Welcome to the Jungle

Okay, is it just me, or has there been a plethora of wedding themed romantic comedies lately? If I see Katherine Hiegl in another bridesmaid dress, Kate Hudson bitching about men or Ginnifer Goodwin whining about being single, I’m going to poke myself in the eye with my eyeliner pencil multiple times until I gauge my eyes out. 

As women, we get it. We want to see a good love story. We want to cry, we want to laugh and we want to see hot guys. But that doesn’t mean that every single chick flick or romantic comedy needs to be about a single girl at her best friend’s wedding. 

Over the weekend I had the pleasure of seeing Bridesmaids, which was refreshingly funny with a cast full of average looking women. Let’s face it, most of us don’t look like Cameron Diaz or Jennifer Aniston. Instead, the characters are as real and pathetic as can be, with scenes like the now infamous dress-fitting gag where Kristen Wiig and her co-stars succumb to a disastrous case of (to put it nicely) food poisoning.

But what’s with all the ruckus about “This movie finally proves that women really are funny.” The notion that women aren’t funny is as old as the people still bringing it up. Wasn’t it Joan Rivers who hosted The Tonight Show for Johnny Carson decades ago? Wasn’t it Ellen DeGeneres who was the first woman to get called up to Johnny Carson’s desk (again, decades ago)? Wasn’t it Tina Fey who became the first female head writer on Saturday Night Live? And wasn’t it Betty White who has suddenly become a phenomenon (again) for… I don’t know… being funny? 

While I absolutely adored Bridesmaids, one thing still plagues my mind; why did the first female comedy that’s supposedly going to “change comedy forever” have to be about a wedding? Is that all chicks are good for, to write romantic comedies about being the eternal bridesmaid? 

Whatever happened to the days of Nora Ephron movies about just falling in love?