Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Compendium of Curmudgeonly Humour

Kurt Vonnegut is a curmudgeon. Curmudgeons are often misunderstood and taken for irascible pedants. On the contrary, they are anything but pedantic. Curmudgeons are introverts who are simply tired of adapting themselves to the demands of an extrovert world. They want to be left alone. Which is why they occasionally write or say nasty things to annoy people. The hope is that other people will then have something to talk about with each other and give the curmudgeon some peace.

A curmudgeon like Vonnegut is the opposite of a totalitarian. A curmudgeon knows the world around him and its imperfections through direct experience. But he is wary of turning his opinions, of which he has many, into policies. This is just as well because his opinions are anything but consistent. He has learned over the years that consistency is indeed the sign of a trivial mind which would like to impose order on a universe that is inherently chaotic.

Curmudgeons are male by definition because they fear the power of women and have no defences against it. Female power arises from the inherent male incompetence in things like communication and relationship-building. Sisterhood is a mystery which manifests to him as a hive-mind and he dares not mess with it. The curmudgeon knows he is deficient and relies on women to suffer frustration and annoyance in his presence. He is aware of this sufferance and, as a mark of respect, neither contradicts nor criticises his female companions. They in turn accept the deal as the best they are likely to get and desist from all attempts to improve him.

A curmudgeon is not without charm in certain situations, primarily those in which he is forced to respond to the opinions - usually political, but sometimes anthropological - of others, particularly blowhards and dilettantes. In such circumstances his remarks are likely intended not to convince but to undermine. He perceives this as healthy cynicism. The charm emanates from the fact that he doesn’t mind what anyone else thinks of him. The combination of the unexpected and the absence of obvious banality helps.

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