cultural impact. The analysis reveals several key themes: the balance between charm and credibility, the significance of lead performances, narrative plausibility versus genre conventions, cultural and seasonal context, divergent perspectives on humor and tone, the importance of cinematic style and directorial choices, reflections on the romantic comedy genre, and audience engagement and emotional resonance. These findings highlight the complex and multifaceted nature of film criticism, particularly in the romantic comedy genre, where films are evaluated not just for entertainment but also for narrative structure, character development, and adherence to genre norms. The study underscores the importance of external factors such as cultural context and timing in film reception and emphasizes the impact of lead performances and casting decisions on audience engagement and film perception. It contributes to a deeper understanding of film criticism, extending beyond mere entertainment to encompass cultural, narrative, and stylistic considerations. The insights gained can inform future film productions, critiques, and academic discussions in cinema studies.

Cross-cultural Narrative in Romantic Comedy by Chinese-American Director -- Take the Case of 'The Half of It'

Chinese-American groups have always existed as "marginalized" in the Western cultural context, and this article uses the romantic comedy "The half of it" as the research object to explore its cross-cultural narrative strategy. With the dual cultural identity of director Alice Wu as the entry point, the film narrative space is divided into three parts of family life, campus life and table tennis platform as a cross-cultural intersection of Chinese and Western culture, focusing on the film's character image design and the cultural phenomena behind the film, from Audio-visual design, plot structure and value connotation of three aspects to assist intercultural narrative of the film, explore the background of the cultural differences between China and West. The focus on the marginal groups highlights humanistic care, directs implicit, humorous narrative technique, so that the film shows more inclusive and provides ideas for the cross-cultural narrative of Chinese-American films.

Jesuit School Productions of Roman Comedy in the 19th-century U.S.

Abstract: In this article I examine productions of Roman comedy in Latin at the end of the 19th century by several Jesuit schools in the United States. I show that they used these plays to demonstrate the high quality of Catholic education, to gain public support and private patronage, and to defend themselves within the hostile landscape of largely-Protestant U.S. education in this period. I also argue that these Jesuit schools saw Roman comedy as a way to link themselves not only to ancient culture, but also to traditions that once formed the core of the Society of Jesus’s educational model.

Women and their Voices in Plautus’ Rudens

Abstract: The women who performed Plautus’ Rudens at Washington University in 1884, though they eliminated much misogyny from the play, left in a verse in which a character argues that good women should be silent. The women would have been aware that the line is deeply ironic, as the play offers one of Roman comedy’s most rewarding presentations of women’s voices, which are essential for the successful resolution of the plot. The verse reflects not a belief that women should be silent, but rather an awareness of the necessity for women to use their voices strategically in a patriarchal society.

Slavery and Gender in the Performance of Rudens : from 1884 to 2021

Abstract: Staging Roman comedy for a modern audience requires making decisions about how to portray uncomfortable power dynamics. In this article we discuss the casting and acting choices, and their implications for slavery and gender, in a Zoom performance of Plautus’ Rudens by the Classics Department at Washington University in St. Louis, based on the 1884 English translation by the Ladies’ Literary Society of Washington University. The 2021 performance’s individualized, fluid approach to portraying gender, alongside its engagement with modern discourse on power and status, highlights the importance of sociocultural context and performance context for understanding key features of the play.

Provoking Politeness

Abstract Dialogic interaction plays important generic, poetic, and structural roles within hexametric Latin satire. One aspect of this interaction which has received little prior exegesis is the presence, or lack, of politeness. By adapting and applying existing models which study this sociolinguistic phenomenon, we can perceive not only patterned use of politeness across the genre, but further intertextuality between Latin satire and Roman comedy. Interactions in the works of Horace and Juvenal are illustrative of both shared ‘politeness-motifs’, as well as divergent stylistic adaptations which suit each poet’s literary agenda.

The Traditions of the Rise of the Prodigal Play in the English Renaissance

Prodigal plays originated in the intellectual environment of the early European Renaissance and penetrated the whole stage of the English Renaissance. It takes the Prodigal fable in the Gospels as a carrier, integrates the content of the new Roman comedy, especially Terence’s works, inherits some traditions of neoclassicism, at the same time, it focuses on the conflict between virtue and evil in the experience of the prodigal son, and inherits the tradition of the native morality play in a general sense. On the basis of inheriting the tradition, the prodigal drama highlights its own distinctive characteristics and shows great vitality by incorporating the elements of the times into the open prodigal fable.

