The Forlorn

To U.S. soldiers, "Sad Sack" is the funniest little lug who ever got a typhus shot or tried to goldbrick out of a duty. Sad Sack, lugubrious comic-strip creation of onetime Disney Animator Sergeant George Baker, leads a life of misadventure in the Army's newspaper Yank. Soldier readers think Sad Sack is comical because he is so forlorn.

Writing in the current Infantry Journal, Chief Warrant Officer E. J. Kahn Jr. makes it all clear by explaining that the main basis for soldier humor is self-pity. Kahn, who also writes for the unpitying New Yorker, declares :"0ne man is apt to feel fine when he has reason to believe another feels worse." Griping sends soldiers into fits of morose laughter.

But "with admirable impartiality" the U.S. soldier also likes to laugh at his own misfortunes. If he should "stumble inadvertently into a pile of manure, he will be the first to tell about it, and will almost certainly enlarge the dimensions and aromas of the pile at each successive recounting." His humor is vulgar, loud and bawdy.

Gripe & Countergripe. Along with the gripe there is the countergripe, or argument. Example by Listener Kahn:

"The food they give us stinks. What are they trying to do, starve us? I wish I was back in civilian life eating steaks every day."

"Aw, dry up. You never had the price of a steak in your life. It's a wonder you never strained your shoulder digging into those garbage cans for your meals."

A Change of Subject. Subjects change, says Kahn, as soldiers progress from recruit camp to the front line, where U.S. soldiers show a cold-bloodedness which "would probably alarm their families" as it does their enemies. The rookies joke about such ancient miseries as KP, blisters, close-order drill. But humor in combat is fleeting and spontaneous, often would be meaningless any other time.

In the Buna campaign a scout, returning to his unit, was asked what he had seen. "Two whorehouses and a pub," he whispered. Shaking with silent laughter (the enemy was so close they could not laugh out loud), his comrades "began to squirm forward to attack the three pillboxes their scout had so engagingly described."

From the Enemy. Jap prisoners of some Marines on Guadalcanal, Kahn relates, spent half the time boasting about their leaders, the other half begging for cigarets. "One Marine first sergeant hit upon the happy notion of requiring that each Jap, before getting a cigaret, recite loudly: 'Tojo is a son of a bitch.'

"The Japs, who didn't know what the phrase meant but quickly gathered that its use brought cigarets, learned it phonetically and chanted it endlessly, bowing low and grinning toothily while their captors nodded approval and complimented the prisoners on the excellence of their delivery of those honorable sentiments."

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