Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and literature at Oakton Community College. In this essay, Kelly examines the ways in which Sherwood's play can be categorized as a comedy.

Robert E. Sherwood's 1935 play The Petrified Forest, delves into deep topics concerning love and existence, and it ends with one man shooting another in cold blood—but at its core it is a comedy. This might seem an odd idea to audiences who find few outright laughs in the play. A better way to judge it overall, though, might be for audiences to ask what effect the play has had on them when it is done. Most viewers would probably find that they are sorrier for hopeless intellectual Alan Squier's loss of ideas than they are for his actual death, and that gangster Duke Mantee being "doomed," as Sherwood describes him in a stage direction, is...