Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
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If you have read Slaughterhouse-Five, you already have a sense of what to expect from Breakfast of Champions. In this novel, Kurt Vonnegut dissects himself through some of his most beloved characters, Kilgore Trout — an aging science-fiction writer whose stories are often about a tragic failure of communication. One of the stories plot goes like this:
The Dancing Fool
A flying saucer creature named Zog arrived on Earth to explain how wars could be prevented and how cancer could be cured. He brought the information from Margo, a planet where the natives conversed by means of farts and tap dancing. Zog landed at night in Connecticut. He had no sooner touched down than he saw a house on fire. He rushed into the house, farting and tap dancing, warning the people about the terrible danger they were in. The head of the house brained Zog with a golfclub.
Read the book, watch the film, or do both, and join and discuss this surreal darkly comic work.