The protagonists divorced, flirted, or even had relationships, with strangers without risking the wrath of censorship, and then got back together.
The genre was given its name by the philosopher Stanley Cavell[1] in a series of academic articles that later became a 1981 book, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage.
Cavell argues that the genre represented Hollywood's crowning achievement, and that beneath all the slapstick and innuendo is a serious effort to create a new basis for marriage centered on mutual love – religious and economic necessity no longer applying for much of the American middle class.
In response to Cavell's article, scholar David R. Shumway claims it is possible "to make too much of the remarriage 'genre'".
[2] More recently, film critics A. O. Scott and David Edelstein both argued that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was a 21st-century example of the genre.