Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld
Romantic comedy, as a genre, is not for everyone – if anything, literature enthusiasts often like to define themselves in opposition to it. And yet romance is wildly popular, enjoying its renaissance in the hands of more and more people across a wider spectrum of readers, whether it’s queer romance, enemies-to-lovers tales or TikTok-approved stories of love.
Into this cultural moment comes American author Curtis Sittenfeld with her latest novel aptly titled Romantic Comedy (2023). Romantic Comedy is both a love letter to the genre, and a tongue-in-cheek exploration of some of the stereotypical tropes that define it.
Sally Milz is a 30-something sketch writer for a weekly live comedy show called The Night Owls (TNO for short), based almost entirely on Saturday Night Live. The frenzy of her schedule, from Monday afternoon pitch meetings to midweek all-nighters, leaves her with little time for dating. Which is just as well, because Sally is a divorcée and a cynic when it comes to love: so much so that when her average-looking colleague-slash-friend Danny starts dating a very famous and incredibly hot actress, Sally writes a sketch for the show called “The Danny Horst Rule”.
The rule posits that men in celebrity-adjacent jobs often date women way out of their league, but that the same thing would never happen the other way around. Average-looking women don’t get to date famous, hot, successful guys. That is, until the ageing pop star Noah Brewster comes on the show – at which point Sally must reconsider the line between exposing yourself through your writing publicly, and exposing yourself to another person privately.
The beginning of Romantic Comedy has the makings of an interesting, well-fleshed out world, with interesting, well-fleshed out characters. As we follow Sally throughout her week at TNO, we get a fascinating insight not just to the inner workings of a show like Saturday Night Live, but also to the role of female writers within the industry. Sally is observant, smart and wittily sarcastic, but above all, she is actually very funny. As this book is about the very essence of writing comedy, you’d think this is a given, but I have read way too many books recently in which characters are described as funny but never once befit the descriptor.
On top of her friendly banter with colleagues and her intelligent remarks on the structure of comedy writing, Sally also brings to TNO a woman’s perspective that sheds any striving for male approval.
“...there was a different way I wrote when, even subconsciously, I was seeking male approval, male sexual approval: a more coy way, more reserved, more nervous about being perceived as angry or vulgar. It was the syntactical equivalent of dressing up as a sexy zombie for Halloween.”
Sally is definitely not a sexy zombie. She defines her career as a woman writing about stuff funny to and for women, “ostensibly female topics”: camel toes and wage inequity and mammograms and Dirty Dancing and female politicians and farting girlfriends.
But as the week wraps up and Sally and Noah go from discussing sketches and flirting in person to emailing back and forth (as COVID-19 hits), Sally once again (although perhaps without Sittenfeld meaning to), starts writing for a specific type of male approval: that of your crush reading your messages.
While the novel does find its way back to normal narration as the two meet up after COVID, this email-interim puts Sally’s character onto a very clear display. The messages sent back and forth try (and they try HARD) to be funny, intelligent, emotionally open, honest, and impressive – all at the same time. They feel like the type of messages that best friends must approve before they’re sent out. While this section did take away from the enjoyment of the book for me, it also encapsulates a very specific stage of dating, one when you can still craft the perfect image of yourself. And at the very least, Sittenfeld acknowledges the double-edged nature of such a communication method.
“I do still wonder whether a person's writing self is their realest self, their fakest self, or just a different self than their in-the-world self?”
This scripted feeling does not end with the emails, however, but rather intensifies. Once they meet and begin a relationship, Sally and Noah are annoyingly perfect (read, honest and vulnerable in all the right and unrealistic places), and it’s here that the novel really plays into the rom-com trope. Luckily, Sittenfeld is well-aware of this, as Sally admits towards the end:
"Sometimes when I speak, I feel like I'm writing dialogue for the character of myself. I'm impersonating a normal human when really I'm a confused freak.”
At the end of the day, Romantic Comedy is hugely unromantic. Sally and Noah’s budding relationship is unveiled as something perfectly mundane – from worries about when to shower following a multiple-day drive before meeting for the first time, sneaking to a guest room to sleep because sleeping with a stranger is too much intimacy too fast, to honestly talking about unprotected sex or the exclusivity of a relationship. These small things are all part of life, but rarely do they make it into romantic retellings of love, and they make Romantic Comedy both real and somehow oddly clinical. Real life is never that open, and so it’s unnerving to read about a tentative love story in that way.
What does give this novel a romantic – but never sentimental – edge is Sittenfeld’s portrayal of genuine connection. Noah puts it perfectly at one point:
“Aren't we all just looking for someone to talk about everything with? Someone worth the effort of telling our stories and opinions to, whose stories and opinions we actually want to hear?”
That’s exactly what Sally and Noah’s relationship reads like, and Romantic Comedy deserves to be read for its exploration of what romantic love (or any kind of love, for that matter), should feel like.
Fruzsina Gál is an aspiring writer and book reviewer from Hungary, currently residing in Naarm/Melbourne. She has been a reader all her life, and she finds unexplainable joy in forcing literary revelations into the hands of friends, family, and strangers. When she's not reading or writing, she likes to even out her nerdy side by doing martial arts or going for hikes. You can find her online at fruzsinagal.com.