But over the span of several weeks in late September and October, the cast of Mr. Greenberg's play, a melancholy comedy about a turn-of-the-20th-century publisher, lost both its leading women.

In 1979, Peña appeared in her first film, El Super, "an exceptionally moving and melancholy comedy about a family of lower-middle-class Cuban refugees attempting to adjust to life in Spanish Harlem".

But the prescription for happiness implied proves pretty unreliable in this amiably melancholy romantic comedy set in the slums under the Brooklyn Bridge in the early years of the last century.

The people in "From Above," Tom Donaghy's melancholy comedy at Playwrights Horizons, never appear as fully three-dimensional as they do when they're seen in two dimensions.

Within days, she will fly to New York from Los Angeles - where she lives with the film director Taylor Hackford - and begin rehearsals for the Roundabout Theater Company production of Turgenev's melancholy comedy "A Month in the Country."

Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Mark Costello described Waterloo as "a melancholy comedy of Texas politics [written] with great wit and assurance."

(to which "The Wayward Cloud" is something of a sequel) - Mr. Tsai achieves a tone of haunting, melancholy comedy.

And none provides more fodder for melancholy middle-aged comedy, from the heavyweight musings of Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being to the fluffy screwball machinations of Forces of Nature .

A melancholy romantic comedy is told by an old Bistro customer, who functions as a sort of keyhole peeper in a cabaret-like farce.

All values are religious values in this melancholy comedy about Texas politics.