William Hazlitt said that comedy arose at disjunctions in society, when people saw people as strangely juxtaposed. He might be thinking of the humor Samuel Johnson found in a woman preacher Johnson had compared to a dog walking erect: managing it but not very well. People a hundred years ago might find amusing minstrels or white people in blackface, though in present times that seems very offensive rather than an expression of artistic freedom in that blackface allowed people to be more uninhibited. Similarly, comedians in vaudeville found that the comedy was funnier if they used foreign accents or adopted foreign identities, such as Jewish or German or Chinese.. Such features can illuminate the culture and structure of the moment rather than simply provide a way to disdain it. The same is the case with the plots in Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies, meant to be amusing fluff and just interludes between seeing the heavenly and always uplifting dancing, when what they do is make funny the moment when men and women banter with one another about their situation, as it was for the moment, about how men and women could engage one another in courtship. So let us look at the comedy as sociology, particularly in “Top Hat” and “Swingtime”, those musicals produced respectively in 1935 and 1937, long before the first women's march in the Seventies, and also by counterpoint in “Follow the Fleet”, a service comedy in 1936 and directed by the same Marc Sandrich who had directed the other two.