Photo Credit | Stars & Stripes – Bill Mauldin
Sometimes a touch of humor – just a bit of laughter in dark moments – is worth the pause. We live in times when politics infect everything, along with the disease of humorlessness, people taking everything literally, for offense or lack of wonder.
Interestingly, in the dark days of WWII and the Cold War, soldiers and leaders kept their humor. Life was dark – at times scary – but life was amusing by definition.
In combat zones, you had day-to-day humor, perhaps best captured by the cartoons featuring “Willie and Joe,” creation of Bill Mauldin for Stars and Stripes.
Reality shown but the irony in comedy gave readers – at war and home – a way to process adversity, laugh a little at themselves, not let insoluble problems dog them.
In one cartoon, the always gritty-looking Willie and Joe sit in a swamp, Willie’s arm over Joe’s shoulder, “Joe, yestiddy ya saved my life an’ I swore I’d pay ya back. Here’s my last pair of dry socks.” In another, a replacement walks through. “That can’t be a combat man, he’s lookin’ fir a fight.” With guys hanging out, a soldier says, “I need a couple guys what don’t owe me money for a routine patrol.”
Among leaders, Churchill was an unrivaled master of dark humor, fixing ideas in people’s minds with spontaneous lines. “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last,” and “If you are going through hell, keep going,” and “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
In other challenging moments, Churchill reset the table with one-liners that made people appreciate his own humanness. Leaders and peers get distance with humor.
Challenged for his speaking style, Churchill said: “Don’t interrupt me while I’m interrupting.” Pushed to say what history would make of his failures, “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” When things got upside down, “I have never developed indigestion from eating my words.”
Commenting on opponents, “He has all the virtues I dislike, and none of the vices I admire,” and “A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject,” and “The greatest life lesson is to know that even fools are right sometimes.”
On ironies, “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened,” and “Show me a young Conservative, and I’ll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal, and I’ll show you someone with no brains.”
Interestingly, Churchill – like Reagan after him – was fond of animals, and often introduced them into his jokes. People share more than they say. Both men knew it.
Reagan told the story of three dogs during the Cold War, the height of the Soviet Union’s communist domination of Eastern Europe: one American, one Polish, one Soviet.
Reagan said an American dog was explaining life in America. “You bark … and after you bark long enough, someone comes along and gives you some meat.” The Polish dog said, “What’s meat?” The Russian dog said, “What’s bark?”
Reagan told dozens of jokes like that one, subtly driving home the deprivations and depravity of communism, while keeping the flow and tone light. He did the same thing on domestic issues, and in that way got people to start thinking.
Perhaps the funniest part of humor deployed to convey a point is that sometimes the situation is just so truthful that no point at all, except life’s amusement, is left.
Turns out, Churchill kept a parrot named Charlie, but also kept every kind of animal at his country home, and loved walking people around his farm yard.
Once quizzed about his favorite animal, he said, “I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.” Asked to explain, he just said, it is true. He liked pigs. Sometimes, if we let it be, the truth itself is funny.
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, Maine attorney, ten-year naval intelligence officer (USNR), and 25-year businessman. He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (North Country Press, 2018), and “Cherish America: Stories of Courage, Character, and Kindness” (Tower Publishing, 2024). He is the National Spokesman for AMAC. Today, he is running to be Maine’s next Governor (please visit BobbyforMaine.com to learn more)!
If you can, get a hold of Bill Mauldin’s book Up Front which includes many of his cartoons throughout the war as well as a narrative explaining the context of each cartoon as he wrote for Stars and Stripes.
Mauldin joined the Army at 18 in1940 and spent the next five years chronicling the events of his fellow soldiers (mostly in the 45th Division) as they fought across Europe.
His humor was much appreciated by most of his fellow soldiers but sometimes aggravated the higher-ups.
General Patton once called him an unpatriotic anarchist for mocking Patton’s order that soldiers be clean shaven even in their foxholes and threatened to ban Stars and Stripes from his command until General Eisenhower intervened and told Patton to lay off Mauldin.
In 1945, Mauldin won the Pulitzer Prize for his body of work during the war.
A story from President Ronald Reagan about the system in the Soviet Union – it was said that only about one in seven people in the Soviet Union owned cars and that it took ten years to purchase a car.And the full amount of the cost of the car needed to be paid in advance ,that is, ten years ahead of the actual taking possession of the car. So, someone with the required amount of money for a car went to the agency that handled those transactions and a date was set for exactly ten years from that day and the Soviet citizen making the purchase asked if it would be available in the morning or the afternoon on that day.The bureaucrat at the car sale agency said “What does it matter – it is ten years away from now ? ” And the Soviet citizen said it was necessary to know because a plumber was scheduled for that morning ! “
RBC, I remember the “Stars and Stripes” newspaper from my overseas duty stations. I always enjoyed the cartoons and have quite a bit of the cartoons that I saved in a scrap book. I enjoy looking them from time to time.
We could use a few more like Willie and Joe, Churchill and Reagan, W.C. Fields and RBCs.
Reckon?
Humor, for sure, is the best way to cope with adversity. It’s why, at funerals, some amusing anecdotes take away the solemnity of the occasion. It’s how I was able to stay married for 50 years to an often obnoxious man: he was funny and made me laugh.
Bill Mauldin’s Joe and Willy were still in the stars and stripes when I joined the ARMY in 1974. However I was already a fan from other sources. My favorite was the guys standing next to a bombed out building. There was a window with one unbroken glass pane. Willy was saying “go ahead joe, you know you won’t sleep tonight.”
Does anyone remember the up front movie with the toilets standing at attention?
The true humor, the ability to laugh at one self, even a little self deprecation is not in the vocabulary of the communist. It would be the acknowledgement that they too are only human, fallible, not happening. Dour, sour, miserable, I love Greta Garbo in Ninotchka, absolutely perfect dead pan faced communist. We see the humor of the left daily, not funny. What happened to cartoons? Oh I forget, too violent for children, now we have LGBTQ inclusion and reeducation. It is the humor that gets people through toughest times .