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What's so Funny about Richard Nixon? Vonnegut's Jailbird and the Limits of Comedy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2007

WILL KAUFMAN
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Abstract

This essay explores the questionable potency of satire in the light of Richard Nixon's political rehabilitation. Following a discussion of satirical treatments from the 1940s to the 1980s by, among others, the cartoonists Herbert Block (‘Herblock’) and Garry Trudeau, the comedians Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, and writers including Philip Roth and Robert Coover, I examine one work extensively – Kurt Vonnegut's Jailbird (1979) – as a disquisition on satiric impotence, setting that novel in the context of the comedic firepower that had been directed at Nixon since the dawn of his political career and which, in the end, could not prevent his rehabilitation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , December 2007 , pp. 623 - 639
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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