How is comedy used in Sherrif's 'Journey's End'?

At the beginning of Act 1, Sherriff uses comedy as a conversational device. When Osborne enters the dugout for the first time he meets Hardy, another officer, who is in the process of drying his sock by candle flame. They proceed to chat about this sock, Osborne comments ‘it’s a nice-looking sock’. This conversation is the first interaction between characters on stage which sets the precedent for the rest of the play; many conversations centre on the mundane and everyday details of life in the war. By using realism in his humour Sherriff gives the impression that, like in non-war situations, small and inconsequential things like drying a wet sock can be found funny even if, to an outsider, they appear ordinary; this is typical to Sherriff’s style. Sherriff introduces one of the main themes of the play (the reality of war) very early in the play by using comedy to show what life was really like for soldiers.

Towards the end of the play, in Act 3 Scene 2, Sherriff uses comedy to question the purpose of the war and the effectiveness of the people who held authority during that period of time. When Stanhope and the Colonel are discussing the raid which had just happened, the Colonel expresses his sympathy for Osborne’s death to which Stanhope responds ‘it will be awfully nice if the brigadier’s pleased’. The use of an intensifier (awfully) creates a hyperbole which makes Stanhope sound sarcastic to an audience. This effect is strengthened by the choice of ‘pleased’ as a way to describe someone’s reaction to the news that seven people had just died because this specific description highlights the perverse nature of leader’s attitude toward human lives being lost at war. Sherriff wrote ‘Journey’s End’ 10 years after the end of the war which suggests that he used this play as a way of criticising the people who held the power to make decisions. Sherriff’s gradual and developed use of comedy from using humorous situations to start conversations to using irony and sarcasm as comedic techniques to comment on the state of the war show his versatility as a play-write.