The Romantic Comedy

Comedy as the delivery system and never the whole cargo. The romantic comedy runs on timing, set pieces, and a narrating voice funny enough to be worth reading on its own, but the form's covenant is that the jokes must be load-bearing. The humour has to come out of who these people are, so that laughing at them is a method of learning them.

The promise is delight with a guarantee attached: the reader's confidence that they will be entertained on the way to being moved. The desk's test is the third act. A rom-com that stops being funny the moment feelings arrive has confessed that comedy was a costume worn until the real business could start, and the best of them stay funny through the grief, because people are like that. The common failure is the joke aimed at the couple rather than sourced from inside their heads, which buys laughs by withdrawing sympathy and then asks the reader to invest in the people it has been mocking.