When Harry Met Sally, possibly the last great American comedy to depict men and women not just as adults but as vaguely compatible, famously claimed that men and women can't be friends. While my respect for this film or, indeed, any film in which the main characters do karaoke to The Surrey With a Fringe on Top will always be sky high, on this point I have long disagreed with the film's writer, Nora Ephron. I have plenty of male friends with whom "the sex thing", as Harry memorably refers to it, has never got in the way, but maybe that's just because none of them know the lyrics to Oklahoma!
But Ephron and I were both wrong: not only can men and women not be friends, they can barely stand to be in the same movie with one another. This summer, ye olde battle of the sexes is being played out in cinemas with The Hangover Part II in one corner, and, for the ladies, Bridesmaids in the other.
The Hangover Part II is hilarious only in its disregard for its audience: it is exactly the same as The Hangover, with the only nods to novelty being that Bangkok has been swapped for Vegas, a monkey for a baby and a missing brother-in-law for a missing groom. Bridesmaids opened in the US two weeks ago with heavy responsibility on its taffeta shoulders. "Bridesmaids: Women Can Be Funny Too?" snarked the snarky website Gawker. Happily, Bridesmaids, which is smart and joyful, has proved that having a vagina is no bar to having comic timing.
Something, though, is missing from both movies: the other gender. One is almost entirely female and the other – as is usually the way with American comedies – is almost entirely male. This is odd in itself (audiences in the 1930s and 40s could cope with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant snapping out one-liners on the same screen) but it's the way these movies effect gender segregation that underlines the real problem female comic actors face today.
In Bridesmaids, the men are sidelined but have personalities and pose no threat to the bond between the women. In The Hangover Part II, the women have no roles other than the shrewish wife and the hot if silent babe, and only when the men get away from their wives and girlfriends can they be themselves – which in this film involves (SPOILER ALERT) having sex with a male prostitute. In a gymnastic leap of logic, the movie uses this jaunt as proof that the character is worthy of his bride.
Now, to look too closely at the gender politics of The Hangover Part II is to risk getting butterfly fragments in one's eye as it splits on the wheel. But they do highlight a common trope in American comedies: the adult relationships are not so much husband and wife as Mean Mommy and Infantilised Man Child.
Another comedy opened last week in the US that's weirdly similar to The Hangover Part II in that respect: Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. Gil, played by Owen Wilson, is only able to write his novel when he gets away from his horrible fiancee, played by Rachel McAdams. Wilson and McAdams also starred in Wedding Crashers. Midnight in Paris could almost be that film's sequel as they are playing the same parts: she is the daughter of wealthy parents; he is Owen Wilson. But McAdams has morphed from the sweet thing in Wedding Crashers to the dream-crushing bitch that, according to American comedies, women become once they ensnare their man. Two more films out this summer, Crazy Stupid Love and The Change-Up, are also predicated on the idea that life as a single man is the dream and life as a married man is equivalent to castration. It's hard to know who should be more insulted by the cliche: women for being portrayed as humourless bitches or men for getting the overgrown baby role.
For too long, American comedies have struggled to conceive of a role for women other than soul-sucking wife or smoking hot chick. This is partly because only 17% of directors, producers and writers in Hollywood are women, according to a recent survey, and films that feature women in full possession of a brain are pretty much always written or directed by women.
It would be easy to blame Judd Apatow, creator of the bromance genre, for this trope, and some have seen Bridesmaids, which he produced, as his atonement. But Apatow's biggest success, Knocked Up, emphasised that the misbehaving men are wrong and the complaining wife is totally right. Yet he, like all male comedy writers, reserves the funny lines for the men. "I'm a dude . . . so I lean men, just the way Spike Lee leans African American," he told the New Yorker.
Yet there is another factor and it's not, contrary to Christopher Hitchens's claim, that women aren't funny, but that funny women seem to repel male audiences. Thus, female actors often get shunted into humourless roles. In the same New Yorker article, producer Michael Shamberg said: "If you make a guys' comedy you can get the girls, but if you make a girls' comedy the guys will go, 'That's just chick stuff.'" This is depressingly true. Despite excellent reviews for Bridesmaids, and terrible ones for The Hangover Part II, the former made less than a third of what the latter did in its opening weekend.
And this is why Bridesmaids will be the exception and The Hangover Part II the rule. What do you know, Harry was right: the sex thing just got in the way.