Name: Jeselnik Book Club: Kurt Vonnegut's "Mother Night" Book Review + Q&A
Uploaded: 2026-03-31T15:11:25.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Jeselnik Book Club: Kurt Vonnegut's "Mother Night" Book Review + Q&A' from Anthony Jeselnik on Comedy Buff. Published 2026-03-31. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Jeselnik Book Club: Kurt Vonnegut's "Mother Night" Book Review + Q&A' from Anthony Jeselnik on Comedy Buff. Published 2026-03-31. Transcript available.

Jeselnik Book Club: Kurt Vonnegut's "Mother Night" Book Review + Q&A

Hey everybody, Anthony Jeselnik here with my March Jeselnik Book Club Recap for
Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut.
This was an easy read. Vonnegut is an easy author to read.
It's a difficult book to talk about because it happens in like a non-linear way.
And there's so many ideas involved that I like went through study guides, I
took a bunch of notes.
And I'm just like, screw it, let's make this video fun.
I'm just going to talk about this book.
If I mix up anything, if I mess up anything you want to talk about in the
comments, go ahead, have fun.
That's what Jeselnik Book Club is all about.
This book was written in 1961. I believe it takes place in 1961.
It's about a man named Howard W. Campbell Jr., who worked as a Nazi propagandist
during the war and is now hiding out in New York.
Actually, the book starts with him writing his memoir in a prison cell in
Israel.
Again, this is 1961. It's not taking place during the Nuremberg Trials. Those
are over.
People moved on from World War II. They're happy to do so.
It's right around the time that Adolf Eichmann is captured in South America and
brought to trial.
And a lot of people at the time, I didn't know this, were kind of like, we don't
even need a trial.
Just kill the guy. We're kind of over World War II.
He deserves to be punished, but we don't need these trials anymore.
Kurt Vonnegut was famously in World War II, famously survived the Dresden
bombing.
He goes on to describe that more in Slaughterhouse-Five, a novel he wrote later,
brought him to greater fame, brought more attention to Mother Night.
Howard Campbell Jr. is in this jail cell writing his memoir. He hasn't written
in a long time.
He was a famous playwright in Germany.
He was born in America, in New York, and at 11, his parents moved to Germany.
They live in Germany most of their lives.
As the war starts to come closer in the 30s, his parents leave and go back to
America.
Howard stays.
He's now like a successful playwright with a beautiful actress wife.
They work together. He's in love with her.
He describes himself as part of a nation of two.
He doesn't consider himself a Nazi or an American.
He's part of this nation of two.
As the war gets closer, he is recruited by a man named Major Frank Wirtanen.
I'm going to go ahead and say that.
He's recruited by this guy who says, hey, we want you to become a spy for the
Americans.
He says, you're a romantic. I've read your work. I've seen your plays.
You want to help the good guys.
You want to help the Americans.
So he decides to do this by becoming a Nazi propaganda minister.
He gets on the radio every night and he gives these anti-Semitic speeches to
the Nazis.
Two people living in Nazi Germany.
And his code is kind of coughs, pauses, mispronunciations, little mess-ups that
the Nazis would never notice.
But people in America who know that he's a spy, and again, there are only three
of them, you find out later, know he's passing code.
Howard does not know what the code is.
He doesn't know what information.
He doesn't know where he's getting it.
He finds out later that it's seven different women who have been Nazi spies who
have been feeding this information.
I think that is important.
I think the fact that he is going off and giving these speeches, he knows what
the speeches say.
He's writing them.
They're anti-Semitic.
But he's not exactly sure how he's helping the Americans.
He just knows that he thinks that he is.
He does this for most of the war.
During the war, his wife goes off to entertain Nazi troops and is killed in a
bombing.
The wife is a total Nazi, such a Nazi that Howard never tells his wife that he
is a spy.
He says he's a nation of two, but he never tells his wife the truth.
She thinks they're just enjoying being Nazis, and they are.
They are celebrities in Nazi Germany.
He gets to meet all the big-time guys.
I don't know if he meets Hitler.
Hitler definitely knows who he is and is a fan, but he gets to meet with
everybody else.
He gets the benefits of Nazi Germany.
And I think even later on, he says if the Nazis had won the war, he would have
just stayed there and just been a Nazi.
