Scholars who study ritual clowning across cultures generally treat it as doing real social work rather than existing purely for entertainment. A figure licensed to invert normal behavior, mock authority and cross ordinary boundaries of decorum can say things during a ceremony that would be unacceptable from anyone else, and communities in different parts of the world have independently arrived at similar institutions for similar reasons: the Pueblo clown societies, the Lakota heyoka, and comparable figures elsewhere all combine comic performance with a form of enforced social discipline.
The clown's disorder is bounded, not open ended. It operates within the ceremony, under rules the community itself recognizes even when outsiders see only chaos, and it ends when the ceremony ends. This is part of why anthropologists distinguish ritual clowning sharply from secular comic performance: the Pueblo societies are religious institutions with their own initiation, obligation and standing within the community's ceremonial structure, not entertainers hired for an occasion.
The comparative pattern, clowning as licensed correction rather than mere comic relief, is one of the more consistent findings in the study of Indigenous North American ceremonial life, though the specific meaning any single society's performance carries remains particular to that pueblo and is not something an outside account can supply on its own.