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For Ryan Reynolds, Hasty Pudding Theatricals’ 2017 Man of the Year, comedy is key. During his roast at Farkas Hall, the “Deadpool” star performed a lap dance for “Blake Deadly,” jokingly called Meryl Streep overrated, and drank straight from a bottle of maple syrup. Later in the night, he spoke about comedy’s importance.

“Comedy is everything. It’s as far back as Jack Benny, you know. It’s much farther,” Reynolds said. “It’s one of the greatest tools for social commentary on the planet.” Indeed, comedy was the actor’s best defense during his roast, when actors from the Pudding cast poked fun at him for failing to graduate college and asked him to fish a green lantern out from the bottom of a trash can (a jibe at the low rating that “Green Lantern,” in which Reynolds starred, received).

But comedy alone did not define his contribution to the night. During the roast, Reynolds was also asked to insult Tom Brady—the New England Patriots quarterback whose rumored friendship with Donald Trump has made news. “You know we’re in Boston, right?” Reynolds replied. “Tom, I'm afraid your voting skills are as bad as…” he said before trailing off.

“In the best of times, [comedy’s] amazing,” Reynolds later said. “In the worst of times, it’s even better. So for me, it’s a real shelter in the storm, and I noticed that [holds true] for a lot of people too.”

He certainly realizes the importance of comedy in a variety of circumstances. In fact, the actor has consistently demonstrated a knack for tackling the political with a lighter edge. After 2016 election night, he wrote in a tweet: “I watched Frozen without my two year old this morning. Despair reveals itself in many forms.” And recently, Reynolds encouraged his Twitter followers to talk about mental illness, tweeting “#MaximumEffort,” an allusion to “Deadpool.”

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“I love smart comedy. In times of crisis I listen to Louis C.K. and a whole bunch of other people,” Reynolds said at the press conference. “I think its value is somewhat underappreciated in the arts in general. But overall I think it’s not going anywhere.”

—Staff writer Grace Z. Li can be reached at grace.li@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @gracezhali.