One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest; Humour As a Tool

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“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest : Humour as a tool of subversion” Submitted by : Tracy Jose “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Humour as a tool of subversion” “I think McMurphy knew better than we did that our tough looks were all show, because he still wasn’t able to get a real laugh out of anybody. Maybe he couldn’t understand why we weren’t able to laugh yet, but he knew you can’t really be strong until you see a funny side to things. In fact, he worked so hard at pointing out the funny side of things that I was wondering a little if maybe he was blind to the other side, if maybe he wasn’t able to see what it was that parched laughter deep inside your stomach” (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1962) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, set in the late 1950s, is seen as an important part of counter culture literature. Like the youngsters of the period who rebelled against conformity, the inmates of this mental institution at Oregon challenge Nurse Ratched who personifies the power and control exhibited by the government and businesses. The protagonist and narrator of the novel, Bromden, undergoes a metamorphosis, as it were, under McMurphy’s regime. As M. Gilbert Porter rightly points out, “Bromden is very sensitive to the sound and significance of laughter, for example, or to its absence. For twenty years he has been confined in a ward where “the air is pressed in by the walls, too tight for laughing”…”. Through the use of humour, we find Mack subverting and questioning the authority. The protagonist Bromden’s initial inability to laugh or to even talk comes from the machine-like existence he is forced to live under Ms.Ratched’s supervision. The inmates in the institution are divided into several categories. The Acutes are the ones who are “still sick enough to be fixed.” They move around a lot, spy on

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