One of the most influential outside accounts of the Gede comes from the filmmaker and ethnographer Maya Deren, whose 1953 book Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, based on years of fieldwork and initiation into Vodou in the late 1940s, remains a landmark study of the tradition for English-language readers and devotes particular attention to the social and psychological function of the Gede's comic, obscene performance during possession.
Deren argued that the Gede's crude jokes, sexual mockery and gleeful puncturing of dignity and social rank served a genuine communal function comparable to license-granting figures found in many other cultures, carnival clowns, court fools, ritual tricksters, who are permitted, precisely because they speak from the position of the dead or the marginal, to say what ordinary social convention forbids anyone else from saying, exposing pretension, releasing communal tension and reminding the powerful of their own mortality and absurdity. Her account, while shaped by her own particular perspective and the era in which she wrote, helped introduce serious scholarly attention to the Gede's dual role, guardians of the dead and irrepressible practitioners of subversive comedy, to a wider audience outside Haiti, and later scholars of Vodou have continued to explore the specific ways this pattern, comedy and mortality intertwined in a single family of spirits, expresses ideas about death, dignity and social hierarchy that are woven throughout Haitian culture more broadly, well beyond the boundaries of formal ceremony.