How Trench Warfare Can Cure Our Cultures Suppression Of Humor

Ernst Jüngers Storm of Steel as a guide to self mastery

British troops go “over the top” during the 1916 Battle of the Somme in northern France. Credit: © Paul Popper, Popperfoto/Getty Images

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To set the stage for this essay, I am going to describe one of the more ridiculous experiences I had while deployed to the tribal lands of the Middle East.

With about a dozen teammates and some support personnel, we set up a few tents deep within enemy controlled territory. The mission was to turn it into friendly territory, and it was a savage, bare bones business. I remember the night a CH-47 air lifted a metal container to us that would serve as our shower. We had no running water prior to this. We reeked.

The enemy combatants in our neck of the woods liked to lob mortars and rockets at us in between our more intense engagements to see if they could drop a few bombs into our tents. In one of my shower sessions, I was exalting in the thin dribble of water streaming from a hose we stuck through a hole in the roof of the container when I heard explosions and the container bounced a few inches off the ground.

My first thought was, “What an embarrassing way to die.” My second thought was, “Grab your rifle and radio.” I took a breath, pushed the door of the metal container open, and stepped out into a tornado of kicked up dirt, yellow balls of flame, and manic machine gun fire. I ran wearing nothing but my bare skin and my teammates lowered their rifle barrels as I ran in front of them, only to calmly resume their shooting after I had streaked by. I slipped my armor on and got into the fight which ended soon afterwards.   

Once we took care of our man who caught a bit of mortar shrapnel, laughing commenced – from those like myself caught in unfortunate positions, as well as from the man who was hit.   

This experience raises a question: how is it that comedians like Ricky Gervais, Dave Chappelle, or Bill Maher (among many others) can be censored and deplatformed for their routines in the safest era civilization has ever known, while humor flourishes amidst the stew of mud, blood, feces, and flying bits of metal in war zones?

This revelation became even more obvious to me when I read Storm of Steel, a firsthand account of WWI by Ernst Jünger. All I had learned of WWI was focused on the horror – and there was an ungodly amount of horror. Jünger shows us, however, a vein of humor winding throughout the labyrinthine trenches, barbed wire, and artillery barrages that lit the horizon on fire in a black and crimson curtain.

Boots on the ground is a military expression that refers to seeing the battlefield with one’s own eyes. The men in the trenches did not wage drone warfare from glowing screens in low lit metal trailers outside Las Vegas. They were not hovering above the scorched earth in a helicopter. The men in the trenches were not only boots on the ground in chewed up grape orchards and smoldering public squares in France; they were boots on the ground for the full spectrum of human experience – rage, love, hate, sorrow, joy, laughter, terror, pain – all cram packed into a short time span and dialed up to its greatest intensity. And in this they found no holds barred humor. Death humor. 

Humor was batted back and forth across enemy lines, sometimes a mere thirty yards apart, separated by a brief span of hell studded with rotting corpses and impact craters strewn with shards of bone as white as eggshells. Jünger cheerfully recounts a deadly conversation. “Shouts are exchanged, often with an edge of rough humor. ‘Hey, Tommy, you still there?’ ‘Yup!’ ‘Then get your head down, I'm going to start shooting at you!’”¹ Humor was found after the “sweetish, oniony smell” of phosgene gas laid dozens of fighters low in their prime. It was found after fogged out gas masks made it impossible to know whether the wearer was walking towards friendly or enemy gun barrels. It was found during barrages so intense that Jünger felt an “exalted, almost demonical lightness; often attended by fits of laughter I was unable to repress.”

Let us take a look at some scenes left to us by Jünger and pose some hypotheticals.

The mud holes used as latrines were built such that if the enemy fired just above the ridge of the defensive trench, the bullets path flew at chest height. Over the course of one bowel movement, a soldier might have to bear hug the earth two or three times until the bullets finish cracking overhead “like a musical scale,” an “occasion for all sorts of ribaldry.” Would the man lying face down in the muck with his ass barred to the heavens scream at his comrades, “You are making me uncomfortable and I need you need to stop it right now,” or would he laugh at the ridiculous of it all?

