comedy, romantic comedy and bedroom farce. Characteristics Films definitive of the genre usually feature farcical situations, a combination of slapstick with fast-paced repartee and show the struggle between economic classes. They also generally feature a self-confident and often stubborn central female protagonist and a plot involving courtship and marriage or remarriage. These traits can be seen in both It Happened One Night and My Man Godfrey (1936). The film critic Andrew Sarris has defined the screwball comedy as "a sex comedy without the sex." Like farce, screwball comedies often involve masquerade and disguise in which a character or characters resort to secrecy. Sometimes screwball comedies feature male characters cross-dressing, further contributing to elements of masquerade (Bringing Up Baby (1938), I Was a Male War Bride (1949), and Some Like It Hot (1959)). At first, the couple seem mismatched and even hostile to each other but eventually overcome their differences in an amusing or entertaining way that leads to romance. Often this mismatch comes about when the man is of a lower social class than the woman (Bringing Up Baby and Holiday, both 1938). The final romantic union is often planned by the woman from the outset, and the man is seemingly oblivious to this. In Bringing Up Baby, the woman says to a third party: "He's the man I'm going to marry. He doesn't know it, but I am." These pictures also offered a kind of cultural escape valve: a safe battleground on which to explore serious issues such as class under a comedic and non-threatening framework. Class issues are a strong component of screwball comedies: the upper class are represented as idle, pampered, and having difficulty coping with the real world. By contrast, when lower-class people attempt to pass themselves off as upper class or otherwise insinuate themselves into high society, they are able to do so with relative ease (The Lady Eve, 1941; My Man Godfrey, 1936). Some critics believe that the portrayal of the upper class in It Happened One Night was brought about by the Great Depression, and the financially struggling moviegoing public's desire to see the rich upper class taught a lesson in humanity. Another common element of the screwball comedy is fast-talking, witty repartee, such as in You Can't Take It with You (1937) and His Girl Friday (1940). This stylistic device did not originate in the genre: it is also found in many