The University of Queensland

Humour, like war, is a shared experience. For the soldiers of World Wars 1 and 2, as for soldiers generally, humour was camaraderie with a rueful grin, a wry expression of lives lived (and lost) together in the most extraordinary of circumstances. It sustained the bonds of solidarity in the face of isolation, adversity or just plain boredom. It helped shape a group identity against a common enemy, often with racist effect. In its more caustic and satirical forms it expressed repugnance at the conditions at the front, at military life in general, at the officer class at HQ and at the political masters and war profiteers at home. It evoked a common nostalgia for family and community. It nurtured resilience and helped men cope together with fear, hardship, deprivation and loss. Laughter, it was sometimes said, was the best medicine.

War humour had many targets. It maligned the enemy, whether frontline combatants or homeland occupiers. It ridiculed aspects of military life, like the petty tyranny of officer rule, lack of leave, poor rations, the drudgery of training. It made light of the hardships of the front, where, between periods of bombardment and combat, soldiers found good reasons to take issue with just about everything, fleas, food and the physical environment being favourite topics of the comically inclined.

The face of pugnacious soldier larrikinism? Or a study in the effects of shellshock? This arresting image was drawn at Gallipoli by Australian David Barker and published in The Anzac Book in 1916.

Written and illustrated in Gallipoli by the men of Anzac, The Anzac Book (London: Cassell, 1916), p22.

At its worst, war humour vilified or patronised the Indigenous peoples of the war theatres: the cartoons and yarns tell of the ‘Gypoes’ of Cairo, the ‘Boongs’ or ‘Fuzzy Wuzzies’ of New Guinea, the mademoiselles of provincial France. Some humorists offered their audience solace in the suffering and destruction of the other side.

At its best the humour sparkled with a common humanity, celebrating a spirit of mutual support and masculine friendship found amongst the ranks of armies everywhere - what the Australians called ‘mateship’. It gave soldiers licence to poke fun at their commanders, and gave vent to their good-natured inclination to ‘take the mickey’ out of each other.

At its sharpest, the humour of war homed in on the inherent absurdity of war, satirising the politics and mythology of militarism, exposing the elites who stood to benefit, anticipating the likely privations awaiting the demobbed ranks after the guns fell silent. It was not always subtle but it was often clever. It could be excoriating, pathetic, sardonic, larrikin-esque. It was funny, though not universally so. It could be light or dark but always it was suffused with a sense of anxiety and a longing for an end to the sordid business of fighting. As one Digger says to the other in "Slouch ’at Coots", "It’s only us keeping so cheerful wot pulls us through!"

Jeff Rickertt, Fryer Library