Vonnegut Laughs No More

Response to Henry’s article Hahahahahaaaaaaah...

The quote that Henry is responding to in this article is “Humour is an almost physiological response to fear.” – KV.  In his response Henry agrees with the quote and states that everyone can relate to this quote.  I agree with both Vonnegut and Henry.  We as humans don’t always like the situations that we are placed in and sometimes are paralyzed with fear.  We all have different methods of neutralizing the situation to make it seem less scary but we all share one common way of doing this using comedy as demonstrated by Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-five.  He used lines such as "I just about defecated everything except my brains.” As pointed by Henry.  Vonnegut did not use the humour here to neutralize the situation for Billy, but he did it for the readers to defuse the situation of what really is going on, the horror of war.  However this is where I disagree with Henry.  Henry in his comment said that Vonnegut can still depicted the truth about war without all the violence and gore, I disagree saying that it makes it less effective.  I think it makes the novel less effective because Slaughterhouse-five was written as an anti-war novel and I believe that in order to do that there can be no distraction from the truth and real horror of what goes on in POW camps and in battle.