In Catch 22, Doc Daneeka recalls this episode from his days as a general practitioner before being drafted [I’ve cut some bits because they won’t make sense out of context and aren’t relevant]:
The anecdote tells like a joke without a punchline. Why did the husband punch him?
I don’t get it. He demonstrates what to do. The newlyweds appear to understand. The husband is clearly not offended by the suggestion because he seems to understand how intercourse could be something you’d “get a kick out of” and they go off eager to try.
OK, at the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, Heller is something of a kidder and he has a bit of a warped sense of humour. So maybe the whole anecdote just doesn’t make sense. Maybe it’s like “why is a raven like a writing desk?”, Lewis Carroll’s famous riddle-designed-without-an-answer.
Maybe he was secretly pissed that the doc was “talking dirty” in front of his wife, but didn’t want to lose his cool in front of her so he waited till he could get the doc alone to slug him.
Maybe we’re not supposed to understand it. Like that thing with the prostitute’s sister jumping up and down and hitting that guy over the head with her shoe. I’m more interested in the reason for that, actually. I’m still mad at Yossarian for turning down his chance to find out.
There was a joke kind of like this in El Milagro de P. Tinto. 6-year-old P. Tinto and his girfriend overhear two men talking. One has a car filled with kids, and the other asks how he got so many children. The man with the kids says “well, you know, me and the wife, morning, noon and night…” and then he stretches his suspenders in and out to imitate the sound of bedsprings squeaking.
As adults, P. Tinto and his girlfriend are now married and trying to have kids. VO: “We did it all the time” sound FX: Squeak, squeak, squeak “morning” squeak, squeak “noon” squeak, squeak “and night” squeak, squeak “but no children.” Each shot is of a closed door, with the sounds coming from behind.
Finally they show P. Tinto and his wife in the bedroom. They’re both sitting on the edge of the bed, fully clothed, and he’s dutifully stretching his suspenders in and out, wondering what they’re doing wrong.
The husband was doing something other than intercourse with his wife, though he was boasting about “doing it” to Daneeka. (Daneeka was suggesting, btw, that the “kick” could be gotten out of manipulating the model genitalia, not the actual intercourse that was being simulated.) But when the virginal couple got home after the demonstration and tried having actual intercourse, to our surprise, the husband found it (for some unexplained reason, and very much to our surprise) to be unpleasurable, or at least less pleasurable than what he had been doing when he was doing ‘it’ before.
Heller’s joke is that we were expecting actual intercourse to be an improvement and we’re meant to be baffled by someone responding to it with anger at the person who taught him how to fuck (part of the joke is the concept that someone couldn’t figure it out for himself, of course).
Not an answer to the OP but man do I love Catch 22. It is the only book I have read at least six times. I don’t know what it is but I find the world of Catch 22 so engrossing in its strangeness.
My Favorite moments
The whole bit with him in the hospital impersonating the dead man for his family
The Old Italian man explaining why it is better to live on one’s knees than to die on one’s feet. In a strange way he makes sense.
The gas stove and the therory that prepetual boredom lengthen’s one’s life.
I’m surprised no one’s got it: it’s obvious that the point was that the man preferred anal sex, and now his wife, knowing how it was supposed to work, was refusing.
I mean, the husband said he was “puttin’ it to her” every night, yet he was not putting it into the vagina. Where could he have been “putting it”?
(Yes, it could have been oral sex, too.)
As for their reaction when they saw the models, the wife genuinely did not know and was pleased to learn, while the husband just pretended.
This is it – the newlyweds are so dumb, not only do they not know how to fuck, but they can’t even believe it when it’s expained to them. It also works on a commentary on how absurd the sexual impulse is – or if not a commentary, at least an exasperated sigh – because honestly, the mechanics of sex are so monumentally silly that someone who didn’t grow up understanding it would never get why we spend so much effort chasing tail.
It’s also somewhat possible that the guy is punching Daneeka because, using Doc’s method, he has punctured his wife’s hymen, and he’s upset because he thinks Daneeka tricked him in to injuring her. But I don’t think so – if that’s what Heller meant, he would have said it.
–Cliffy
P.S. Mostly, I’m just hoping that someone double posts so that I can say “I see everything twice!”
Doc maybe explaining how some people prefer to be wrong rather than to be corrected. I guess doing it right is harder than doing wrong but he was happy with wrong.
That was Orr. She was smacking him over the head because he paid her to do it. He was trying to get some kind of medical discharge or something, I guess. He’s the one who kept crashing his plane and eventually ended up rowing to Sweden.
Re: the OP, I always thought kind of the same thing as irishgirl; that they went home, gave it a try, and decided there wasn’t any way in hell this could be correct. The mechanics of sex are pretty ludicrous, if you stop and think about it.
The Husband punched Doc Daneeka because he found out about who saint Antony was. And realized Doc Daneeka was making a joke about saint Antony being terribly tempted by his wife’s breasts.
Doc Daneeka’s story is so great just because the punchline is so well delivered seeming unintentional.
Some soldier even asks about saint antony afterwards.
I realize this is a zombie…but I never thought this was some obscure non sequitur. I thought the newlyweds tried what he recommended, and like first times often are, it was a bit of a train wreck. Maybe it was painful for her, he couldn’t perform (or performed too quickly). Whatever. But it’s a disaster, and this after Doc explained a practice that was so foreign to them, he may as well have told them that they needed to stand on their heads and whistle Dixie.
So the guy went back to Daneeka and punched him in the nose for tricking them with such a cruel practical joke. I didn’t think there was any other interpretation.
Yeah, I always thought this. They were both incredibly naive, had been doing some sort of dry humping that worked for him and was at least pleasant for her, and their first crack at PIV was a disaster.
I know this thread’s been dead for a while but I’m so frustrated trying to find some answers elsewhere on the internet.
I just finished that chapter. My interpretation was that Doc Daneeka had sex (or messed around) with the wife, and the husband came back a few days later to beat him up after finding out.
Throughout telling the story he keeps making comments about the wife: “She was lovely.”, “You should have seen her. She was so sweet and young and pretty.”, “I don’t think I’ll ever stop loving that girl. She was built like a dream”.
Then he says he goes back into the other room with the husband alone while she was pulling her undies back on.
… Maybe I’m just reading too far into it and I’m already too jaded by the dark humor of the book, lol.
All these years and no one understood what this was about? It’s not a joke. The guy punched him in the nose for making him look like an idiot to his wife.