Those who snuggle up on the sofa with a bowl of popcorn, a blanket and a pile of Drew Barrymore DVDs are not seeking to have their core values challenged. We romcom fans are a disparate lot, but we are united in our pursuit of comfort. So perhaps we missed the big romance movies of the last six months. Loving and A United Kingdom both told the true stories of interracial couples who triumphed over 20th-century racism, while the contemporary-set horror GetOut, while not a romcom, used afictional interracial couple to question how far we have really come.

But upcoming romcoms with mixed race matchups, such as The Big Sick and The Incredible Jessica James (also out this summer on Netflix) have a wider appeal. The former is the true story of Pakistani-American stand-up Kumail Nanjiani’s courtship with his now-wife and co-writer, Emily Gordon, and comes pre-approved by comedy godfather Judd Apatow in a producer role.

The Incredible Jessica James is a star-making vehicle for The Daily Show’s Jessica Williams, in which she is a broken-hearted Brooklynite paired with Chris O’Dowd (Bridesmaids). Both films were Sundance hits. So, to borrow the title of an under-appreciated interracial romcom from 2006, this, surely, is Something New?

Interracial couples on screen aren’t new, but their depictions in early cinema were rarely “light-hearted” or “happily concluded” — both conventions of the romcom. The most typical set up concerned a white man and a Native American woman (The Bronze Bride in 1917, The Heart of Wetona in 1919), or a white man with an east Asian woman (The Forbidden City in 1918, The Toll of the Sea in 1922). All steered well clear of what was, in actuality, the most common type of interracial union in pre-20th century America — the rape of a slave by a master — yet still managed to complicate a troubling gender dynamic with an equally troubling colonial one. DW Griffith’s 1919 London-set film Broken Blossoms was progressive in that it conceived of a pure love between a white woman and a Chinese immigrant man, but racist in every other respect — although you might have expected as much from the director of the critically acclaimed and nonetheless Ku Klux Klan-glorifying The Birth of a Nation.

John M Stahl’s 1934 Imitation of Life was one of the first films to depict a loving relationship between an African American and an American of European descent. Significantly, though, both the “light-skinned black” character Peola and Fredi Washington, the mixed-heritage actor who played her, were defined as “negro” in accordance with the white-supremacist “one-drop rule”, codified into law in the Jim Crow-era south. Not only did the film never confront audiences with the sight of black and white skin entwined in a loving embrace, but the very description of Peola as “light-skinned black” served to deny the long history of both mixed-race individuals and the interracial unions from which they came.

In a bracingly astute 1935 review, the African-American critic Sterling Allen Brown called out the film for its perpetuation of “the tragic mulatto” stereotype. “She is so woebegone,” he wrote, “that she is a walking argument against miscegenation. Like her mammy, she contributes to Anglo-Saxon self esteem.”

Still, Stahl’s film had slipped by just in time. That same year, the Motion Picture Association of America Production Code or “Hays Code” cameinto force, specifically stating: “Miscegenation (sexual relationships between the white and black races) is forbidden.” Thus the tragic mulatto stereotype moped on, in films such as the 1957 Band of Angels, which starred Clark Gable, and the 1959 remake of Imitation of Life, as the most convenient means to toy with taboo. This was especially the case if the light-skinned black woman in question was actually played by a white woman, as in 1951’s Show Boat, where Ava Gardner was given a role earlier played by Lena Horne, or 1949’s Pinky, starring Irish-American Jeanne Crain.

It was not until 1967, with the release of the Stanley Kramer-directed Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, that cinema began to countenance interracial lovebirds having comically catastrophic dates, irksome in-laws and brazen besties, just like any other on-screen couples. Despite a topical plot — a young white woman (Katharine Houghton) brings home her black fiance (Sidney Poitier) in civil rights-era America — the film embraced the genre froth by casting romcom royalty, Spencer Tracey and Katharine Hepburn, as Joey’s “not-racist-but ...” parents.

Staying relevant

If Kramer’s film seemed groundbreaking at the time, it would stand out even more in the decades to come. In the 70s, 80s and early 90s several serious films engaged with “the issue” of interracial couples (The Great White Hope, Mississippi Masala, Jungle Fever, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul), but relatively few of the light-hearted kind you would take a date to on a Friday night (maybe Thandie Newton’s 1991 film debut, Flirting). Romantic comedies had fallen out of fashion altogether in New Hollywood and when the revival did finally come, so much time had passed, it seemed necessary to make Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner all over again. Literally. Guess Who, starring Ashton Kutcher and Zoe Saldana, was released in 2005, to lukewarm reviews noting its comparative lack of political bite.

