Comedy

Comedies since ancient Greece have often incorporated sexual or social elements.
It was not until the creation of romantic love in the western European medieval period, though, that "romance" came to refer to "romantic love" situations, rather than the heroic adventures of medieval Romance. These adventures, however, often revolved about a knight's feats on behalf of a lady, and so the modern themes of love were quickly woven into them, as in Chrétien de Troyes's Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart.
Shakespearean comedy and Restoration comedy remain influential. The creation of huge economic social strata in the Gilded Age[citation needed], combined with the heightened openness about sex after the Victorian era and the celebration of Sigmund Freud's theories, and the birth of the film industry in the early twentieth century, gave birth to the screwball comedy.As class consciousness declined and World War II unified various social orders, the savage screwball comedies of the twenties and thirties, proceeding through Rock Hudson–Doris Day-style comedies, gave way to more innocuous comedies.