If This Isn't Nice, What Is?

by Kurt Vonnegut

  One more optional piece of advice: If you ever have to give a speech, start with a joke, if you know one. For years I have been looking for the best joke in the world. I think I know what it is. I will tell it to you, but you have to help me. You have to say, “No,” when I hold up my hand like this. All right? Don’t let me down.

  Do you know why cream is so much more expensive then milk?

  AUDIENCE: No.

  It is because the cows hate to squat on those little bottles.

  That is the best joke I know. One time when I worked for the General Electric Company over in Schenectady, I had to write speeches for company officers. I put that joke about the cows and the little bottles in a speech for a vice president. He was reading along, and he had never heard the joke before. He couldn’t stop laughing, and he had to be led away from the podium with a nosebleed. I was fired the next day.

  How do jokes work? The beginning of each good one challenges you to think. We are such earnest animals. When I asked you about cream, you could not help yourselves. You really tried to think of a sensible answer. Why does a chicken cross the road? Why does a fireman wear red suspenders? Why did they bury George Washington on the side of a hill?

  The second part of the joke announces that nobody wants you to think, nobody wants to hear your wonderful answer. You are so relieved to at last meet somebody who doesn’t demand that you be intelligent. You laugh for joy.

  I have in fact designed this entire speech so as to allow you to be as stupid as you like, without strain, and without penalties of any kind. I have even written a ridiculous song for the occasion. It lacks music, but we are up to our necks in composers. One is sure to come along. The words go like this:

  Adios to teachers and pneumonia.

  If I find out where the party is,

  I’ll telephone ya.

  I love you so much, Sonya,

  That I am going to buy you a begonia.

  You love me, too, doan ya, Sonya?

  See—you were trying to guess what the next rhyme was going to be. Nobody cares how smart you are.

  I am being so silly because I pity you so much. I pity all of us so much. Life is going to be very tough again, just as soon as this is over. And the most useful thought we can hold when all hell cuts loose again is that we are not members of different generations, as unlike, as some people would have us believe, as Eskimos and Australian Aborigines. We are all so close to each other in time that we should think of ourselves as brothers and sisters. I have several children—seven, to be exact—too many children for an atheist, certainly. Whenever my children complain about the planet to me, I say, “Shut up! I just got here myself. Who do you think I am—Methuselah? You think I like the news of the day any better than you do? You’re wrong.”

  We are all experiencing more or less the same lifetime now.

  What is it the slightly older people want from the slightly younger people? They want credit for having survived so long, and often imaginatively, under difficult conditions. Slightly younger people are intolerably stingy about giving them credit for that.

  What is it the slightly young people want from the slightly older people? More than anything, I think, they want acknowledgement and without further ado that they are without question women and men now. Slightly older people are intolerably stingy about making any such acknowledgement.

  Therefore, I take it upon myself to pronounce those about to graduate women and men. No one must ever treat them like children again. Neither must they ever act like children—ever again.

  This is what is known as a puberty ceremony.

  I realize that it is coming a little late, but better late than never. Every primitive society ever studied has had a puberty ceremony, at which former children became unchallengeably women and men. Some Jewish communities still honor this old practice, of course, and benefit from it, in my opinion. But, by and large, ultramodern, massively industrialized societies like ours have decided to do without puberty ceremonies—unless you want to count the issuance of drivers’ licenses at the age of 16. If you want to count that as a puberty ceremony, then it has a highly unusual feature: a judge can take your puberty away again, even if you’re as old as I am.

  Another event in the lives of American and European males which might be considered a puberty ceremony is war. If a male comes home from a war, especially with serious wounds, everybody agrees: Here indeed is a man. When I came home to Indianapolis from the Second World War in Germany, an uncle of mine said to me, “By golly—you look like a man now.” I wanted to strangle him. If I had, he would have been the first German I’d killed. I was a man before I went to war, but he was damned if he would say so.

  I suggest to you that the withholding of a puberty ceremony from young males in our society is a scheme, devised cunningly but subconsciously, to make those males eager to go to war, no matter how terrible or unjust a war may be. There are just wars, too, of course. The war I was eager to go to happened to be a just one.

  And when does a female stop being a little girl and become a woman, with all the rights and privileges appertaining thereto? We all know the answer in our bones: When she has a baby in wedlock, of course. If she has that first baby out of wedlock, she is still a child. What could be simpler or more natural and more obvious than that—or, in these days and in this society, at least, more unjust, irrelevant, and just plain stupid?

  I think we had better, for our own safety, reinstate puberty ceremonies.

  I not only pronounce those about to graduate as women and men. With all the powers vested in me, I pronounce them Clarks, as well. Most of you know, I’m sure, that all white people named Clark are descended from inhabitants of the British Isles who were remarkable for being able to read and write. A black person named Clark, of course, would be descended, most likely, from someone who was forced to work without pay or rights of any kind by a white person named Clark. An interesting family—the Clarks.

