Name: Kenneth Ligda

Title: “Apropos of Saturation Bombing”: Humor in George Orwell’s Animal Farm

Abstract: This paper examines humor as a major component of George Orwell’s literary achievements. It gives an overview of Orwell’s many articles and reviews explicitly addressed to the problems and possibilities of comic writing. Orwell’s 1930s comic novels are referred to, as are his techniques in nonfiction, but the core of the paper is an analysis of Animal Farm in the context of Orwell’s other writings from the early 1940s. The basic purpose of the paper is to show how humor was used as a mediating force between the thought-resistant horrors of social reality and the supple liveliness of literary imagination. I believe this paper relates well to the conference topic of “Deception in Literature” for two reasons. First, the set-up of most humorous writing—indeed, most jokes—is patent fiction: the story is “just a joke.” Yet no comedy can be remotely successful without making some fairly overt jab at a reality. That this is disclaimed by the genre itself suggests jokes’ kinship with “realistic fiction” of any kind: they share a built-in tension between make-believe and truth-claims. (In this regard, it is interesting that the subtitle of Animal Farm, an exceptionally open allegory, is “A Fairy Story.”) Second, the inconsequential weight assigned to jokes in society and in reading practice allows them (as Freud pointed out) to smuggle in a great deal of registered but unprocessed meaning.