Palm Sunday_ An Autobiographical Collage - Kurt Vonnegut [70]
“I come to a close now by noting that the news magazines, whose business is to know and understand everything, have found this year’s graduates to be apathetic. This year’s graduates have tired blood. They need Geritol. Well, as a member of a zippier generation, with sparkle in its eyes and a snap in its stride, let me tell you what kept us as high as kites a lot of the time: hatred. All my life I’ve had people to hate—from Hitler to Nixon, not that those two are at all comparable in their villainy. It is a tragedy, perhaps, that human beings can get so much energy and enthusiasm from hate. If you want to feel ten feet tall, as though you could run a hundred miles without stopping, hate beats pure cocaine any day. Hitler resurrected Germany, a beaten, bankrupt, half-starved nation, with hatred and nothing more. Imagine that.
“So it seems quite likely to me that the class of 1978 in the United States of America is not in fact apathetic, but only looks that way to people who are used to getting their ecstasies from hatred. The members of the class of 1978 are not sleepy, are not listless, are not apathetic. They are simply performing the experiment of doing without hate. Hate is the missing vitamin in their diet, and they have sensed correctly that hate, in the long run, is about as nourishing as cyanide.
“This is a very exciting thing they are doing, and I wish them well.”
• • •
One reason I feel the need to be funnier on paper than most of my colleagues is that I have a German name, which can be counted on to remind almost any sort of American for at least a microsecond of German enemies in two world wars. I myself, a prisoner of war of the Germans, am so reminded for at least that microsecond when I hear a German name. I was on our side, remember?
So it is a good idea for me to tell a joke as soon as possible.
I have spoken to, and actually liked, several German veterans of the Second World War who live in America now. They, too, become screamingly funny as soon as possible.
And it may be that Mark Twain drew some of his comic energy from a similar uneasiness. He had served the Confederacy briefly, after all, in the bloodiest war in American history, and later faced paying audiences of, among others, Union veterans and their wives.
• • •
An advantage of a writer’s having a joke-making capability is that he or she can be really funny in case something really is funny. Most contemporary American novelists, especially those credited with greatness because their books are so huge, cannot be funny even when it is time to be funny. So they have to pretend to be dealing at all times with matters so serious, good and evil, for example, that there could not possibly be anything funny about them. Thus are their works as consistently lugubrious as bloodhounds appear to be.
The books of jokesters are short, which is a social disadvantage in an era when literary importance is measured by the pound. The problem is that jokes deal so efficiently with ideas that there is little more to be said after the punch line has been spoken. It is time to come up with a new idea—and another good joke.
• • •
I once asked my friend Joe Heller what he was up to. He said that he had an idea for a new book. I said that one idea wasn’t nearly enough for a whole book. I said this because he is a funny writer.
If he had been a serious writer, I would have said one idea was more than enough for a trilogy.
• • •
The worst thing about a writer’s having a joke-making capability, of course, as James Thurber of Columbus, Ohio, pointed out in an essay years ago, is this: No matter what is being discussed, the jokester is going to head for a punch line every time.
• • •
Some smart young critic will soon quote that line above against me, imagining that I am too dumb to realize that I have condemned