According to more than 70 years of Hollywood tradition, if you get a fatal illness, you get an automatic +10 buff to your charisma score and a permanent soft focus in the camera while you die in a serene, self-aware, and dignified manner in a triple hanky weepie or romcom. It's a tradition that's still alive and kicking. Just look at the Twilight Saga, where the most gorgeous people are the undead. But say you want to make a film nominally set in the real world. Well, dying slowly from a terminal illness is as far as you can get to being literally drop-dead gorgeous.

Then in 50/50, we have a comedy about someone dying from a fatal illness that's set in largely the real world. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Adam, a mild-mannered twenty-something diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. He does not gain any charisma points and neither does the camera imbue him with a soft-focus glow. Instead, he jokes about how much he's going to look like Voldemort while suffering through ill-advised dates in singles bars set up by best buddy (Seth Rogen), grits his teeth through a series of annoyingly optimistic relaxation sessions with his therapist and obvious romantic pairing (Anna Kendrick), and tries not to scream when his melodramatic mum (Anjelica Huston, stealing every scene she's in) smothers him with her care and concern.

Part of what makes 50/50 funny is how it subverts the genre, putting a cancer patient in the real world where cancer is a devastatingly unsexy disease but surrounding him with friends, relatives, and healthcare professionals who behave as if they're in a Hollywood comedy about a cancer patient.

The other part of the comedy in 50/50 comes from writer Will Reiser's personal experiences and observations as a cancer patient and survivor, which find humour in the actual clinical experience – such as bonding with kindly septuagenarians who dispense cookies with medicinal marijuana, the passive-aggressive break-ups with girlfriends who want to dump you without being too mean because of your illness, and healthcare professionals who make up their feelings of impotence with pollyannish optimism.

50/50 is a comedy whose premise doesn't insult the intelligence of its audience, and manages to be very uplifting precisely because of its honesty.