The Horny Friend Is Always the Best Character in Romantic Comedies
In all romantic comedies there are two types of people: one girl who isn’t looking for love because she just moved to this picturesque beach town to focus on her miniature doll furniture business, and one girl who gets so drunk she performs oral sex on a telephone pole.
There’s the protagonist who’s not ready to open up, and then there’s the best friend who met an international soccer team at a bar and is leaving to have an orgy.
There’s the star, who is slowly but surely falling for her enigmatic mailman, and there’s her married friend, who just wishes her husband Doug would let her peg him for once!
That second woman should be the star of the movie.
The Horny Best Friend is one of the great archetypes in romantic comedies, a hallmark of the genre, like emotionally transformative karaoke performances and running through airports. Her goal isn’t to get married, it’s to get off.
The main character is a blank canvas of a woman who is written with purposeful blandness so that anyone can project onto her, imagining ourselves in the fairytale. She exists to find love. The Horny Best Friend exists to make us laugh. The protagonist is “quirky!” The best friend is a fully unhinged sex monster. (See Set It Up: Zoey Deutch’s protagonist is mildly sexual, whereas her roommate, played by Meredith Hagner, “had sex with [a guy] in the handicap bathroom of an Acela.”) The protagonist is easily embarrassed. The best friend is embarrassed by nothing. The protagonist doesn’t know what she wants. The best friend knows exactly what she wants and that is sex in a king-size water bed, covered in chocolate sauce.
It’s Samantha finding herself through sex versus Carrie losing herself through Big. Madonna playing ball and partying in A League of Their Own while Geena Davis’s character thinks about baseball strategy and war. Tiffany Haddish’s character in Girls Trip worrying only about remembering to keep a grapefruit next to her bed, while Regina Hall’s character worries about her husband cheating. It is Daniel Levy’s cheerful disgust with the institution or marriage next to Kristin Stewart’s determination to enter it in The Happiest Season. Sebastian’s “Kiss the Girl” to Ariel’s bug-eyed muteness. Mercutio’s filthy verses versus Romeo’s flowery ones.
In early Hollywood romances, heroines were more complex. Katherine Hepburn and her peers played women who were both sexual and emotionally serious; they netted Oscars by doing laugh-out-loud physical comedy and soul-stirring monologues in the same movie. Contemporary romantic comedies, as film critic Shanna Yellen has pointed out in Glamour, “focus on compatibility and deemphasize sex.” Love, these movies tend to suggest, is about two conventionally attractive thin white people accepting each others’ mild flaws and entering into marriage (common flaws include: being a perfectionist, being afraid to love, and other “my greatest flaw is actually my greatest strength” obnoxiousness).
Thus, being interesting is a task relegated to the Horny Friend, whose strong sexuality precludes her from being a heroine. (Basically, we don’t want to put sexual women on too high a pedestal, because they are not as worthy of love—thanks, society.) The Horny Friend is often the biggest role the movie will allow a woman of color to occupy (see Mindy Kaling in No Strings Attached telling Natalie Portman’s straight-edge character, “We’re sluts, Emma! We’re dirty dirty sluts!” or Dionne having sex with her boyfriend in Clueless while Cher dates first a gay man and then her step-brother). One of the greatest Horny Friend turns in cinematic history is Rupert Everett in My Best Friend’s Wedding, whose character is gay.
The Horny Friend or side character is often allowed to be fat or older. See Allison Janney’s masterful horny guidance counselor in 10 Things I Hate About You, Melissa McCarthy’s career-making horniness in Bridesmaids, Kristen Johnston’s fan-girl hysteria in Music & Lyrics. Too often, whatever characteristic makes the Horny Best Friend ineligible to be the protagonist is played as a joke—it’s supposed to be funny that Allison Janney’s character is horny because older women are supposed to be sexless and maternal. It’s supposed to be funny that Melissa McCarthy’s character is horny because fat women should be grateful for what they get.
But with the right actor, the Horny Best Friend is the character we love best, the one we remember long after the “perfect” main actress has shuffled off in her white veil and train.
Part of what’s so appealing about the Horny Friend is that although she faces discrimination because of her race or her weight or her age or her sexuality, she also has freedom the protagonist lacks. She is allowed to have sex without making a lifelong commitment or seeing it as a horrible mistake. She’s allowed to have desire without focusing completely on the project of monogamous heterosexuality.
Her life isn’t fair, and in that way it’s more relatable. She knows that people are never going to treat her like a princess, so she takes living well upon herself. She’s the one we want to see more of—the girl who sometimes gets love but always gets free.
Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter.
Originally Appeared on Glamour
