Women definitely had the upper hand in most screwball comedies - surprising since it was only relatively recently that women had won the right to vote. Often, the message is that a rich heiress can be happy with a down to earth, working class man and these poor but happy heroes make the heiress see that money is not a prerequisite for happiness. While women could sometimes be more powerful than men, screwball comedy tells us that a poor man can be morally superior to a rich man. In some screwball comedies it is the heroine who is the poor one. Despite the sudden miraculous change in circumstances, she still remains extremely moral and is the catalyst for the rich family seeing the error of their ways.
Elegant lifestyles are the order of the day.
Nora generally matches him cocktail for cocktail. All this elegance is set against the sometimes unglamorous and comic situations the characters find themselves in -getting wet, falling down etc. It is generally the richest and fanciest characters who are the most badly behaved and the everyman or everywoman character who shows the most sense. Lucy or Jerry HAVE been unfaithful. Both of them try to pretend to each other, and to themselves, that they don't care about each other.