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We speak student!

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Catch-22

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a la Shmoop

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Let's focus on...

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more or less the history of satire.

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In 1961, when the book came out,

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satirizing was a new thing.

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It wasn't something that was so common.

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Today, Jon Stewart --

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You know, and Jon Stewart

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really, he will point to Saturday Night Live's

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nightly news and not necessarily the news

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as something he cloned.

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And that was a clone of something that was done in Canada and so on.

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So it's not like this is new today

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or striking today.

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But in 1961,

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making fun of anything coming out of the Cold War

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was a brand new thing.

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And the Cold War, it was like

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laughter was not --

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Like you had to pay a tax on each time you guffawed.

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So talk to us about

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the historical context in 1961

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and sort of why that was so shocking to the public

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in the serious era that we had just come out of.

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Yeah, you really hit the nail on the head there.

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What Heller did was shocking.

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The fact that he was making fun

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of war and so much.

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This wasn't one joke in a serious novel.

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This entire novel is a parody or satire of war.

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And this is something that people weren't used to.

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Today, we expect it.

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That's really the way

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a lot of points are made today is through satire.

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And a lot of the way that we understand the news

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and current events is through satire.

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But back then, it was just unheard of almost.

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And it wasn't like no one had ever made light of serious topics.

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Satire goes all the way back to

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the Classical period and people have been doing this forever.

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But in, like you said, Cold War, et cetera,

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this was not a time that people were ready for that.

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But it did kind of then pave the way

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for more of that.

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So then we get stuff like Dr. Strangelove and MASH,

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which then followed in the footsteps of Catch-22.

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And this is these -- You know, MASH,

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this is another huge cultueral phenomenon

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that we wouldn't have necessarily had

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if Heller hadn't paved the way.

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So we do have to remember

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the historical context here.

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Another cool thing about the fact that it was written in 1961

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is that we're in Vietnam era.

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So while Heller is

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talking about World War II --

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And we only know it's World War II very vaguely.

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It's almost anticipating what was gonna start happening

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in the next few years with the anti-war protests.

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Because that's what Heller's doing.

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This is an anti-war protest.

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And a few years later,

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we start seeing this in huge amounts in the U.S.

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How did Catch-22 differ from its contemporary works of literature?

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How did Catch-22 influence social commentary?

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