Laughing War

by Martyn Burke

Book Overview

Bien Hoa airbase, outside Saigon, wasn't a very funny place, but Barney's job had one advantage: he always played to a packed house. The soldiers flocked to his shows, and the war-zone comedian coaxed... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1587215136
• ISBN13: 9781587215131
• Release Date: July 2000
• Publisher: 1st Book Library
• Length: 308 Pages
• Weight: 1.13 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

A Meaningful Relic

The hardcover copy of this book that I have came out in 1980, a good year for me (I was 33) to be thinking about what I was going to be doing for the rest of my life. Nobody was expecting my life to be so much like this book, and I have no memory of what year this book actually became mine. As the intellectual level of televised life has declined to reflect the lack of thoughtfulness of the media which bring us the most important information we have to go on, I must have figured that this book would be about Nam, as soon as I saw it. Crimes against humor (a network cancelled the Smothers Brothers comedy hour) were so common during the war itself, when laughing at Nam was supposed to be much worse than going to Nam to fight, LAUGHING WAR by Martyn Burke had to be about the great tension required for seriously maintaining an activity that became increasingly absurd. I was once in Nam to escalate the winding down, and finding myself in disagreement with the army (like having my own secret plan for peace) was perfectly natural, as in this book.Comedy has become such a business that the information in this book which might still be considered most useful relates to how a comic routine must reflect a particular character to connect with an audience and be successful. There are chapters on Barney ("Most of Barney's comedy material came from watching the war"), Donna ("the Garbo of the Catinat, coming and going when few people saw her"), Isaacs ("Bitterness wells up inside Isaacs and he decides that he prefers the enemy at the front to the enemy behind him. . . . It is Abbie Hoffman, exhorting his multitudes with anarchistic wisecracks that sound to Isaacs like treason"), Jokes, and finally, Laughing War itself. If there is a possibility that something like Nam will crop up again, with the help of this book, people who want to be comedians will be able to spot it first and tell everybody about the hard times that are about to come down. Anyone who is trying to make sense of civilization will be hard pressed by the case which this book makes against the foolishness of using all of its destructive power in an attempt to wipe out all opposition.In the chapter on Isaacs there is a paragraph about a sergeant who was "bored by the jokes. They remind the sergeant too much of the kind he used to hear at the strip shows with the traveling carnivals. They were all hick comedians in those shows. With corny jokes." That is all most people expect, and it was great to read this comic effort to bring people to another level. More than just liking this book, I try to live it.