Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally might be the greatest romantic comedy ever made. It has all the elements of a perfect romcom: well-matched leads (Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, each defining their careers in the roles of Harry and Sally, respectively) with an opposites-attract dynamic, relatable romantic situations, and a quick-fire gag rate on top of a beautifully told love story.
Nora Ephron’s screenplay perfectly walks the line between delivering the goods as a love story and deviating from the traditional, clean-cut, unrealistic three-act structure in favor of going down more personal paths. Here are When Harry Met Sally’s five funniest and five most emotional, scenes.
Laugh Out Loud: Harry And Sally Call Jess And Marie After Sleeping Together
After Harry and Sally sleep together for the first time, they’re both worried they’ve made a huge mistake, and that their friendship is in jeopardy. Harry calls Jess and Sally calls Marie, and the two sit in bed together as they’re each told a different side of the same story.
The simultaneous dialogue is brilliantly written and overlapped, while the split-screen effect means there’s always something to look at in a static shot where the focus is on the cast dynamics.
Hit Us In The Feels: Visiting The Met
When Harry and Sally go to the Met’s Temple of Dendur, they decide to speak in Eastern European accents for fun. In this new accent, they recite the old tongue twister: “Waiter, there is too much pepper on my paprikash, but I would be proud to partake of your pecan pie.”
Sally tells Harry that she has a date, and he acts like he’s okay with it, but they share a look like they know they should really be dating each other.
Laugh Out Loud: The Pictionary Scene
The scene in which Harry, Sally, and their friends play Pictionary was entirely improvised — and it shows in the best way. A lot of ad-libbed moments in modern comedies drag on because the scenes they’re in aren’t suited to improvisation.
Pictionary opens itself up to improvisation — the whole game is built around players shouting out spontaneous suggestions — and the actors in this scene are quick on the draw with hilarious lines, like “baby fish mouth.”
Hit Us In The Feels: “I Am Not Your Consolation Prize.”
This is what Sally says to Harry that makes him finally realize he loves her. He calls to invite her to a New Year’s Eve party because he couldn’t find anyone else to go with him, and she tells him, “I can’t do this anymore. I am not your consolation prize.”
She hangs up, leaving Harry to reflect on his feelings for her. Alone on New Year’s Eve, Harry wanders the streets until he realizes he’s in love with Sally and wants to spend the rest of his life with her, at which point he runs to the party she’s attending to tell her.
Laugh Out Loud: Harry Tells Jess About His Divorce At A Baseball Game
Billy Crystal and Bruno Kirby have a great repartee as Harry and Jess in this movie. At a baseball game, Harry tells Jess about his divorce. The upbeat energy of baseball fans cheering for the winning team juxtaposes hilariously with Harry’s look of despair.
Throughout the scene, these two actors set each other up to knock punchlines out of the park. For example, when Jess says, “Marriages don’t break up due to infidelity; it’s a symptom something else is wrong,” setting up Harry’s iconic line: “Oh, really? Well, that symptom is f*cking my wife!”
Hit Us In The Feels: “This Stupid, Wagon Wheel, Roy Rogers, Garage Sale Coffee Table...”
Harry has a lot of funny dialogue in this scene, but there’s a tragic undertone to his outburst. After seeing his ex-wife with her new husband, he’s reminded of the early days of their failed marriage when he sees Jess and Marie moving into their first apartment together.
He points to the coffee table as a perfect symbol of the materialistic trappings of a doomed marriage: “Someday, you’ll go 15 rounds over who’s gonna get this stupid, wagon wheel, Roy Rogers, garage sale coffee table.”
Laugh Out Loud: Harry And Sally Accidentally Fix Up Jess And Marie
When Harry tries to fix up Sally with his friend Jess and Sally tries to fix up Harry with her friend Marie, the plan backfires as Jess and Marie end up hitting it off and leaving in a cab together.
It’s apparent from the offset that Sally isn’t interested in Jess (finding him pretentious) and Harry isn’t interested in Marie (finding her boring). There’s a hilarious contrast in the very next scene, as Harry and Sally are suddenly buying them an engagement present.
Hit Us In The Feels: Harry And Sally Watch Casablanca Together Over The Phone
Whatever your romantic situation is, there’s something you can take from When Harry Met Sally. It covers everything: short-term relationships, long-term relationships, single life, married life, and breakups. What finally brings Harry and Sally together as friends is the fact that they both go through big breakups at the same time, and they help each other cope with the loneliness.
As they talk about their post-breakup depression over the phone, watching Casablanca together — one of the greatest love stories ever told — we’re reminded of every big breakup we’ve ever been through, and how it made us feel as we tried to move on.
Laugh Out Loud: Sally Fakes An Orgasm In Katz’s Delicatessen
This is easily the most iconic scene in the movie. It ensured that Katz’s Delicatessen would stay in business for decades to come as a landmark in the annals of film history. Over a sandwich, after calling Harry “a human affront to all women,” which is quite apt, Sally suggests that some of the women that Harry is sleeping with have been faking their orgasms. Harry thinks he could tell the difference, so Sally spontaneously starts faking one in the middle of the deli.
The joke tagged at the end gives the scene a punchline, but Meg Ryan’s unflinching commitment to the bit is what makes it work. The woman who says, “I’ll have what she’s having,” is Estelle Reiner, the mother of director Rob Reiner, the only non-actor to have delivered one of the AFI’s top 100 quotes.
Hit Us In The Feels: Harry Confesses His Love To Sally
Every romantic comedy has a scene with one of the leads confessing their love to the other, but Harry’s in When Harry Met Sally is one of the most emotionally resonant, because it’s honest. It’s not a sweeping statement of love that could apply to any woman in the audience, as is usually the case with rom-coms; it’s specifically tailored to Sally.
After listing all the little details he loves about her, he tells her, “I came because when you realize you wanna spend the rest of your life with someone, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”