The story begins with our heroine, Sally Milz, a comedy writer at The Night Owls (a fictionalized Saturday Night Live), waking up to discover that her “pasty skinned and sleep-deprived” co-worker Danny Horst is dating Annabel Lily-a “gorgeous, talented, world-famous movie star” who is, by all accounts, out of Danny’s league. She does this, in part, by setting her novel in the entertainment industry-that producer of slick narrative arcs and neat archetypes-and, more specifically, by making her protagonist a professional comedian, someone whose literal job is to poke fun at the scripts that govern our desires. This familiar trope is also the opening setup to Curtis Sittenfeld’s latest novel, Romantic Comedy, though Sittenfeld deftly toggles between deconstructing a well-worn genre and leaning into its most predictable beats. And part of the comedy is that an average-looking man who tells good jokes is able to tell them all the way to the bedroom.

When it comes to romancing a woman, humor and a heart of gold turn out to be a foolproof strategy of seduction. In these films, what’s most valued in a man is not his body-or even his bank account-but his winning personality. This is, at least, the fantasy that romantic comedies have too often sold us, from Woody Allen’s Manhattan to Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Dayto Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single, hot woman must be in want of a schlubby man who can make her laugh.

Prep by curtis sittenfeld