Though rarely explored in analytical detail, the romantic comedy remains a stalwart contributor to Hollywood entertainment. This book offers a comprehensive history of the Hollywood romantic comedy film, from the coming of sound to the twenty-first century, examining the conventions of the genre and surveying the controversies arising from the critical responses to these films.Hollywood's romantic comedies can be seen as a series of productions whose form and meaning change in response to conditions in the film industry, courtship culture, and society at large. This book provides an essential overview of the continuities within the genre as well as its historical evolution. A full analysis is provided of the range of romantic comedy conventions, including dramatic conflicts, characters, plots, settings, and the function of humor. In doing so, Leger Grindon develops a survey of historical cycles and clusters and builds a canon of key films from Hollywood's classical era right up to the present day, which are analyzed in detail in the second part of the book. Films analyzed include Trouble in Paradise, His Girl Friday, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, Adam's Rib, Some Like It Hot, The Graduate, Annie Hall, When Harry Met Sally, There's Something About Mary, and Waitress.