Sexual angst

Unstinting in its language and unembarrassed about explicit discussions of sex, Darren Star's Sex and the City, now in its fifth season on HBO, is also television's most dazzling example of high comedy. The revue-sketch glimpses of the four female protagonists' sex lives--especially that of public relations executive Samantha (Kim Cattrall), who boasts a long list of lovers--may suggest a stylish, up-to-the-minute version of burlesque. But high comedy (also known as comedy of manners) has always been as frank about sex as low comedy. In other respects, too, Sex and the City demonstrates how this genre operates for a modern audience. Its focus is on verbal wit. Its characters belong to an aristocracy-which, in a democratic age and place, takes the form of a closed group, bonded by a shared vision of the world and governed by rules of conduct, access to which is a tricky proposition. And though the style of the comedy is glittering and brittle, beneath it is a seriousness of content, an exploration of how people deal with major emotional issues.

Before the turn of the last century, the comedy of manners found its perfect form in Oscar Wilde's deliriously inconsequential The Importance of Being Earnest. Twentieth-century audiences found it in the plays of Noël Coward or, for Americans, Philip Barry. George Cukor's movie versions of Barry's Holiday (1938) and The Philadelphia Story (1940), starring those quintessential Hollywood bluebloods Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, are the high comedies most Americans are likely to remember. Both are exquisitely stylized works; both are also very moving and profound. They are concerned with conformity and nonconformity, compromise and authenticity. Holiday is the story of a working-class man who, having entered the moneyed classes by way of his brains and hard work, finds that he has to barter his adventurous spirit to remain there. The Philadelphia Story is about an heiress who, through imposing unassailably high standards on the people she loves, has frozen them out and locked away her own humanity.

Sex and the City, in which by convention the characters' romantic escapades give rise to a sort of cultural philosophizing in a weekly column written by Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), consistently attains the depth to which the comedy of manners aspires. Good high comedy doesn't just substitute tears for laughter; it conceals tears beneath the façade of laughter (Noël Coward's specialty) or offers a sophisticated blend of the two (Philip Barry's).