I know, I know, what's so funny about a war covering the planet that left millions dead and many more millions living among ruins? You'd be surprised. It's times like these in which our ability to laugh enables us to survive with our optimism intact and assumption that life is worth living no matter the circumstance.

Applause and laughter were never so loud, or so easy to get, as when you were playing before GI audiences. … ‘It didn’t make any difference what you said,’ Jinx (Falkenburg) said. … That’s how appreciative the GI audiences were – and it was also how anxious all of us were to laugh.       ... Even my little dog, Tyrone, discovered how to get an easy laugh during the war. … [One night] Tyrone got tired of waiting [offstage], or of our act, and walked onto the stage. After we finished our number and before we went into our next one, the three of us just stood there looking at him – and he sat there, head cocked and tail wagging, looking at us.       Finally, Patty put her hands on her hips and said to Tyrone for the first time in his life, ‘Now what would you do if Der Fuehrer walked in here right now?’       That little thing got right up from where he was sitting in the middle of the stage, walked to the front, straight to the floor microphone, lifted his leg, and wet the base of the mike. The applause was deafening. From Maxene Andrews and Bill Gilbert, "Over Here, Over There: The Andrews Sisters and the USO Stars in World War II"

It is that feeling that Kilroy Was Here: The Best American Humor from World War II captures in the minds and hearts of American soldiers charged with the task of saving civilization. Although, war apparently isn't all that funny, since the book is a quick 185 pages.

Osgood even helps us out with a glossary that is needed to understand much of what is written. As Kingman Brewster, former U.S. Ambassador to Britain notes, "Incomprehensible jargon is the hallmark of a profession." Thus it helps to have nine pages to remind us that the frequent use of "goldbrickers" denotes soldiers who get by without doing their share of work (which actually seemed to be a fond term to some).

Kilroy, edited by Charles Osgood (bow-tied Emmy-winning host of CBS' "Sunday Morning"), is made up from letters, excerpts of prose, poetry, cartoons and funny anecdotes of Americans trying to make light of their situation, from boot camp to front lines, and the simultaneous hard work and boredom of waiting for a battle they don’t want. Comedy was, in a way, GI (Government Issue), along with everything else the soldier possessed on the front. Much of the humor revolves around daily hassles, structure and annoyances of the Armed Forces, especially dealing with superior officers.

For those unfamiliar, Kilroy was an actual person: James J. Kilroy, a welding inspector at the Bethlehem Steel shipyard in Quincy, Mass. He would write "Kilroy Was Here" on items he inspected before being shipped overseas, and the bald-headed cartoon character with the big nose peering over a wall became a part of the joke. Soldiers the world over were in on the phrase, using it to denote the reach of Americans from "...the Statue of Liberty...on a girder of the George Washington Bridge. ... the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, on the Marco Polo Bridge in China."

Osgood relates: "One story has it that in Potsdam, Germany, in July 1945, during a meeting of the “Big Three,” the Soviet Union’s Josef Stalin came running out of a marble bathroom off limits to all but him, British Prime Minister Clement Atlee, and President Harry S. Truman, the Big Three themselves. Stalin was clearly agitated and conferring urgently with his aides. A translator heard him ask 'Who is Kilroy?'"

During the time of war, such an inside joke connects Americans at all corners of the planet, things that Bob Hope reminisces in I Was There:
      "Laughs came from simple harebrained foolishness, reluctant heroism, and even blatant cowardice set against a climate of high seriousness. We made a point of researching the military lingo and commanding officers’ names. The stern military regime evoked laughs, so did the soldiers’ resentments, hardships, and habits. They laughed at me but, most of all, they laughed at themselves."

The most horrible of occurrences also gave way to something to smile about, as Ralph G. Martin told from The GI War, 1941-1945, “[During] the usual [grueling] banzai charges on Guam, some Marines even kidded about them, passing out this mimeographed announcement”: