Comedy of remarriage

The comedy of remarriage is a subgenre of American cinematic comedy from the 1930's and 1940's. At the time, the Production Code (aka Hays Code) banned any explicit references to or attempts to justify adultery and illicit sex. The comedy of remarriage enabled filmmakers to evade this provision of the Code. The protagonists divorced, flirted with strangers without risking the wrath of censorship, and then got back together.

The genre was given its name by the philosopher Staney Cavell, in a series of academic articles that later became a book, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cavell argues that the genre represented Hollywood's crowning achievement, and that beneath all the slapstick and innuendo is a serious effort to create a new basis for marriage in mutual love--religious and economic necessity no longer applying for much of the American middle class.

More recently, film critics A.O. Scott and David Edelstein both argued that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was a 21st century example of the genre.

Famous comedies of remarriage

• The Awful Truth (1937), d. Leo McCarey (starring Cary Grant & Irene Dunne)
• The Philadelphia Story (1940), d. George Cukor (starring Cary Grant & Katharine Hepburn)
• His Girl Friday (1940), d. Howard Hawks (starring Cary Grant & Rosalind Russell)
• That Uncertain Feeling (1942), d. Ernst Lubitsch (starring Melvyn Douglas & Merle Oberon)
• The Lady Eve (1941), d. Preston Sturges (starring Barbara Stanwyck & Henry Fonda)
• Phffft! (1954), d. Mark Robson (starring Judy Holliday and Jack Lemmon)

Further reading

• Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Harvard Film Studies, 1981) by Stanley Cavell.