In 2006, the fresher, yet still comfortingly familiar, Something New followed, featuring African-American Sanaa Lathan as a successful singleton and white Aussie Simon Baker as the more laid-back landscape architect she falls for, despite disapproval from her community. “We barely see anyone of mixed race or those who create that mixed race, in entertainment,” says Something New’s Moroccan-American director, Sanaa Hamri, reflecting on her film’s impact. “It was way overdue then and it’s way overdue now.”

Genre conventions dictate the bumpy course of true love, but what isnotable about 2017’s batch of interracial romcoms is that race isn’t the primary narrative obstacle. In The Big Sick, the disapproval of Kumail’s Pakistani Muslim family poses a threat to his relationship (“You have to break up with her now or mum will [expletive] ghost you,” warns his brother), but as the title suggests, it’s when Emily goes into hospital that things really get tricky. In The Incredible Jessica James, Jessica and her romantic prospect, Boone, can’t quite connect; not because she’s black and he’s white, but because neither has yet moved on from their last relationship. So are romcoms guilty of glossing over real-world problems in pursuit of post-racial peachiness?

“I always get a little nervous or sceptical when people say, ‘I don’t see race, or it’s not about that,’” says Jim Strouse, the writer-director of The Incredible Jessica James, and also a white guy from Indiana. “I think, after Trump was elected, it’s been more obvious than ever that we are not in a post-racial world. That said, in writing it, it was always meant to be first and foremost a fun, joyful movie about love.” Similarly, The Big Sick’s Nanjiani has said he was reluctant to delve into certain story areas until pressed: “There was a long time when we weren’t talking about any religious stuff. My parents are from a different culture, they’re very religious Muslim people, and Judd said: ‘You have to engage with that aspect of the story.’”

cultural clash

For these films, pairing characters of different ethnicities isn’t so much an attempt to tackle issues as one of several ways of signalling that what we have here isn’t your usual, run-of-the-mill romcom. They nod visually to the screwball truism that opposites attract, while simultaneously asking if these two sensitive, creative souls really are that dissimilar, just because their skin colours come in different sections of a Pantone swatch. Certainly the Kumails, Emilys, Jessicas and Boones of this world have a lot more in common with each other than they do with their tonally matched families back home. In the tradition of Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, the real cultural clash of the interracial romcom is not between races, but between generations. These films also dispense with the 90s/00s style “meet-cute” because they just aren’t the kinds of characters who would break a heel then spill a skinny latte all over the cute guy from the office. As Strouse says of his leading lady and muse: “I think of Jessica as like Katharine Hepburn; no nonsense and I’m not going to apologise for it. I love that kind of bumbling, I’m-sorry-for-existing type character you see in romantic comedies. But, y’know, we’ve seen that plenty.” Romcoms are hardly known for their invention, but it’s no coincidence that many of cinema’s most formally inventive films, from Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour to John Cassavetes’ Shadows, do feature interracial couples.

As Hamri points out, diverse representation and creative innovation all go hand in hand: “Not only is Something New about opening one’s mind about race relations, it’s about looking at something using a different lens. Freedom is key in artistic expression.” It’s the comedy element, though, that gives these films their ability to reach a wider audience. “It’s a way to make all people more comfortable and less stressed out about learning differences,” adds Hamri. “Laughter shows more of our commonalities versus our differences.”

In this respect, TV, where Hamri now does most of her work, is way ahead. In The Mindy Project, a romcom-obsessed Indian American seems to exclusively date white men; in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a Jewish New Yorker has an on-again-off-again obsession with a Filipino-American surfer dude, and the family sitcom black-ish explores what it’s like to be a bi-racial American woman married to an African-American man. In Aziz Ansari’s Netflix show Master of None, Dev has dated white, black, east Asian and South Asian women, all within a single episode, and also had a serious, long-term relationship with Rachel, played by Tunisian-Mexican-American actress Noel Wells.

In fact, Master of None fan Strouse was so taken with Wells that he cast her in The Incredible Jessica James, as Jessica’s sassy-comes-as-standard bestie — because some romcom cliches are too good to mess with. He is feeling optimistic about the potential for mainstream movies to follow where TV and the indies have led. “In the past 10 years, there’s been a wonderful tide change behind the camera and in front, but it’s still incremental. At the studio level, things are changing at a glacial place.” It may take a while, then, and it is likely that there will be a few hilarious misunderstandings along the way, but if romcoms have taught us anything, it’s this: those crazy kids will get it together in the end.

Don’t miss it

The Big Sick releases in the UAE on August 3.