My Fair Lady

I think that very few comedies can be considered meaningful. In fact, the meaning in comedies is not apparent or easily found. The reader or viewer must be intentional in their search. For instance, I easily enjoyed reading the "original" comedy, Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, but once I finished I just as easily forgot the novel due to its lack of obvious meaning and importance, like that found in tragedies such as King Lear.

Nevertheless, I think there is something to be said about the humor and love stories of Jane Austen's novels and some of Shakespeare's plays such as "Twelfth Night", "As You Like It", and "The Taming of the Shrew". By crafting humor with irony and contrasting it with the seriousness of love, readers can take these works seriously and not just as entertainment for women. These comedies are the exception, though, as many more modern comedies use too little irony and satire for their humor and more ridiculous or extreme circumstances to convey a love story thus making the work less meaningful.

For example, the popular romantic musical "My Fair Lady," taken from the play "Pygmalion" by George Shaw, has many situational similarities to Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew" though the characters are a little different. "My Fair Lady" is clearly a comedy as Aristotle defined it. The heroine (Eliza Doolittle) is a young women clearly of a low class due to her unclean clothes and accented, harsh speech. A somewhat abusive man takes on the challenge of transforming her into a lady and the sympathetic heroine rises in fortune through her new knowledge of what it means to be proper and her relationship with the man. This musical enhances the viewers understanding of love as something that can overcome the oftentimes ridiculousness of social classes. Furthermore, it emphasizes how love develops in the wake of prejudices such as sexism and misogyny. This musical is one example of a meaningful romantic comedy that should not be dismissed as trivial.