Sunday, June 21, 2009

Rand on Romantic Comedy

One of my father's day gifts is Objectively Speaking: Ayn Rand Interviewed, which includes this question:
Within the field of literature, where would you place humorous writing, compared with, say, Romantic literature?
In the first paragraph of her reply, she informs the interviewer that he has drawn a false distinction:
To begin with, there are Romantic types of humor. Romantic comedy is a very broad category, in which some very good works have been written. Take Oscar Wilde and my favorite, Noel Coward, as examples. They write Romantic humor. It is benevolent humor. It laughs at problems that in fact are not serious, and it shows the triumph of the good characters and their values. But it laughs at the unpleasantness of life. It laughs at negatives. Therefore, Romantic humor is a perfectly appropriate part of literature. (p 134-135)
But she's not in love with it. On page 126, in another interview, she declares that she likes romantic comedy very much, but that it's not "of personal importance to me," a fact she attributes to her own earnestness and seriousness.

She liked it alot, but her feelings were merely... warm.

Which explains
why she refrained
from writing in the form.

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