After a heavy downpour, those who found their trenches on slightly higher ground than their enemies would bail the primordial soup out of their own and watch it flow down into the enemies’. Would a soggy booted Brit baling water out of his trench scream across no man’s land at the snickering Germans and say, “You are making light of my suffering in this knee deep trench water and you need to stop it right now,” or would he shake his head and smile?

One last Jüngerian example. A soldier gorged himself on alcohol after midnight, and deemed it wise to go out beyond the wire and shoot at his own lines. When he ran out of bullets, he was brought back in, beaten, and the men got a good laugh at the madness of it all. Would the bacchanalian reveler say, “You are being a bully by punishing me and laughing at me for shooting up my own lines while drunk on red wine,” or would he admit he was wrong and laugh in his lice infested dugout when he tells the story to his platoon mates?

The significant point is that the men in the trenches did not seek to suppress humor, even when they did not like it. Instead, they leaned into it. They found humor despite the metal nightmare around them; they found it at the expense of others, and they found it at the expense of themselves.  

Now for the big question.

How can combatants find a sense of humor despite launching bombs at one another, but when a rude joke is launched today, a man or woman’s happiness can be completely shattered? In other words, why is it that when times are truly hard we allow and even encourage humor, but when times are truly easy we forbid it? Why, when it comes to humor, are we free in war but slaves in peace?

War is stark. Black and white. My point is that war teaches us fundamental truths on the human condition. If I am a trench man, I know that the silky snap of a subsonic bullet streaking by is not within my control. I know that the man laughing at me while holding a Luger is not within my control. I know that the slightest barometric change that can alter the course of a mortar by a few inches is not within my control. Above all, I know that life itself is not under my control. I can accept all of these things because they are very clearly not up to me. I realize that the only thing that is truly my own is my power of choice.

What happens now? My feeling is that without the reminder of death, we are fooled into thinking we have something to lose, and we are crippled, stunned, and pacified at this fear of loss. A culture that forbids humor creates some anxious fog that heightens this sense of loss. We are ruled by ifs. If I laugh at a crude joke, then I will lose my job, or be labelled some hissing “-ist”, or struggle sessioned, or lose my “friends”, or some other non-life-threatening consequence that appears unbearable because we have forgotten death and thereby lost all perspective. We have the false impression that we can control outcomes if we keep our mouths shut, if we murder the humor within us, if we become short term slaves. This if becomes a breaker of souls in a way a bullet never could. This if allows humor to die.  

It seems then that we reach a somewhat diabolical conclusion: since most cultures restrict humor at a scale that war does not, the censorship we find coursing through the veins of a given culture is, in this sense, a noxious destroyer of mankind even worse than the meat grinder of trench warfare; less tolerant, less forgiving, less human, and less free. 

I am not saying that war is better than peace. I am saying that we can make our cultures better by leveraging lessons written in blood.

The men in the trenches who found themselves with a fatalistic sense of humor can teach us a bit of wisdom: “If I can endure this storm of steel, I can endure whatever comes my way. What is an off-putting joke? A comedian? An insult? A threat? You think a word can break me when hell cannot? You think I will not keep my sense of humor until the very end? You think you can take this freedom from me, or that I want to take it from you, when humor is one of the few things entirely within our control?”

I believe we would do well to listen to those who have faced death, for they have something crucial to teach us about life. What did Socrates say to the judges who held the power to condemn him to death? ”Know well that if you kill me, I being the sort of man I say I am, you cannot harm me.”²

A dead body is not a broken soul. They murdered Socrates but they did not break him – his ironic sense of humor was cranking until the moment he shut his eyes for good. No one can ever take away our ability to laugh. No one but ourselves. Humor is rebellion. Humor is freedom.

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1. Jünger, Ernst, 1895-1998. Storm of Steel. New York :Penguin Books, 2004.

2. Plato’s Apology, 30C