Only once have I ever bought a book just because I saw it on the shelf of a bookstore (remember those?). It was this book, and boy, my intuition was firing on all cylinders that day! The main character is born in the bowels of Stalin's Russia as a pink-cheeked peasant who avoids starvation by climbing the apparatchik ladder, eventually landing the job of his boyhood dreams: a spy in America, the land of not just wealth but CLASS, of Gary Cooper and Martinis and the wearing of a condom on your "skolnikov" under your Brooks Brothers suit day and night, just like a millionaire! Soon he's balancing his duty to his KGB bosses and his new loves: women (one in particular), pop culture, and the stock market. Remember Polaroid? That was him. The mind wants to cast Alan Arkin in the role, especially when you get to the jarringly unexpected ending. This book is out of print. Find it, and overpay for it. Read it from time to time over the years. Loan it not. Then bequeath it to a loved one, dog-ears and all.

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.

Martyn Burke captures the lunacy of a culture self absorbed. I was laughing so hard at various times during the book that I had to stop reading. Anyone who thinks they know what people in Beverly Hills think, feel or act like when stressed or relaxed should read this book.