Comedy is Funny, Not Important

Comedy, as entertaining as it is, is no more meaningful to people's lives than hearing a passing joke. The comedy that does not matter at all to society despite being incredibly funny is Pitch Perfect. The movie, about a college freshman who grudgingly joins a girls' acapella group, can fall into both the farce and romantic comedy categories. The movie follows the girls' adventures as they begin the movie as a rag-tag group of mediocre singers and end as a championship winning act.

Mostly just a hilarious montage of failures at singing, dancing, and socializing, the movie fits the mold of a farce. Towards the end, the conflict between the main character, Beca, and her love-interest intensifies, and they union at the end is a perfect romantic comedy ending with the coupling of the well-matched pair.

As funny as the movie is, it contributes very little to our understanding of the world. It is a funny lesson to learn about growing as a person when you get to college, but I don't think hyperbolic representations of a single college experience is helpful to the majority of the population as a way to understand the world. In general, the setting of the story only really functions to add humor to the story because the majority of the characters are inexperienced and naive. 

The human experience gains little more than a laugh from the movie because of the singularity of the characters' experiences. Even other funny movies about college and high school that are often meant to teach people life lessons about surviving school can miss the mark because they represent only one individual and their experience no matter how broad it is. So maybe for some people, seeing these stereotypes of young people in high school or college can be meaningful to explaining the human experience, but for me, they are just too far off from what reality is to make their genre of comedy meaningful.