Jonathan Wakeham is the programmer of the LOCO London Comedy Film Festival. He explains how comedy helps us face our fears.

“Comedy is king now,” the American comedy writer and actor Zach Galifianakis said recently, “because we’re the ones who are talking about real life". Galifianakis was talking specifically about his FX comedy Baskets, in which he plays a frustrated rodeo clown (is there any other kind?) but his analysis is one that all comedy creators will relate to.

We set up the LOCO London Comedy Film festival to celebrate comedy's ability to do more than simply entertain. Our programming strategy isn't just to look for films that make us laugh; inspired by The Wizard of Oz we look for films with brains, heart and courage. In other words, films that have something to say; that bring us characters worth caring about; and that take creative risks. Because as Galifianakis says, comedy can do more than tell a joke: at its best it tells the truth.

Our programme this year is packed with films that make us think as well as make us laugh. The Hippopotamus, adapted from Stephen Fry's beloved novel, is a hilarious character comedy with a host of beloved British stars including Roger Allam, Emily Berrington, Tim McInnerny, Fiona Shaw and Russell Tovey. But it's also an enquiry into the nature of faith: how does fear affect our judgement? And can hope itself create positive change? The Hippopotamus takes the form of a witty country house mystery story, but these are questions with profound implications across medicine, psychology and of course politics, where hope and fear joust for dominance and emotion often trumps reality.

At a time when even our famously stiff upper-lipped royal family are openly discussing mental health, Every Brilliant Thing feels more relevant than ever. HBO's film of the worldwide stage hit captures all the humour and emotion of People Places and Things writer Duncan Macmillan's story of a young man growing up with a suicidal mother. It's a subject that's frightening for all of us, but by treating the subject with enormous wit and warmth Macmillan and his co-writer / performer Jonny Donahoe have created a uniquely welcoming way to confront it.

The great Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, meanwhile, has taken on one of the most important social issues of our time in The Other Side of Hope, his Berlin Best Director-winning masterpiece about a young Syrian refugee in Finland. It's proof that there's no subject that comedy can't address, provided it's approached with sensitivity, humanity and empathy. And while there have been several superb documentaries about the crisis, Kaurismäki's use of comedy gives us all space to see where we fit in the story, and to ask how we might best respond.

But comedy doesn't need crisis to be valuable. At its best it can uncover the brittle, brutal everyday struggles of living, and by exposing them to laughter make them easier to talk about. Whether that's the indignities of ageing in Hannes Holm's Oscar-nominated A Man Called Ove or the envy and exhaustion of new parenthood in Marie Kreutzer's We Used To Be Cool, comedy says: this is all of us. We are all fragile, frightened, awkward people, even if our Instagram says otherwise. We're all — well, most of us — more generous in how we judge other people than how we think they judge us. We're all just pretending to be adults and hoping we don't get found out; and we should all be grateful to our comedy writers, directors, producers and performers for creating the spaces to say so.

There are many ways to laugh: in delight; in surprise; in shock and horror; in sheer relief that it's happening to them not to you. But there's no better laugh than recognition: the realisation that what we're watching is true.

The LOCO London Comedy Film Festival runs 4-7 May at BFI Southbank. For full film listings and booking please visit www.locofilmfestival.com.