In the postwar years after World War II, a new subgenre of sex comedies was on the rise where sexual issues were becoming more blatant and open on screen. In American Cinema, the book describes how women’s roles in comedies molded to “a figure of male sexual fantasy” (186) and sizzling female characters were able to “melt the iceman’s ice, boil the milkman’s milk, and shatter the eyeglasses of male onlookers” (187). Though a common stereotype of women in the comedy genre in that time, Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) subverts the trope by introducing female lead Annie Hall, an eccentric, aspiring singer, who is not in the least bit as seductive or provocative as females characters before her.

The plot of Annie Hall centers around neurotic forty-year-old