In the late 1930s a sub-genre developed in the American film. The so-called screwball comedies were different from the comedies that had gone before, and to some extent it is a sub-genre that has persisted. The definition of a screwball comedy is not as definite as that for, say, a Western or a Horror film, and whether a given work fits this sub-genre is always arguable. Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby (1938) is an accepted classic in the genre, while Rob Reiner's Harry Met Sally (1989) is not so clearly an echo of the original group of films so classified.
The original screwball comedies were made in the era between the onset of the Depression and the end of World War II. Ed Sikov offers a definition of screwball comedy that emphasizes the sexual relationships involved, with madcap comedy surrounding the onset and development of romance. Usually, he says, the Hollywood process of "meet cute," of male and female meeting in some interesting way, is only the beginning for a further process of antagonism leading eventually to romance:
In the world of screwball comedy, there is one primary axiom: Hatred is no reason to give up on a relationship. Just because two people seem to despise each other doesn't mean they're not in love. It could, on the contrary, provide the final proof of a couple's delight in one another, their passion, devotion, and joy (Sikov 15-16).
Sikov finds that this new genre developed in the late 1930s as a response to social conditions and a shift away from the primacy of ideal love such as had been the staple to that time, but the films included much more:
Screwball comedy, like any film genre, expresses a whole range of meanings--the news of the day, cultural obsessions, psychological dynamics, and aesthetic conventions. . . As a genre, screwball comedy presents a much wider, more contradictory picture of the world out of which it arose than the individual films we remember best (Sikov 17).
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