Kurt Vonnegut - A Man Without a Country

Player Piano

The Sirens of Titan

Canary in a Cathouse

Mother Night

Cats Cradle

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

Welcome to the Monkey House

Slaughterhouse-Five

Happy Birthday, Wanda June

Between Time and Timbuktu

Breakfast of Champions

Wampeters, Foma & Granfallons

Slapstick

Jailbird

Palm Sunday

Deadeye Dick

Galapagos

Bluebeard

Hocus Pocus

Fates Worse than Death

Timequake

Bagombo Snuff Box

God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian

Copyright 2005 by Kurt Vonnegut

Portions of the text of A Man without a Country appeared originally in In These Times magazine. The authors editor there, Joel Bleifuss, provided crucial editorial support of this project throughout. The pieces that appeared in the magazine then became the most visited parts of the In These Times website in the history of that publication.

Others who helped make this book a reality were Don Farber, Jill Krementz, David Shanks of Viking Penguin, and, at Seven Stories Press, Dan Simon, Jon Gilbert and Chris Peterson.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vonnegut, Kurt.
A man without a country/Kurt Vonnegut;
edited by Daniel Simon1st ed.
p. cm.

ISBN: 978-0-81297-736-3

1. Vonnegut, Kurt.
2. Authors, American20th centuryBiography.
3. United StatesPolitics and government2001
1. Simon, Daniel, 1957-11. Title.
PS3572.O5Z473 2005
813.54dc22
2005014967

As a kid I was the youngest

Do you know what a twerp is?

Here is a lesson in creative writing

Im going to tell you some news

Okay, now lets have some fun

I have been called a Luddite

I turned eighty-two on November 11

Do you know what a humanist is?

Do unto others

A sappy woman from Ypsilanti

Now then, I have some good news

I used to be the owner and manager of an automobile dealership

Requiem

Authors Note

There Is No Reason

I Want All Things to Make Some Sense

Funniest Joke in the World

Man in Hole

Boy Meets Girl

Cinderella

Kafka

Hamlet

I Dont Know About You

Thats How We Got Giraffes

We are Here on Earth to Fart Around

Do You Think Arabs Are Dumb?

The Highest Treason in the USA

We Do, Doodley Do

Thats the End of Good News

What Can It Possibly Be

Life is No Way to Treat an Animal

Peculiar Travel Suggestions

Saab Dealership Self-portrait

My Father Said, When in Doubt, Castle

As a kid I was the youngest member of my family, and the youngest child in any family is always a jokemaker, because a joke is the only way he can enter into an adult conversation. My sister was five years older than I was, my brother was nine years older than I was, and my parents were both talkers. So at the dinner table when I was very young, I was boring to all those other people. They did not want to hear about the dumb childish news of my days. They wanted to talk about really important stuff that happened in high school or maybe in college or at work. So the only way I could get into a conversation was to say something funny. I think I must have done it accidentally at first, just accidentally made a pun that stopped the conversation, something of that sort. And then I found out that a joke was a way to break into an adult conversation.

I grew up at a time when comedy in this country was superbit was the Great Depression. There were large numbers of absolutely top comedians on radio. And without intending to, I really studied them. I would listen to comedy at least an hour a night all through my youth, and I got very interested in what jokes were and how they worked.

When Im being funny, I try not to offend. I dont think much of what Ive done has been in really ghastly taste. I dont think I have embarrassed many people, or distressed them. The only shocks I use are an occasional obscene word. Some things arent funny. I cant imagine a humorous book or skit about Auschwitz, for instance. And its not possible for me to make a joke about the death of John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King. Otherwise I cant think of any subject that I would steer away from, that I could do nothing with. Total catastrophes are terribly amusing, as Voltaire demonstrated. You know, the Lisbon earthquake is funny.

I saw the destruction of Dresden. I saw the city before and then came out of an air-raid shelter and saw it afterward, and certainly one response was laughter. God knows, thats the soul seeking some relief.

Any subject is subject to laughter, and I suppose there was laughter of a very ghastly kind by victims in Auschwitz.

Humor is an almost physiological response to fear. Freud said that humor is a response to frustrationone of several. A dog, he said, when he cant get out a gate, will scratch and start digging and making meaningless gestures, perhaps growling or whatever, to deal with frustration or surprise or fear.

And a great deal of laughter is induced by fear. I was working on a funny television series years ago. We were trying to put a show together that, as a basic principle, mentioned death in every episode and that this ingredient would make any laughter deeper without the audiences realizing how we were inducing belly laughs.

There is a superficial sort of laughter. Bob Hope, for example, was not really a humorist. He was a comedian with very thin stuff, never mentioning anything troubling. I used to laugh my head off at Laurel and Hardy. There is terrible tragedy there somehow. These men are too sweet to survive in this world and are in terrible danger all the time. They could be so easily killed.

Even the simplest jokes are based on tiny twinges of fear, such as the question, What is the white stuff in bird poop? The auditor, as though called upon to recite in school, is momentarily afraid of saying something stupid. When the auditor hears the answer, which is, Thats bird poop, too, he or she dispels the automatic fear with laughter. He or she has not been tested after all.

Why do firemen wear red suspenders? And Why did they bury George Washington on the side of a hill? And on and on.

True enough, there are such things as laughless jokes, what Freud called gallows humor. There are real-life situations so hopeless that no relief is imaginable.