Fairy Tales and Sex Jokes

When I was a little girl I loved fairy tales. The flowery stories all unfolded in ways that made the characters' lives seem so wonderful. Of course Prince Charming would show up and rescue the damsel in distress! Cinderella would no longer have to clean up after her lazy family members. The Frog would turn into a man who conveniently is also royalty and would live happily ever after with the Princess. You get the point. Anyway, as I grew up these fairy tales which were often animated for my viewing pleasure eventually were replaced by something not far off: Romantic Comedies. Instead of Sleeping Beauty, there's Sleepless in Seattle. French Kiss instead of The Frog Prince. When you think about it, the similarities are astounding. 

If you boil all of the stories down to their bare bones, you really don't have anything left except for the makings of most any fairy tale classic. Boy meets Girl - Boy/Girl has a problem - Girl/Boy has solution - They fall in love - The End. I can't think of a single film that falls within this category that doesn't follow this formula. To be completely honest? It has gotten pretty boring. I can't even watch Sleepless in Seattle any more. 

Fortunately where there is a problem, there is a solution. The solution to my particular problem is the fleet of films that have been coming out more recently. The comedies that are as smart as they are funny while lacking completely in pretension. The movies that immediately leap to mind are The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. In my opinion, you could almost categorize any one of them as a Romantic Comedy without the gag-inducing Hallmark-memories Kodak-moment mental pictures that the other films I'd mentioned bring about. The thing about these movies is that the most important thing to the film is the comedy, not the romance. The things that spring to mind about any of these movies are not how cute a certain moment was or just how touching the end might have been, but the jokes that just don't seem to get old. The romance in these movies is so discrete that one might have to struggle just to remember the moments (I know I'm guilty of it, on occasion), but that makes it far more palatable. My point is that though some people may think that romance has died, it hasn't. It's just cleverly hidden.