Romantic Comedy?

      Lucius or the Ass definitely made me laugh, which was not something I expected when I sat down and started reading out of Anthology of Ancient Greek Popular Literature. Now as I am trying to think of a blog topic for this particular story I can't help but feel this may have been one of the first romantic comedies. Lucius starts out with the motive of wanting to see the witch perform magic, who ironically ends up being the wife of the host he is lodging with. That reason then leads him to a girl, Palestra, with whom he engages in sex with in order to get her to show him the mistress's magic, but I speculate that he did started to developed some sentimental feelings towards Palestra. In a Hollywood rendition he definitely would have fallen in love with her. So Lucius as a result of Palestra's oversight gets turned into an ass, instead of the bird he desired to morph into. After a succession of brutal attempts on his donkey life, Lucius finds fame in being a smart and well trained donkey, finally living the good life in his donkey form. Somehow or another a girl falls madly in love with his donkey form, a few bizarre events later and Lucius finally finds some roses to munch on and turns himself back into his glorious human self. 

      He is finally out of his donkey prison and free to do manly things once again. So of course his first order of business is to seek out the girl who loved him as a donkey and enjoy her love for him in his new man form. The part where this story diverges from romantic comedy and into some other weird genre that may be more similar to scifi than romance, is when the girl refuses him because he is no longer a donkey. Now full disclosure, I am chuckling to myself as I am writing this because I find is so funny, that she completely shoots his confidence down in a matter of sentences, while the entire story has been centered around his quest to be a glorious man once again. 

    After pondering this story I actually think it could make a great movie, no one would expect the ending because it is so different from what we have become accustomed to seeing at the end of a romantic comedy.