  I realize that you graduates are all specialized in some way. But you have spent most of the past sixteen or more years learning to read and write. People who can do those things well, as you can, are miracles and, in my opinion, entitle us to suspect that we may be civilized after all. It is terribly hard to learn to read and write. It takes simply forever. When we scold our schoolteachers about the low reading scores of their students, we pretend that it is the easiest thing in the world: To teach a person to read and write. Try it sometime, and you will discover that it is nearly impossible.

  What good is being a Clark, now that we have computers and movies and television? Clarking, a wholly human enterprise, is sacred. Machinery is not. Clarking is the most profound and effective form of meditation practiced on this planet, and far surpasses any dream experienced by a Hindu on a mountaintop. Why? Because Clarks, by reading well, can think the thoughts of the wisest and most interesting human minds throughout all history. When Clarks meditate, even if they themselves have only mediocre intellects, they do it with the thoughts of angels. What could be more sacred than that?

  So much for puberty and Clarking. Only two major subjects remain to be covered: Loneliness and boredom. No matter what age any of us is now, we are going to be bored and lonely during what remains of our lives.

  We are so lonely because we don’t have enough friends and relatives. Human beings are supposed to live in stable, like-minded, extended families of fifty people or more.

  Your class spokesperson mourned the collapse of the institution of marriage in this country. Marriage is collapsing because our families are too small. A man cannot be a whole society to a woman, and a woman cannot be a whole society to a man. We try, but it is scarcely surprising that so many of us go to pieces.

  So I recommend that everybody here join all sorts of organizations, no matter how ridiculous, simply to get more people in his or her life. It does not matter much if all the other members are morons. Quantities of relatives of any sort are what we need.

  As for boredom: Friedrich Wilhelm
Nietzsche, a German philosopher who died seventy-eight years ago, had this to say: “Against boredom even the gods contend in vain.” We are supposed to be bored. It is a part of life. Learn to put up with it, or you will not be what I have declared the members of this graduating class to be: mature women and men.

  I come to a close now by noting that the press, whose business is to know and understand everything, often find young people to be apathetic (especially when pundits and commentators can’t think of anything else to write about or talk about). The new generation of graduates has failed to eat a certain vitamin or mineral perhaps, iron perhaps. They have tired blood. They need Geritol. Well, as a member of a zippier generation, with sparkle in its eyes and a snap in its stride, let me tell you what kept us as high as kites a lot of the time: Hatred. All my life I’ve had people to hate—from Hitler to Nixon, not that those two are at all comparable in their villainy. It is a tragedy, perhaps, that human beings can get so much energy and enthusiasm from hate. If you want to feel ten feet tall and as though you could run a hundred miles without stopping, hate beats pure cocaine any day. Hitler resurrected a beaten, bankrupt, half-starved nation with hatred and nothing more. Imagine that.

  So it seems quite likely to me that young people of today in the United States of America is not in fact apathetic, but only looks that way to people who are used to getting their ecstasies from hatred, among other things, of course. The members of your graduating class are not sleepy, are not listless, are not apathetic. They are simply performing the experiment of doing without hate. Hate is the missing vitamin or mineral or whatever in their diet, they have sensed correctly that hate, in the long run, is about as nourishing as cyanide. This is a very exciting thing they are doing, and I wish them well.

  VONNEGUT GIVES ADVICE TO GRADUATING WOMEN (WHICH ALL MEN SHOULD KNOW ABOUT!)

  In which the author answers the question that Freud asked, but never could figure out: “What do women want?” For good measure, he also reveals what men really want.2

  We love you, are proud of you, expect good things from you, and wish you well.

  This is a long-delayed puberty ceremony. You are at last officially full-grown women—what you were biologically by the age of 15 or so. I am as sorry as I can be that it took so much time and money before you could at last be licensed as grown-ups.

  Kin Hubbard, a newspaper humorist in my hometown of Indianapolis when I was growing up, wrote a joke a day for The Indianapolis News. One day, I remember, he said, “It’s no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.” He said this about graduation addresses: “I think it would be better if colleges spread out the really important stuff over four years, instead of saving it all up for the very end.”

  But that’s what you’re going to get from me: All the really important stuff at the very end.

  I am so smart I know what is wrong with the world. Everybody asks during and after our wars, and the continuing terrorist attacks all over the globe, “What’s gone wrong?”

  What has gone wrong is that too many people, including high school kids and heads of state, are obeying the Code of Hammurabi, a King of Babylonia who lived nearly four thousand years ago. And you can find his code echoed in the Old Testament, too. Are you ready for this?

  “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

  A categorical imperative for all who live in obedience to the Code of Hammurabi, which includes heroes of every cowboy show and gangster show you ever saw, is this: Every injury, real or imagined, shall be avenged. Somebody’s going to be really sorry.

