A new film has raised questions about whether finding comedy in conflict
is correct. Even though mass slaughter and widespread destruction aren’t
something to laugh at, we seem to do. Dad’s Army is a Second World War comedy
film that has risen very popular, even in the most family-friendly contexts.
Graham McCann, the author of the film says: “What
Dad’s Army says to viewers is that, for all the frightening and confusing and
alienating aspects of war, there was also a sense of continuity and
familiarity. It’s a very reassuring idea that people still had their foibles,
and still lead ordinary lives, even during WW2.”
Dad’s army would have been a risky proposition after de WW2, and when it
was first mooted, BBC executives thought the horrors were still too fresh in
viewer’s memories. The writers had been soldiers themselves, and thought they
could joke about it without threating it as unimportant.
More recent wars are trickier to turn into comedy. Also, a reason contemporary
wars don’t lend people to comedy is that they don’t involve conscription. Today’s
soldiers have consciously elected to be in the army.
Making war comedies does raise another question: why make them? Isn’t it
walking through a minefield? But, wartime settings bring depth and intensity to
any comedy. John Lloyd says: “What gives Dad’s Army
its comic power is that the country could be invaded by the Germans at
any time. The characters are bumbling around, but what they’re doing is a
matter of life and death.”
Many war veterans talk fondly of the black comic banter that helped them
there. “When one character gets his leg blown off in
the third series (in a war series called Bluestone 42) the team sends
him a big bag of jelly babies, but they’ve bitten one leg off every one of
them. You would never do that as a civilian – it would be too cruel. But that
story was told to us by a soldier, and he thought it was hilarious.”
The only thing I would say regarding to war
films is that, if war veterans can laugh at it, everyone should do. It is true
that a lot of people died and to laugh at this isn’t good, especially if anyone
in your family has gone to war, but comedy is one of the things in life that
helps us get over tragedies and bad times.
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