klar gives another description of the genre that also links romantic with social conventions and ideas:
Screwball comedies were the last refuge of the satire, self-mockery and sexual candor of early 1930s filmmaking, but their iconoclasm was used, overtly at least, to support the status quo. They belonged firmly to the tradition of romantic comedies whose purpose was to show how imagination, curiosity and cleverness--those dangerous levers of social change--could be channeled into support of things as they are. The screwball comedies by and large celebrated the sanctity of marriage, class distinction and the domination of women by men (Sklar 187-188).
One of the positive values Sklar finds in these films is that they suggested different ways of living:
And yet, though they never challenged the social order, the pictures gave audiences a whole new vision of social style, a different
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