Happy ending

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For other uses, see Happy ending (disambiguation).

A happy ending is an ending of the plot of a work of fiction in which most everything turns out for the best for the hero or heroine, their sidekicks, and just about everyone but the villains. This is epitomized in the standard fairy tale ending phrase, "happily ever after" or "and they lived happily ever after." Satisfactory happy endings are happy for the reader as well, in that the characters he sympathizes with are rewarded.

The presence of a happy ending is one of the key points that distinguishes melodrama from tragedy. In certain periods, the endings of traditional tragedies such as Macbeth or Oedipus Rex, in which most of the major characters end up dead, disfigured, or discountenanced, have been actively disliked. In the eighteenth century, the Irish author Nahum Tate sought to improve Shakespeare's King Lear by rewriting the ending so that Lear survives, Cordelia and Edgar marry, and the three sisters are reconciled. Most subsequent critics have not found Tate's amendments an improvement. Happy endings have also been fastened to Romeo and Juliet and Othello. Not everybody agrees on what a happy ending is. An interpretation of The Merchant of Venice’s forced conversion of Shylock to Christianity is that it was intended as a happy ending, but for modern audiences it is pitiful, unreasonable and profoundly unjust.

A happy ending only requires that the main characters be all right. Millions of innocent background characters can die, but, as long as the characters that the reader/viewer/audience cares about survive, it is still a happy ending. Roger Ebert commented on this in his review of Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow; "Billions of people may have died, but at least the major characters have survived. Los Angeles is leveled by multiple tornados, New York is buried under ice and snow, the United Kingdom is flash-frozen, and lots of the Northern Hemisphere is wiped out for good measure. Thank god that Jack, Sam, Laura, Jason and Dr. Lucy Hall survive, along with Dr. Hall's little cancer patient."^[1]

Since the ending is the point at which a narrative ends, a "happy ending" is constructed in a way so as to imply that, after the conclusion of the narrative, the lives of all the "good" characters will be filled with happiness and that any unpleasantness they encounter will be negligible. However, as is often demonstrated through the creation of sequels, it is conceivable that the characters' happiness will be ruined after the "curtain falls." This means that a storyteller can create a happy ending to a sad story (or vice-versa) merely by ending the story before a horrible tragedy occurs or, if the tragedy is not irreversible, by continuing the story on after its original end so that the characters can overcome it. Either way, the "ending" is changed without altering the story's canon.

In the modern world, happy endings have sometimes been viewed as an American specialty, and the English-language words happy ending (or happy end) have been imported as-is into other languages to make this point. In the 1928 Austrian operetta, Die Herzogin von Chicago, the two lovers who are too proud to speak to one another are finally brought together by a Hollywood producer who explains that he plans to make a movie of their love story, but that he cannot, until it has the required happy ending.

Some works of fiction, such as Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's operetta The Threepenny Opera or F. W. Murnau's film The Last Laugh, have intentionally implausible happy endings. The P.D.Q. Bach opera The Stoned Guest originally ends with all of the cast strewn about dead on the stage. However, as the residents of the town would be disappointed with such a gloomy conclusion, Bach is urged to rewrite the opera. Thus, he has all of the cast suddenly spring back to life with no explanation whatsoever and sing a piece entitled "Happy Ending!" (P.D.Q. Bach albums are satires created by musicologist Peter Schickele.)

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In Late 2006, a mixed drink called "Happy Ending" became popular in the East Coast club circuit. Made by mixing 2 parts Kahlua, 1 part Vodka, and 1/2 part Triple Sec or Gand Marnier and served in a rocks glass with ice. "Happy Ending" was created by entrepreneur John Paul Parker to be a "post-business dinner drink" in Washington DC.
In American slang, a "happy ending" can take on a sexual meaning, e.g "a massage with a happy ending".