Literary Parallels

Why did the doctors use such horrible hospital humor? Renée Fox has noted a resemblance between medical humor and the humor of soldiers in combat.^[6] Literature provides some excellent examples of war humor.

War and Peace

In Tolstoy's epic, the Russians have been retreating toward Moscow. In one battle, "tens of thousands fell."^[7] By 10:00 A.M.,

cannon balls fell more and more frequently. . . . But the men . . . seemed not to notice this, and jokes were heard on all sides.

"A live one!" shouted a man as a whistling shell approached.

"Not this way! To the infantry!" added another, with loud laughter, seeing the shell fly past.^[8]

How can there be joking and laughing in this death-charged scene? Paradoxically, it is probably the atmosphere itself that occasions the laughter, for through their laughter the soldiers try to trivialize, defy, or nullify the anxiety and anguish surrounding, and within, them. "'Are you afraid . . . ?'" Pierre Bezúkov, who had come to observe the battle, asked one of the soldiers. "'One can't help being afraid,' [the soldier said] . . . laughing."^[9]

In some ways, this atmosphere of fear, pain, dying, and death recalls the hospital scene. Is it possible, then, that doctors' humor—like soldiers' humor—seeks to combat anxieties about the atmosphere of suffering, death, and dying from which one cannot escape? Can the reactions of a soldier offer insights into those of a doctor?

Something About A Soldier

Jacob Epp, age eighteen, the protagonist of Mark Harris's novel, is in a training camp, preparing to fight in Europe in World War II. Captain Dodd likes him, but in the excerpt below Dodd seems heartless and mean. Jacob has just received a newspaper clipping announcing that his best friend, also eighteen, has been killed in action in Italy.

And Jacob said to the Captain, My friend is dead.

Who, said the Captain.

My friend, said Jacob. Dead in a burning airplane between Salerno and Naples, Italy.

That's what happens, said Dodd, when you fly around in burning airplanes.^[10]

On the surface, Dodd appears cruel. But later in the novel, Dodd, who likes and pities Jacob, helps him get a discharge

from the army before Jacob is even sent abroad, whereas Dodd himself will die fighting in Europe. Dodd's insensitivity thus is only apparent, not real. In fact, his grimly ironic quip voices the opposite of what he really feels, and his humor is therefore a defense and a mask. It helps protect him from his own fear of death and conceals—although to those who understand its irony it actually reveals—his sympathy for another person.

War humor, then, like medical humor, continually jostles against death, the fear of death, or one's own feelings of sympathy. Often such humor is ironic; it pits grim wit against the grim facts. How else may the grimly humorous combat the grimly serious? There is a very thin line between them.

The Thin Red Line

In James Jones's novel fictionalizing the Guadalcanal campaign, semihysterical laughter, obscenity, and bravado are three ways in which grim humor combats grim reality

Semihysterical laughter, which is akin to tears or helplessness, implies a person's lack of control over himself or over events. (We think here of the doctors' behavior in the case of "Swollen Ankles.") In Jones's novel, such laughter erupts after a confrontation with death. While debarking, the soldiers have seen one of their landing boats blown to bits by a Japanese air attack. Those who are unhurt have to march miles into the jungle to set up camp. Then they are drenched by a pouring rain. Suddenly they turn everything into a semihysterical lark.

A hollow and pathetic lark, to be sure, when associated with the dead, dying and wounded from the air attack whom they could not forget;—but perhaps for that very reason the clowning and laughter rose to an even higher pitch, one that in the end resembled hysteria. . . . In the end, however, it did not lessen their painful new tension.^[11]

Although the soldiers' clowning and laughing are described as reactions to their recent exposure to terror, horror, pain,

and death, their semihysterical laughter "did not lessen their painful new tension." Grim reality is not so easily vanquished—at least not by fits of laughing.

In a way, their laughing is a kind of bravado, indecent and almost obscene. This becomes clear in the next episode. Some of the soldiers explore the jungle and come upon the bloodstained shirt of an American soldier. They hold up the death shirt, examining it nervously, curiously, and almost guiltily. Then they drop it and proceed in the jungle until they come upon a mass Japanese grave.

It was here that the delayed emotional reaction to the death shirt caught up with them in the form of a sort of wild horse-play of bravado. . . . [They] pushed or poked at this or that exposed member, knocked with riflebutts this or that Japanese knee or elbow. They swaggered impudently. . . . They boisterously desecrated the Japanese parts, laughing loudly, each trying to outbravado the other.^[12]

The key words here are "bravado" and "outbravado": they imply pretended courage or defiant confidence where there is really little or none. Bravado, therefore, explains something about war humor and—because it resembles it—medical humor.

Are the bravado of war humor and medical humor wholly horrible, unnecessary, and perverted? Or might this humor actually be helpful and even healing? A final example from literature attempts to analyze or explain, very briefly but very insightfully, why this horrible humor exists and is helpful.

All Quiet On the Western Front

Paul Bäumer, the narrator of Erich Maria Remarque's remarkable novel, is a soldier in the German army during World War I. His company has just returned from two weeks at the front. On their last day there, 70 of their 150 men were wounded or killed. The remaining soldiers are waiting to eat.

"Say, . . . open up the soup-kitchen," [one soldier called]. . . .

[The cook said,] "You must all be there first." Tjaden grinned: "We are all here." . . .

"That may do for you," . . . [the cook] said. "But where are the others?"

They won't be fed by you today. They're either in the dressing-station or pushing up daisies."^[13]

Like the cook, the reader is probably startled or repelled by the soldiers' joking about their dead comrades. How can we accept—or understand—such offensive humor?

First, like the narrator, Bäumer, we should always see it in context, that is, in an atmosphere of fear, pain, dying, and death from which one cannot escape.

Second, we can understand this humor as both offensive and defensive; it is an armament, at once a weapon and a protective shield. As an offensive device, this humor causes the men using it to appear insensitive, cruel, or gross. As a defensive device, it is protective, helpful, and healing. As Bäumer explains, it keeps the men from going mad, upholds their resistance, cheers them, and gives them courage.

The terror of the front sinks deep down when we turn our backs upon it; we make grim, coarse jests about it, when a man dies, then we say that he has nipped off his turd . . . ; that keeps us from going mad; as long as we take it that way we maintain our own resistance. . . .

We have to take things as lightly as we can,. . . and nonsense stands stark and immediate beside horror. . . . [T]hat is how we hearten ourselves.^[14]

Third, we can see that their offensive-defensive humor functions like an anesthetic, for in making those who use it appear insensitive, it dulls their fear and pain. There is a parallel, therefore, between the soldiers' humor and the emotional numbness that soldiers develop in battle. The most startling—and revealing—aspect of Bäumer's analysis

below is that into his insightful discussion of soldiers' numbness he himself injects, when speaking of Hans Kramer's body, a typical bit of offensive-defensive war humor.

I soon found out this much: terror can be endured so long as a man simply ducks;—but it kills, if a man thinks about it. . . . We want to live at any price; so we cannot burden ourselves with feelings which, though they might be ornamental enough in peacetime, would be out of place here. Kemmerich is dead, Haie Westhus is dying, they will have a job with Hans Kramer's body at the Judgment Day, piecing it together after a direct hit.^[15]