Military Humor - Books

Books

Notable books include Shel Silverstein's Grab Your Socks (1956), Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk (1923) and Catch 22 by Joseph Heller. Reader's Digest's Humor in Uniform (1963) is a collection of short true anecdotes depicting amusing experiences in the armed forces. In 1941, according to editor Harold Hersey, there were about 350 Army camp newspapers. Three years later, when they had expanded to "hundreds and hundreds", he compiled his collection of camp newspapers cartoons, More G.I. Laughs (1944).

In 2002, Hyperion published Kilroy Was Here: The Best American Humor from World War II by Charles Osgood. Publishers Weekly reviewed:

Originating as a chalked inspection notice in a Quincy, Mass., shipyard, the sketch of bald-headed Kilroy launched a thousand ships and eventually became the most familiar globe-trotting graffiti of World War II... Osgood has assembled a barrage of WWII's amusing essays, stories, jokes, cartoons, poems and short satires. Selections range from heavy artillery (Reader's Digest's "Humor in Uniform" and Bob Hope's I Was There) to the small-arms fire of lesser-known writers. The opening salvo, "A Dictionary of Military Slang: 1941-1944" (compiled from Harold Hersey's More G.I. Laughs and Paris Kendall's Gone with the Draft), is followed by a parade of thematic chapters. Drinking from the same canteens, Osgood repeatedly excerpts from the same handful of mid-1940s publications. Oddly, he ignores the great Dave Breger of the Army weekly Yank, who coined the term G.I. Joe for a cartoon series so popular it ran simultaneously in that outlet and in American newspapers. Osgood offers a half-dozen of Bill Mauldin's famed Willie and Joe cartoons but only a single George Baker Sad Sack strip and one cartoon by the stylish Irwin Caplan, a prolific contributor to the slick postwar magazines.