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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   2383 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 31, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Slaughterhouse-five is supposed to be in the category of dark humor/satire, but I honestly don't remember much about that book from when I read it in high school. Catch-22 is often mentioned as a similar absurdist fiction anti-war satiric book and it is the far superior of the two.

I've read both and found Catch-22 uproariously funny other than the places where it was darkly serious, but Slaughterhouse-Five wasn't funny at all, the effect was more of "I need to take a break from all the gruesome WWII shit I remember, here's some aliens as a palate cleanser".

I don't recall ever laughing to anything in Slaughterhouse-Five either, but Wikipedia indicates dark humor as one of its genres.

Is there anyone here who read Slaughterhouse-Five and found it funny?

It's not laugh-out-loud funny, but I think it nails a certain "if I don't crack a smile about this, I'll burst into tears" tone that Jewish humour is known for.

Definitely. The elaborate parody of the tough guy Roland Weary right off the bat is deeply funny, with the two recon soldiers disdaining his loser affect and abandoning the losers then immediately getting got for irony.

Haven't read Slaughterhouse-Five but much of Catch 22 is just funny. I don't know if it would count as dark humor.

"You should see her naked," General Dreedle chortled with croupy relish, while his nurse stood smiling proudly right at his shoulder. "Back at Wing she's got a uniform in my room made of purple silk so tight her nipples stand out like bing cherries. Milo got me the fabric. There isn't even room enough for panties or a brassiere underneath. I make her wear it some night when Moodus is around just to drive him crazy." General Dreedle laughed hoarsely. "You should see what goes on inside that blouse of hers everytime she shifts her weight. She drives him out of his mind. The first time I catch him putting a hand on her or any other woman I'll bust that horny bastard right down to private and put him on K.P. for a year.

"He keeps her around just to drive me crazy," Colonel Moodus accused aggrievedly at the other end of the bar. "Back at Wing she's got a uniform made of purple silk that's so tight her nipples stand out like bing cherries. There isn't even room for panties or a brassiere underneath. You should hear that silk rustle everytime she shifts her weight. The first time I make a pass at her or any other girl he'll bust me right down to private and put me on K.P. for a year. She drives me out of my mind.

"He hasn't gotten laid since we shipped overseas," confided General Dreedle, and his square grizzled head bobbed with sadistic laughter at the fiendish idea. "That's one of the reasons I never let him out of my sight, just so he can't get to a woman. Can you imagine what that poor son of a bitch is going through?"

"I haven't been to bed with a woman since we shipped overseas," Colonel Moodus whimpered tearfully. "Can you imagine what I'm going through?"

I think the point of Catch-22 is that as hilarious as it is underlying the humor is a tragedy revealing the horrors of war. At first, it's just funny but in the second half, we start to really see the tragic consequences of the absurdity. There are just outright dark scenes like Snowden's death where Yossarian desperately tries to save a dying man's life but is unable to do anything and has to watch Snowden's organs drip out after he is hit by flak.

Then there are the humorous parts that come hand-in-hand with the tragedy.

For example, there is a scene where Yossarian is making love to Nurse Duckett at the beach and it's quite a dreamy and beautiful moment, people are out and about enjoying themselves in this moment of tranquility during the war, only for it to cut short by the death Kid Sampson.

Even people who were not there remembered vividly exactly what happened next. There was the briefest, softest tsst! filtering audibly through the shattering, overwhelming howl of the plane’s engines, and then there were just Kid Sampson’s two pale, skinny legs, still joined by strings somehow at the bloody truncated hips, standing stock-still on the raft for what seemed a full minute or two before they toppled over backward into the water finally with a faint, echoing splash and turned completely upside down so that only the grotesque toes and the plaster-white soles of Kid Sampson’s feet remained in view.

What killed him? McWatt had been "buzzing" the beach as a joke for a while earlier in the chapter trying to scare people by flying his plane dangerously close to the ground. Except this time, he fucks up and actually does kill someone. And in response, he chooses to crash his plane into the mountain killing him. The people watching can't make sense of it, they watched a comrade die and can't do anything but watch the other choose to kill himself as well. The two newbie pilots on the plane with McWatt jump out via parachute, indicating they too failed to convince him otherwise.

This scene is immediately ended with this gem of a line:

Colonel Cathcart was so upset by the deaths of Kid Sampson and McWatt that he raised the missions to sixty-five

And then this line in the immediate chapter afterward:

When Colonel Cathcart learned that Doc Daneeka too had been killed in McWatt’s plane, he increased the number of missions to seventy.

I think that would count as dark humor.

After typing this all out, I just realized where your flair comes from. Somehow I haven't made the connection despite seeing it several times.

When Colonel Cathcart learned that Doc Daneeka too had been killed in McWatt’s plane

And the whole tragedy of Doc Daneeka trying to explain that he isn't actually dead definitely counts as dark humor. Especially when his own wife would rather keep the money paid to war widows than prove his existence.

Yes, it's a good point. I thought of the grim sections as an alternating contrast to the humorous ones, but you're right of course that they do overlap as well.

Ironically, the author didn't seem to mind his wartime experience too much, rather thinking of the Korean war while writing the book.

"How did I feel about the war when I was in it?" Heller wrote in the letter to an academic preparing a collection of essays about the book. "Much differently than Yossarian felt and much differently than I felt when I wrote the novel … In truth I enjoyed it and so did just about everyone else I served with, in training and even in combat.

"I was young, it was adventurous, there was much hoopla and glamour; in addition, and this too is hard to get across to college students today, for me and for most others, going into the army resulted immediately in a vast improvement in my standard of living."

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