Just saw this.

Okay let me try to explain.. there's comedy like, you know.. Seinfeld.. and then there's comedy like this, which it has.. some funny stuff, but the comedy is what we the audience see and how we react to what we are seeing.. as opposed to the characters themselves actually trying to be funny or comedic.. like the Seinfeld characters are more or less written to be comedic.. the Battlefield Earth characters exhibit a type of humor that I would describe as natural humor.. they are all acting normally within their own psychology, yet from our perspective, it's funny stuff. Like the whole scene where they are trying to learn what the man-animals favourite food is, they lack any kind of sense or indepth understanding of humans to realise that the humans will eat anything due to their desperate situation and end up truly thinking that humans favourite food is rat. The whole boardroom scene where Terl is informed he will not be getting transferred is.. well, maybe not comedy, but everyone ends up laughing at him, but it's all within the bounds of psychlo psychology. The scene where Johnny steals the gun and kills a psychlo, and then Terl comes along and forces the guard to reenact what happened, not caring about the guards safety due to his sick sense of humor and their cultures lack of safety protocols and also his disbelief in the capability of humans to have done such a thing, and when he sees it with his very eyes, just bursts out laughing about it, because that's just what their culture is like, the superiors bully the inferiors.