»Misere miser sum«. Die sprachliche Darstellung von Affekt und Emotionen junger Männer auf der Bühne der Palliata

This article examines the linguistic representation of strong emotions within Roman comedy using the character of the adulescens. The detailed linguistic analysis of scenes of the three young men Calidorus (Pseudolus), Diniarchus (Truculentus), and Lysiteles (Trinummus) focuses on lexicon, syntax, morphology, prosody, and imagery. As a rule, the characters name their feelings in the beginning and explain them in detail by means of metaphors. In addition, they make use of polymetric verse and typical stylistic elements that serve to increase the pathos of the expression, such as anaphoric enumerations, amplification, rhetorical questions etc. The analysis suggests that a specific combination of these features is used to represent emotions such as miseria, ira or desperatio within the text. A final look at Terence’s Andria and Adelphoe supports the results.

Out of time: fantasising the French romantic hero in the Netflix era

ABSTRACT Netflix’s globally oriented French products are commercially bound to negotiate between producing locally legible and internationally acceptable gender types. This article spotlights variations in representing the French romantic hero – traditionally a gallant séducteur – to a global audience hypersensitive to notions of toxic masculinity in two post-#MeToo Netflix Original French romantic comedy narratives: the series Plan cœur/The Hook-Up Plan (2018–2021) and the film Je ne suis pas un homme facile/I Am Not an Easy Man (Eléonore Pourriat, 2018). Noting that Netflix is now the key export channel for French romcoms, the article draws primarily on textual analysis, while also leveraging psychoanalytic and affective theories, to argue that the platform’s impetus to make French masculinity in particular more widely palatable, and (so) appeal to emergent popular feminism, has the potential to reconfigure parameters of legitimate gender norms, French and beyond.

PARALLELISMS AND CONTRASTS IN SHAKESPEARE’S TWELFTH NIGHT

Twelfth Night is one of the greatest comedies by Shakespeare. Since it is a romantic comedy, most of the discussion of the play centres on different aspects of love while there is also some discussion on how disguise and mistaken identities contribute to the romance as well as to its comic dramatization. Besides the two sub-plots, Shakespeare has used in the play wit and physiological humours, all of which contributed to creating his paragons of romantic and comic characters. In respect of all these elements there are obviously some similarities as well as differences among the characters of this play. This study seeks to reveal the parallelisms and contrasts that exist in Twelfth Night regarding all these elements and the extent to which they are used. If these elements of love, disguise, wit, physiological humours, and sub-plots are considered together, Twelfth Night can be seen as pervaded with a crisscrossing pattern of parallelisms and contrasts. To read the play thus can give insight into its characters and themes and help understand better what make Twelfth Night such an enjoyable romantic comedy.

Roman comedy and the final dance

Dance pervaded Roman theater, and in Plautus’ Persa, Pseudolus, and Stichus characters refer explicitly to their own dancing very near the end of the play. Of the remaining twenty-three extant plays of Plautus and Terence, twenty include scenes of lively motion performed in accompanied meters either in their final scenes or just before, or at the moment of the play’s climactic crisis or its resolution. These scenes of lively motion near the ends of plays often share metrical features with the scenes of explicit dance, and some plays may include metatheatrical allusions to a final dance. It therefore seems very likely that Roman comic playwrights almost always made a point of including an exuberant dance at a significant moment at or near the ends of their plays.

“Frankly, My Dear, I Just Might Give a damn:” An Experiment Investigating Preexisting Beliefs and Reasons to Watch Romantic Comedies on Reports of Beliefs, Mood, and Enjoyment

ABSTRACT This multiple message, pretest-posttest control group design experiment investigated whether different motivations to view romantic comedies and preexisting romantic beliefs (e.g. love conquers all, soulmate) influenced mood, enjoyment, and romantic beliefs. Results of 358 undergraduate participants demonstrate that romantic beliefs prior to viewing predicted reduced beliefs after viewing a challenge film, and greater enjoyment after viewing an ideal film. Watching in order to learn or be entertained led to stronger romantic beliefs in the ideal condition, whereas watching for entertainment led to more enjoyment and a more positive mood than did watching for other reasons, regardless of the content. Sheer viewing led to stronger romantic beliefs in the ideal condition.