It’s impossible to spoil a great romantic comedy. We know its plot from Shakespeare plays, high school farces, and Hallmark Christmas movies. When young lovers meet in one of these stories, obstacles loom and then recede. Watching from behind protective glass, audiences can be sure the dowager will drop her objections to the upstart suitor; homophobic parents will relent; all the racists in town won’t be able to keep those crazy kids apart.

Classic romantic comedies enforce heteronormative monogamy, while more recent rom-coms attempt to evade the genre’s race, class, and gender constraints. These modern variants, though, call our attention to something that hasn’t really changed: the genre’s intergenerational politics. While the young lovers are growing up, joining the world of adulthood through marriage, their hidebound parents are carried forcibly into a newly liberalized world. As Northrop Frye argues, romantic comedy inherently sides with youth; it “turns on a clash between a son’s and a father’s will. Thus … the older members of almost any society are apt to feel that comedy has something subversive about it.”

Those subversive energies are already well established in the very first romantic comedy on record: Menander’s Dyskolos (The Bad-Tempered Man). Menander’s play opens with a young man from the city falling in love with a beautiful country girl. Everything about the setup is familiar rom-com fodder. The farmers fear that the young city slicker is inauthentic (“You mean that man in the splendid cloak? … His looks at once show he’s a rogue”) and the city parents despise their prospective in-laws as hicks (“What are you gaping at, you half-wit?”). The biggest impediment is the girl’s misanthropic father, who has driven everyone from his house. His antisocial behavior threatens to keep his daughter single for life. The lovelorn hero, however, has help: a buddy sidekick (coarser and funnier than he is), the girl’s brother (gruff, but willing to give the suitor a chance), and a lucky accident that allows him to impress the cantankerous father and win the girl.

Menander’s classic comedy is both inescapably influential and virtually forgotten. It won top prize at the Theater of Dionysus (17,000 seats) in 316 BCE, was performed across the ancient world in the subsequent centuries, and was widely adapted and translated, including by the Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence. After that, the play’s influence flowed like an underground river. By the 16th and 17th centuries, none of Menander’s rumored 108 plays was fully extant, although they were known from a robust tradition of imitation. The Latin comedies influenced by Menander inspired British and French dramatists, who left their mark on the broad tradition of domestic farce and romantic comedy that followed. Inspired by mere fragments, Molière based The Misanthrope (1666), still widely in repertory, on the theme of Dyskolos.

From its beginnings, romantic comedy has enfolded the story of generational conflict within a story of generational collaboration.

The twist in this story of influence and tradition came in 1952, when an important set of papyri from the third century CE were found in Egypt. They contained, among other treasures, the full text of Dyskolos. This delightful comedic development—the sudden reappearance of the lost child—allows us the rewarding plot turn Aristotle described as “recognition.” By looking back at the romantic comedy tradition through Dyskolos, we find ourselves squinting past the young lovers to their more interesting parents.

Dyskolos, as its title suggests, spends much of its narrative energy transforming Knemon, the “Bad-Tempered Man” at its heart. Knemon is marked by the character traits that Henri Bergson identifies as the legitimate targets of comedy: “unsociability” and “rigidity.” Constantly laboring (“it’s work, work, work for him”) and farming his large property alone, he is defined by his lack of neighborliness. Living next door to the temple of Pan, he complains about the smell of roasting meat, refuses to lend a stewpot for a sacrifice in the temple, and feels constantly besieged by the noise of revelers. He refuses to till the strip of his land that borders the public thoroughfare, in order to avoid roadside interactions: he is the original grouch yelling at kids to stay off his lawn. At the play’s start, Knemon, his virtuous daughter, and one enslaved maid (both women are nameless throughout, one of many details that situate the play more firmly in 316 BCE than in 2024) live a cloistered life, restricted to their home, their fields, and the nearby temple.

Knemon’s treatment of his marriageable daughter raises the stakes of his eccentricity. As the classic blocking figure of romantic comedy, he threatens generational progress. We can recognize him in countless strict parents who must be outwitted by their children, from Shakespearean fathers like Baptista in The Taming of the Shrew and Egeus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to more modern parents. Bella’s taciturn father in Twilight cleans his shotgun when her vampire boyfriend visits, while the dad in Clueless informs Cher’s date, “Anything happens to my daughter, I got a .45 and a shovel. I doubt anybody would miss you.” The teenage heroine of Freaky Friday thinks her joyless mother will be a cinch to impersonate: “It’s easy to be you. I’ll just suck the fun out of everything.” The logic of comedy demands that these antisocial parents be reformed.

However, that logic is more complex than it seems. From its beginnings, romantic comedy has enfolded the story of generational conflict within a story of generational collaboration. Even in Dyskolos, the union of the young lovers, ordained by the god Pan, is already seen as inevitable. The play focuses instead on finding a solution to the generational opposition that initiated conflict. The shift in the action comes when Knemon refuses help in retrieving a tool from the well, and falls in. He is rescued by the joint efforts of his estranged stepson and the play’s hero. The near-deadly accident transforms Knemon’s isolationist attitude (“One mistake perhaps I did make—thought myself alone of all / Self-sufficient, never needing anything from anyone”), and he agrees to the marriage between the hero and his daughter.

The arc of the play remains incomplete until the misanthrope is brought into the fold of society by dancing at his daughter’s wedding. Act V consists of a scheme to get Knemon out of his solitary home and to the party. Getas and Sikon, two victims of Knemon’s earlier rudeness, force the wounded man to dance in time to the wedding music that drifts through his closed door. There is cruelty in this moment, and the scene could be played for crude laughs, but Getas and Sikon are aiming for genuine reform: “He’s now one of the family; suppose he never changes, / Shall we not have an awful job to tolerate his manners?” When Knemon admits, “Perhaps it’s better to endure the party there,” the two carry him to the temple so they can all join the newly formed, cross-class extended family.

Even as Dyskolos plays Knemon’s oddities for laughs, it promises that the unsociable, prejudiced, and authoritarian parent will be brought into the general social harmony. Romantic comedy depends on the misunderstandings and even violence that get in the way, but the certainty of its conventions guarantees everyone will get to the church on time. The wedding that closes romantic comedies does a lot of work—weaving families together, forcing sexuality into a recognized form, and consolidating the authority of the community. Amid all this conformity, it’s easy to lose sight of the social possibility called forth by cross-class (or race or gender) unions. Dyskolos reminds us that the wedding isn’t over until the grumpy father dances.