The Social Function of Comedy

by Terry Snyder

In Sullivan’s Travels, the main character, Sullivan, is a man who makes movies. He wants to make a film about the dire current situation of the world as he sees it. Although he has made popular comedies, he wants to move into more serious work to reflect the times people are living in. To that end, he decides he should go out and experience “trouble” for himself to make a more realistic film. Through most of the picture, he is not really living a hard life because of constantly being saved by people who work with and for him. At the end, he is believed to have died and ends up on a chain gang with a brutal overseer and truly does experience trouble. While he and the rest of the prisoners live in misery, they occasionally are allowed to see a movie. They are taken to a church where they view a Mickey Mouse cartoon. The prisoners and eventually Sullivan are laughing uproariously and he soon realizes that the comedy is doing much more to brighten the prisoner’s life than a serious picture would.

That is the social function of comedy that I believe this picture is stressing. It was released in December 1941, the same month and year that the U.S. officially entered WWII, after the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor. But even before then, there was the knowledge of what was happening in Europe and the possibility that we would eventually be involved. I think Sullivan’s Travels reflects that period of history and the idea that people need to get their minds away from the dismal affairs of the world and just laugh and be entertained.

In Funny, The Book, by David Misch, he says, “…humor has been critical for humanity’s survival and, perhaps as importantly, our need to do more than just survive.” He then devotes an entire chapter of the book to the Marx Brothers. All of their movies except the first one were released in the 1930’s and 1940’s. The 1930’s in particular were very dark times in the United States after the stock market crash and subsequent depression in 1929. The Marx Brothers movies were very funny and very popular, mostly because it was an escape from reality. The price of a movie ticket ranged from a few pennies to around a quarter, so despite the Depression, most people could scrape up that amount for a night’s entertainment. 

While this is not the only social function of comedy, it perhaps says the most about our society. Whenever some significant event happens in the world, there is usually a movie made that either makes fun of the situation or the circumstances surrounding it. From a movie like The Candidate, which skewers the circus that our political system has become, to The Big Short that ridicules the mess Wall Street made of the housing market in the name of greed, comedies can make us laugh at our troubles, forget them or even learn from them.