I. Introduction

In his foreword to a collection of the radio scripts of comedians Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. endorses these entertainers as somehow new and different—and relevant—since they draw their humor from the plight of the (American) Common Man. In the process, Vonnegut offers us an insight into his own writing, and the philosophies that inform it.
“They aren’t like most other comedians’ jokes these days,” Vonnegut writes,

aren’t rooted in show business and the world of celebrities and news of the day. They feature Americans who are almost always fourth-rate or below, engaged in enterprises which, if not contemptible, are at least insane.
And while other comedians show us persons tormented by bad luck and enemies and so on, Bob and Ray’s characters threaten to wreck themselves and their surroundings with their own stupidity. There is a refreshing and beautiful innocence in Bob’s and Ray’s humor.
Man is not evil, they seem to say. He is simply too hilariously stupid to survive.
And this I believe.
Jerome Klinkowitz, in the introduction to his essay collection entitled Vonnegut in America, has used this quote—as he certainly should—to support his claim that Vonnegut’s humor has its roots in the comedic response to the Great Depression. But of course there is much more to it than that.
The reader is left with a nagging question: Were humanity’s case really as Vonnegut describes it, and were this truly his belief, wouldn’t it seem that the only appropriate response would be for Vonnegut to sit and laugh quietly at the antics of the doomed race? But of course Vonnegut has done anything but sit and laugh quietly. His dozen novels fairly shout his anger at the “hilarious stupidity” which unfits our species for survival.
In the first chapter of what is certainly his greatest novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut tells us a secret