  (Horrible laugh.)

  Bombs away—or whatever.

  When Jesus Christ was nailed to a cross, he said, “Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.” What kind of a man was that? Any real man, obeying the Code of Hammurabi, would have said, “Kill them, Dad, and all their friends and relatives, and make their deaths slow and painful.”

  His greatest legacy to us, in my humble opinion, consists of only twelve words. They are the antidote to the poison of the Code of Hammurabi, a formula almost as compact as Albert Einstein’s “E = mc2.”

  Jesus of Nazareth told us to say these twelve words when we prayed: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

  Bye-bye, Code of Hammurabi.

  And for those words alone, he deserves to be called “the Prince of Peace.”

  Every act of war, every act of violence, even by a paranoid schizophrenic, celebrates Hammurabi and shows contempt for Jesus Christ.

  Is anybody here a Presbyterian?

  I want to warn you: Many people have been burned alive in public for believing what you believe. So watch your backs after you get out of here.

  Some of you may know that I am a Humanist, or Freethinker, as were my parents and grandparents and great grandparents—and so not a Christian. By being a Humanist, I am honoring my mother and father, which the Bible tells us is a good thing to do.

  But I say with all my American ancestors, “If what Jesus said was good, and so much of it was absolutely beautiful, what does it matter if he was God or not?”

  If Christ hadn’t delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn’t want to be a human being.

  I would just as soon be a rattlesnake.

  Revenge provokes revenge which provokes revenge which provokes revenge—forming an unbroken chain of death and destruction linking nations of today to barbarous tribes of thousands and thousands of years ago.

  We may never dissuade leaders of our nation or any other nation from responding vengefully, violently, to every insult or injury. In this, the Age of Television, they will continue to find irresistible the temptation to become entertainers, to compete with movies by blowing up bridges and police stations and factories and so on.

  Fires, explosions. Come look. Oh my gosh—hey wow.

  To quote the late Irving Berlin: “There’s no business like show business.”

  But in our personal lives, our inner lives, at least, we can learn to live without the sick excitement, without the kick of having scores to settle with this particular person, or that bunch of people, or that particular institution or race or nation.

  And we can then reasonably ask forgiveness for our trespasses, since we forgive those who trespass against us. And we can teach our children and then our grandchildren to do the same—so that they, too, can never be a threat to anyone.

  OK?

  Amen.

  Not that there hasn’t been a lot of good news, along with the bad, long before you got here. I am talking about the birth of works of art. Music, paintings. Statues, buildings, poems, stories, plays, and essays, and movies (you bet), and humane ideas—which make us feel honored to be members of the human race.

  What can you yourselves contribute? You’ve come this far anyway, and it wasn’t easy. And I now recite a famous line by the poet Robert Browning, with one small change. I have replaced his word “man,” which in his time was taken to mean “human being,” with the word “woman.”

  May I say, too, that his wife Elizabeth Barrett was as great a poet as he was: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways…” and so on.

  While I’m at it, get a load of this: The atomic bomb which we dropped on the people of Hiroshima was first envisioned by a woman, not a man. She was, of course, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. She didn’t call it an “atomic bomb.” She called it “the monster of Frankenstein.”

  But back to Robert Browning, and what he said about anyone who hopes to make the world better. Again: I’ve changed his word “man” to “woman” for this occasion:

  “A woman’s reach should exceed her grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”

  And of course the original: “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”

  Sigmund Freud said he didn’t know what women wanted. I am so smart I not only know what is wrong with the world, the Code of Hammurabi, but I know what women want. Women want a whole lot
of people to talk to. What do they want to talk about? They want to talk about everything.

  Men want a lot of pals—and they don’t want people to get mad at them.

  Some of you may become psychologists or ministers. In either case, you are going to have to deal with men, women, and children whose lives are being damaged by our country’s astronomical divorce rate. You should know that when a husband and wife fight, it may seem to be about money or sex or power.

  But what they’re really yelling at each other about is loneliness. What they’re really saying is, “You’re not enough people.”

  Back when most human beings lived in extended families and lived in the same part of the world for the whole of their lives, a marriage was really something to celebrate. Wedding guests laugh instead of cry. The groom was going to get a lot of new pals, and the bride was going to get a whole new bunch of people to talk to about everything.

  Nowadays, most of us when we marry get just one person—and, oh sure, maybe a few scruffy in-laws, ready to kill each other, and living hundreds of miles away, if you’re lucky—in someplace like Vancouver, British Columbia, or Hollywood, Florida.

  So again: If any of you educated people find yourselves in a therapeutic situation vis-à-vis a marriage on the rocks, please realize that the real problem may not be money or sex or power or how to raise a kid. The real trouble with the wife, as far is the husband is concerned, may be that she isn’t enough people. The real trouble with the husband, as far as the wife is concerned, may be that he isn’t enough people.