Comedy Comradery: Life Lessons from Cary Grant

It’s a cliché story of childhood friendship: We were misfits. We were three girls who read too much, had awkward bodies, and liked to quote Monty Python. The two other girls had already been friends for four years when I joined the group—we would drink afternoon tea and giggle at episodes of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” delighted by innuendos that, in retrospect, we couldn’t have possibly fully understood. With ups and downs, we were friends from the fourth grade through high school.

But what really brought us together was our passion for screwball comedies. If Cary Grant starred in it, or even appeared, we loved it. I suggested that all of life’s questions were answered in “The Philadelphia Story” and “The Awful Truth”—and, for the most part, they agreed.

I don’t think it was an accident that we bonded over screwball comedies. These are films that Harvard philosophy professor emeritus, Stanley L. Cavell, calls “comedies of remarriage” in his book “Pursuits of Happiness.” They are movies that take a chaotic world, one that has in some way been turned on its head (usually by a grave misunderstanding between a couple that really ought to be together) and in reorder it through a remarriage. They are glossy films—products of Depression-Era America; they are both an escape from the economic problems of their time and a reminder that the people are flawed. During the course of these films two things usually happen: the obviously flawed people change (not entirely, but enough), and those around them learn to recognize their own flaws and forgive others’ shortcomings.

When we were twelve–years-olds huddled around television sets and sipping cocoa, we probably didn’t grasp the full significance of these lessons, but now they seem more salient. Because I admit it: I have sinned. We all went to different colleges, promising to speak every week, and now I barely call them up once a month. Reaching out, calling back, and responding to e-mails has never been my strong suit. In my first year of college, I came to associate home with varying degrees of pain—my father was very ill when I returned for Christmas break and I was still stinging from a trying break-up with my high school boyfriend.

Sure, I still saw the other two girls but, we had changed; we were not the three little girls in plaid jumpers, reminding each other that “no one expects the Spanish Inquisition.” Over the holiday break, we still had tea but silences were palpable. Old jokes fell flat, tea grew cold in our cups, and we left each others’ apartments, walking home alone into what seemed to me a desolate city.

We told each other we were excited to see each other, we couldn’t wait, but that summer I got an internship in Rome. I jumped at the opportunity not to be in New York, a place that was now filled with ghosts of a happier high school experience. When I returned from Italy we spent a weekend together by the sea; I was scolded for my poor romantic choices while abroad (in hindsight, they were right) and the distance between us, even as we sat on the beach reading The New Yorker, felt greater than ever.

In November of my sophomore year, I got on a bus with a group of other kids wearing crimson and journeyed to New Haven for Harvard-Yale, more to see one of the two friends than to watch the game. After a few hours of unsatisfying party-hopping, my friend had an idea; she suggested we watch “The Philadelphia Story,” our favorite of the screwball genre—a 1940 classic starring Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and Jimmy Stewart. We purchased Tate’s Chocolate Chip Cookies and Milanos at a deli near her college and changed into our pajamas. Sitting on her futon we watched the comedy of remarriage, and I fell asleep, my head on my friend’s shoulder, to the sounds of Dinah, the protagonist’s younger sister, singing “Lydia the Tatooed Lady.”

It did not feel like “old times” per se, but when I managed to find my way back to my friend’s room after the game, she and I decided to finish the movie before I went back to Cambridge. We sipped hot chocolate and watched Tracy Lord, the heroine played by Katherine Hepburn, learn not to be so proud.

I would like to write that I got better at keeping in touch after that moment—I didn’t. Time has only made me worse. But I still maintain that “The Philadelphia Story” can answer all of life’s questions: “The time to make up your mind about people,” says Tracy Lord to a jaded journalist, “is never.”

—Columnist Sofia E. Groopman can be reached at segroopm@fas.harvard.edu.