“Where the Wise Elder is a sexless fossil, the Pervy Elder is anything but. He or she shows up to pinch bottoms, cackle double-entendres about teeth that come out and convey the message that our lovebirds had better cut to the chase while they're still continent.”

~ E. Bougerol

By E. Bougerol  |  Send to Friend

Most people have experienced something like love, or lust, or at very least unhealthy obsession from afar, which totally counts -- and yet audiences keep returning to the same insipid romantic comedy plotlines and cartoony characters over and over again. With these 10 tropes, below, we're essentially giving you a D.I.Y. romcom kit. So equipped, you (or the average monkey) should be able to phone in a crappy Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson vehicle by lunch.

The All-Time Worst Rom-Com Cliches of All Time:

10. The Contrived Set-Up

In real life, boy meets girl in the grocery store checkout line, at a party, or on a dating website for Christian singles. How can anything so undramatic portend epic, soul-stirring, life-changing love? In Hollywood, if it's meant to be, boy'll meet girl when one of them is writing an article about women who bolt at the altar ("Runaway Bride"), or a column about driving men away ("How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days"), or when the guy's assumed to be gay and hired to chaperone some steely mogul's girlfriend ("Fools Rush In"), or when one of them slips into a coma after being stalked by the other ("While You Were Sleeping"). Anything else reads flat in the Netflix synopsis and will be skipped over in favor of the first season of "Meerkat Manor."

9. The Getting-to-Know-You Montage

Ferris wheels, zoos, ice rinks and riverbank promenades serve only one cinematic purpose, and that's to act as scenery for the montage of freewheeling fun in which two characters get to know each other. These segments are usually dialogue-free, set to a vaguely indie soundtrack that sounds like (and often is) something by Fountains of Wayne, but some filmmakers opt for dialogue here, trotting out the tired "I've never told anyone this, but…" set-up. We're not sure which is worse.

8. The Oldies Soundtrack

Somewhere in the bowels of Los Angeles, there's a lab where songs recorded between 1930 and 1968 are analyzed for their ability to telegraph a scene's emotional timbre. Aretha Franklin's "Respect" means a wronged woman is about to exact revenge (double points if she's throwing the bastard's clothes out a window). "Just the Way You Look Tonight" (by Tony Bennett or Michael Bublé, depending on budget) is a sure sign that suckface is imminent, while Etta James warbling "At Last" is your cue to beat the rest of the audience to the parking lot. (Bonus points if the movie stole its title from an oldie: "Only You," "Fools Rush In," "One Fine Day," "'Til There Was You").

7. The Love of a Good Quirky Woman

Say you're a fellow who's past his prime, manically overworked or pathologically anal (see "Music and Lyrics," "Sweet November" and "Along Came Polly," respectively). In short, joie de vivre eludes you. Hollywood will see to it that you're saved by someone who's just your opposite, and by "opposite" they mean quirky, and by "quirky" they mean completely batshit. Why bother with character development when you can make your heroine a flighty hypochondriac, bag lady-attired dognapper or neo-hippie with a blind pet ferret, and take the rest of the month off? (And yes, we know "Sweet November" is a movie about a woman with a terminal illness, and therefore not technically a comedy. But we dare you to rewind any of Keanu Reeves' scenes and not laugh.)

6. The Fat Best Friend

Maybe she's actually chubby (Rosie O'Donnell, "Sleepless in Seattle"), maybe she's a little older, taller and kookier than the heroine (Bonnie Hunt, "Only You"), or maybe she's a gay man (Rupert Everett, "My Best Friend's Wedding"). Whatever the best friend's salient trait might be, it knocks her down a peg, ensuring that she won't muscle in on the heroine's catch and can just sit on the sidelines, living vicariously, cracking wise and offering a shoulder to cry on. She's usually lonely, either single or trapped in a dead-end relationship with someone shorter (see Fisher Stevens, "Only You")

5. The Wise Elder



What's all this fuss about old people not getting any good acting jobs? Rom-coms provide steady work for the over-80 set. The Wise Elder is wheeled out (sometimes literally) to deliver a speech to the boneheaded hero or heroine about the importance of love. She sits in her cardigan, wistfully spooling out tales of her youth, in an attempt to smack some life-is-short sense into the vacuous schmuck she's saddled with schooling. (Note: Where the Wise Elder is a sexless fossil, the Pervy Elder is anything but. He or she shows up to pinch bottoms, cackle double-entendres about teeth that come out and convey the message that our lovebirds had better cut to the chase while they're still continent.) The official Lifetime Achievement Award in this category goes to Olympia Dukakis, who has made a great living being nothing but old, cantankerous and wise.

4. The Pet

(Wo)man's best friend is one of the most hackneyed crutches in the canon, and it goes like this: Girl takes boy home after a date and introduces him to her pet -- without Fido or Fifi's stamp of approval, the evening (read: the relationship) ends there. The snarling standoff while the heroine's not looking is popular, and canine crotch-sniffing or leg-humping during foreplay is a tipoff that what you're watching went straight to video. Some filmmakers have even managed to stretch this chestnut into two hours' worth of material ("Dog Park," "Must Love Dogs"). But we'll pay grudging respect to creative pet deployment, such as "Along Came Polly"'s overwhelmingly vile twist of Ben Stiller using Jennifer Aniston's pet ferret as toilet paper.

3. The Wedding Scene

Blame Richard Curtis. It's not like the British director invented matrimony, but he wrote "Four Weddings and a Funeral," the movie that made women everywhere want to go to as many weddings as possible in case Hugh Grant was there. Curtis' movie was actually warm, nuanced and funny as hell; not so with "The Wedding Planner" (Jennifer Lopez), "The Bachelor" (Chris O'Donnell) or "The Wedding Date" (Debra Messing), all of which stockpile wedding-day stereotypes to confer "romance" on the proceedings. Horny bridesmaids! Meddling mothers-in-law! Dashing men in tuxedoes dancing cutely with flower girls! Drunken confessions! If cliché in romcoms is low-hanging fruit, setting a movie at a wedding is like planting an orchard two feet high.

2. The Crowd Confessional

When our hero's faced with the prospect of his soulmate slipping away forever (a.k.a. "boy loses girl"), only a grand, 11th-hour, public declaration of love -- followed by strangers cheering -- will do. Preferably, on a plane about to take off ("Only You") -- or in flight already ("The Wedding Singer"); at Yankee Stadium ("Anger Management"); at a camp auditorium in the '50s ("Dirty Dancing"); on a subway platform ("Crocodile Dundee"); or at midnight on New Year's Eve ("When Harry Met Sally"). Of course the perfect double-bonus is to have the 'Confessional' occur at someone else's wedding ("Picture Perfect"). Extra points if the hero has to get past a cantankerous official to get to his love (a cop, a judge, a cabbie), especially if the latter has a Brooklyn accent.

1. The "Ugly" Duckling

If there's a trope more insulting than being asked to buy hotties like Sandra Bullock (a transit worker in "While You Were Sleeping"), Rachael Leigh Cook (the butt of a bet in "She's All That") or Drew Barrymore (a 20-year-old who's "Never Been Kissed") as frizz-haired, four-eyed klutzes next door, clearly we haven't watched enough late-night TBS, because we don't know what it is. Bullock should actually be cast in bronze for playing frumps who blossom into beauties, given her turn as an FBI agent in the "Miss Congeniality" series, which revolves around the hilarity that ensues from attempting to pass off such an obviously homely creature as a beauty pageant contestant.


E. Bougerol is neither wise, single, married, dating, frumpy or beautiful tonight. She is, however, quirky and in a relationship, so buzz off.