If films like the Marx Brothers' Animal Crackers made clear the object of their social satire, many of the comedies made later in the decade – including the romantic “screwball comedies” by directors such as Gregory La Cava, Mitchell Leisen, and Leo McCarey – were far more equivocal in their treatment of class and other social issues. La Cava's My Man Godfrey (1936), for example, begins with a satire on upper-class society that seems equal in its subversive potential to the most anarchic comedies of the Marx Brothers, yet it ends with an unexpected and rather sudden reversal of its underlying social critique.

The film begins when two wealthy young women – Irene Bullock (Carole Lombard) and her sister Cornelia (Gail Patrick) – discover the apparently destitute Godfrey Parke (William Powell) among the homeless men living on the city dump, bring him as their “forgotten man” to a scavenger hunt party at the “Waldorf Ritz,” and subsequently hire him as the family butler. Throughout most of the film, La Cava's satirical lens is directed toward the screwball antics of the conspicuously pampered upper classes, as we witness the total lack of sensitivity displayed by upper-class characters toward the situation of their less privileged counterparts. When Irene first encounters Godfrey at the dump, she fatuously asks him why he lives in such a place when there are so many nicer homes. Irene appears not even to have registered the fact of the Depression, and the Bullock family as a whole retains a pre-crash mentality in the midst of the Depression era.