As a general rule, comedy attends to and reflects upon human desires for love, life, and fertility. Comic plots emphasize sequences of reversal and recovery that in turn reflect mythological sequences of death and rebirth….

Elements of the miraculous, the wonderful, and the fantastic are found in all comedies. Shakespeare's comedies abound with fantastic characters and situations….

Capra's films present no exception to this general comic characteristic. Aspects of the improbable, the fantastic, and the unexpected always seem at work in Capra's films, throwing characters off balance, upsetting their sense of equilibrium, deceiving and confusing normally perceptive individuals. Few people, after all, ever find themselves seated beside a runaway heiress on a New York-bound bus. Few people inherit twenty-million dollars. Few Boy Scout leaders suddenly find themselves in the U.S. Senate. Few beggars find themselves hosting the Governor of New York at a penthouse reception.

Hence, the first rule of the comic universe in general and the Capra universe in particular is that normal everyday rules of probability do not always apply. In other words, the everyday rules are "off." Such a suspension of probability allows Capra to put his characters in fantastic situations that require that they rethink their own sense of self and morality, working through the morass of their own emotional and perceptual mistakes towards a renewed awareness of emotional and intellectual reality. (p. 227)

What we see in Capra, then, is actually a latter-day equivalent of the Roman Saturnalia, a period of madcap license in which "all normal business and ceremony [were] put aside for the duration of the holiday, and masters and servants exchanged roles; the slaves sat at table wearing their master's clothes and the pilleus, or badge of freedom, and enjoyed the right to abuse their masters, who served them." The rules of everyday human interaction are suspended, and the world is turned upside-down …: the low are made great, and the great are brought low, and the final effect is one of "leveling," making all characters undergo the democratic experience of absolute equality under the benevolent providence of the comic spirit…. The Vanderhoff household in You Can't Take It With You … is a good example of such saturnalian equality at work. (p. 228)

[The] second rule of the Capra universe is that the "off" rules are always poised to reassert themselves. As in Pocketful of Miracles …, we are always aware that the fairytales of improbable fortune can return at any moment to the logical fate of everyday life. (pp. 229-30)

Such a balance between wish fulfillment and reality principles is a hallmark of mature comedy. Holiday and everyday only have meaning when placed in opposition. We cannot appreciate the freedom of release unless the bondage of everyday life, with its mundane logic and requirements, remains in our minds. And it is this skill at maintaining the delicate balance between wanting and getting, the probable and the improbable, appealing to our anarchic desires without forgetting our very strong sense of reality and probability, that characterizes Capra's use of the comic form. He is fully aware of human hopes, and yet he is, particularly in the Capra romances, fully cognizant of the ease with which human hopes can lead to disappointment and disaster.

But Capra's mastery of form does not completely account for the great success of his films. Capra's primary concern is with human beings and human emotions. Accordingly, the "reality" of Capra's films depends upon the reality of Capra's characters. Do they act as we would act if we were in their admittedly fantastic shoes? I think the answer to that question is generally an unqualified "yes." Capra creates a sense of emotional necessity: given this situation, these characters would experience these emotions and make these moves. Capra obviously constructs his films to achieve this feeling of emotional verisimilitude, but we never sense the construction. There is a natural "lifelike" flow to Capra's movies, and it is this emotional rhythm that strikes us as realistically accurate. Our reaction as spectators is never "this could never happen to me," but rather "if that did happen to me, that is precisely how I would feel about it, precisely how I would handle it." Therein lies the "truth" of the Capra cinema. His world is self-contained and consistent, yet it arouses and reflects upon actual human emotions.

Thus another key factor in Capra's success is audience identification. His movies are festivities and are about festivities. His characters experience a "rules-off" situation where new emotional and intellectual responses are required, and similarly we as spectators experience a "rulesoff" situation where we are free to identify with and feel very deeply about the characters and their struggles….

But our knowledge and hence our experience is often more complete than that of the characters. We are often aware of situational ironies unknown to the characters themselves. For example, in It Happened One Night …, we know that Ellie and Peter love each other. Accordingly, our sense of anxiety is in fact greater than that of either Ellie or Peter near the film's conclusion when she is about to marry Westley, for we realize how agonizingly narrow yet how unbridgeably wide is the gap between them: if they would only drop their cynical masks for a moment to see each other as we see them, people deeply in love, the properly comic conclusion would be assured and fertility would symbolically triumph. Our sense of frustration is as great as if not greater than that of the characters. (p. 230)

But Capra does not just put us through an emotional ringer. It is not a matter of cheap thrills and Hollywood daydreams. Peter and Ellie count because they represent a properly attentive sort of human concern: were they not so sensitive to each other they would not be so easily hurt. Thus Capra's point, a mature point at that, is that one should remain both sensitive (as we are when we watch the film) and vulnerable (as we are when we watch the film), willing to risk hurt for the sake of legitimate emotional involvement. (p. 231)

To a great extent, then, the Capra cinema is about involvement, the way situations can demand greater degrees of emotional hazard and commitment than we had at first thought possible or necessary. This is true both for Capra's characters and the members of the audience. Capra's moral code is a function of this involvement: life is a swift-running, exhilarating stream, and each person shares the responsibility of insuring that the stream of existence runs ever onward. Capra's cynics and romantics are thus reprehensible because they refuse to immerse themselves in the rhythm of life. They are captured by their dreams or disappointments, and hence they tend to destroy themselves or to destroy others. But life, human life, is too wonderful and precious to be thus destroyed, and the cinema of Frank Capra serves as an aesthetic reminder both of life's mystery and our responsibility as human beings to insure life's continuity. We must maintain an appropriate sense of commitment, sensitive, vulnerable, deeply felt, in our otherwise everyday lives. The Capra universe is a world upside-down, but thus suspended we are given a closer look at the nature of human emotional reality. Such is the poet's task. Such is Frank Capra's accomplishment. (pp. 232, 234)