Slapstick, Or, Lonesome No More! - Kurt Vonnegut [0]
KURT VONNEGUT IS …
“UNIQUE … one of the writers who map our landscapes for us, who give names to the places we know best.”
—DORIS LESSING
The New York Times Book Review
“OUR FINEST BLACK-HUMORIST …. We laugh in self-defense.”
—The Atlantic Monthly
“AN UNIMITATIVE AND INIMITABLE SOCIAL SATIRIST.”
—Harper’s Magazine
“A MEDICINE MAN, CONJURING UP FANTASIES TO WARN THE WORLD.”
—The Charlotte Observer
“A CAUSE FOR CELEBRATION.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“A LAUGHING PROPHET OF DOOM.”
—The New York Times
BY KURT VONNEGUT
A Man Without a Country
Armageddon in Retrospect
Bagombo Snuff Box
Between Time and Timbuktu
Bluebeard
Breakfast of Champions
Canary in a Cat House
Cat’s Cradle
Deadeye Dick
Fates Worse Than Death
Galápagos
God Bless You, Mr. Kevorkian
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Happy Birthday, Wanda June
Hocus Pocus
Jailbird
Like Shaking Hands with God (with Lee Stringer)
Look at the Birdie: Unpublished Short Fiction
Mother Night
Palm Sunday
Player Piano
The Sirens of Titan
Slapstick
Slaughterhouse-Five
Timequake
Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons
Welcome to the Monkey House
Dedicated to the memory of
Arthur Stanley Jefferson and Norvell Hardy,
two angels of my time.
“Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptiz’d …”
—ROMEO
PROLOGUE
THIS IS THE CLOSEST I will ever come to writing an autobiography. I have called it “Slapstick” because it is grotesque, situational poetry—like the slapstick film comedies, especially those of Laurel and Hardy, of long ago.
It is about what life feels like to me.
There are all these tests of my limited agility and intelligence. They go on and on.
The fundamental joke with Laurel and Hardy, it seems to me, was that they did their best with every test.
They never failed to bargain in good faith with their destinies, and were screamingly adorable and funny on that account.
• • •
There was very little love in their films. There was often the situational poetry of marriage, which was something else again. It was yet another test—with comical possibilities, provided that everybody submitted to it in good faith.
Love was never at issue. And, perhaps because I was so perpetually intoxicated and instructed by Laurel and Hardy during my childhood in the Great Depression, I find it natural to discuss life without ever mentioning love.
It does not seem important to me.
What does seem important? Bargaining in good faith with destiny.
• • •
I have had some experiences with love, or think I have, anyway, although the ones I have liked best could easily be described as “common decency.” I treated somebody well for a little while, or maybe even for a tremendously long time, and that person treated me well in turn. Love need not have had anything to do with it.
Also: I cannot distinguish between the love I have for people and the love I have for dogs.
When a child, and not watching comedians on film or listening to comedians on the radio, I used to spend a lot of time rolling around on rugs with uncritically affectionate dogs we had.
And I still do a lot of that. The dogs become tired and confused and embarrassed long before I do. I could go on forever.
Hi ho.
• • •
One time, on his twenty-first birthday, one of my three adopted sons, who was about to leave for the Peace Corps in the Amazon Rain Forest, said to me, “You know—you’ve never hugged me.”
So I hugged him. We hugged each other. It was very nice. It was like rolling around on a rug with a Great Dane we used to have.
• • •
Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous.
I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, “Please—a little less love, and a little more common decency.”
• • •
My longest experience with common decency, surely, has been with my older brother, my only brother, Bernard, who is an atmospheric scientist in the State University of New York at Albany.
He is a widower, raising