After Howard's wife is killed, he's pretty bummed about it.
He is trying to find out if she's still alive.
She goes missing.
He's paying money to try to see if she's still alive.
As the war starts to come to a close and it becomes obvious that the Germans
are going to lose the war,
Howard pays one last visit to his in-law's house.
We're about to flee Germany.
There's a daughter named Desi.
I think his wife's name is Helga.
Daughter's name is Desi.
He goes and visits the house, and the father-in-law is out on the front steps.
And the father-in-law says to him, you know, I never really liked you.
I assumed you were probably an American spy this whole time.
But after all you've done during the war, all this propaganda,
I realized that even if you were a Nazi spy, even if you were a spy for the
Americans, you did more to help the Nazi cause than you ever could have helped
the Americans.
The father-in-law himself says, I would have felt like we were doing a horrible
thing here in Nazi Germany.
And the father-in-law was a total piece of shit.
The father-in-law, I think, was a judge.
A lot of people died.
A lot of Jewish people and a lot of non-Nazis died because of this father-in-law.
And the father-in-law says to him, like, I would have felt bad for what I did,
but because of your, like, rah-rah speeches every night, I felt like I was
doing a good thing.
And the father-in-law is bummed out.
He's shell-shocked.
He's just like, whatever.
Howard's like, how can I help you?
You know, I love your daughter.
How can I help you?
And he's like, go shoot our dog.
Our dog is too old to make the journey.
I'm staying here, but my daughter and wife are leaving.
The dog is too old.
Howard goes up, goes to collect the dog from the daughter, Desi.
Desi is, again, a nihilist at this point.
She's been through World War II.
Again, everyone in this book is fucking nuts because of World War II.
Desi is, like, doesn't care.
She's like, I'm in love with you.
Go ahead, take my dog.
Go shoot my dog.
Thank you for shooting my dog.
But I love you as much as my sister ever loved you.
He takes the dog outside, shoots the dog.
Someone comes up and is like, hey, you should bury the dog or else someone's
going to eat it.
It's a weird thing to have in the book.
People were like, why does he have to shoot the dog in the book?
It makes him a bad guy.
Howard is not, like, a cool guy who is, like, who is a cool spy.
James Bond going through a mission.
He's a complete and total piece of shit who is surviving, living on the high
horse during World War II.
So he kills this dog.
Again, probably putting it out of its misery, but you don't shoot dogs.
You don't shoot dogs in Jessalyn book club.
Kills this dog, gets out of there, can never find his wife.
Gets caught after World War II by a guy named Bernard B. O'Hare, who's just
like a gung-ho American troop, excited the war is over.
Finds this guy, finds Howard Campbell, knows who he is.
Grabs him, says, I've just been, like, to a concentration camp, you son of a
bitch.
Takes him there, shows him all these officers being hanged, who have been hanged.
He thinks he's next.
So there's a picture taken of the two of them, where, like, where Bernard is
just staring at Howard, and it almost wins a Pulitzer, they remark upon.
But, because Howard Campbell is a spy, or was a spy, and people say, like, oh,
was he an unreliable narrator?
Yes.
Even in the introduction of the book, Vonnegut, who says he's kind of editing
the book, is like, I wouldn't believe everything this guy says.
He was a dramatist.
He was a dramatist.
Dramatist?
Dramatist?
Playwright.
Because he was a playwright, we can't believe everything he says.
He's a writer.
But I believe that Major Frank Wirtanen, his fairy godmother, as he calls him
in the book, is real, only because he gets him out of Nazi Germany without
being hanged.
He gets him out of there.
He just slips through the court system.
They don't want to say he's a spy.
They don't want to give up any secrets.
They just get him to New York, where he lives in a Greenwich Village attic with
rats, living off of his parents' money.
He refuses any money for his spy efforts.
And even Major Frank Wirtanen says, all our spies refuse the money.
He says, people choose to become a spy so that they can go crazy in the way
that they've always wanted to go crazy.
Again, is he going crazy or is he just surviving?
He talks about schizophrenia a lot.
It's just kind of having two different selves, the spy self and the real self.
And he sits in this Greenwich Village attic, hoping for news of his wife,
living off the meager interest from his parents' money.
His parents died of a broken heart when it was reported what he was doing in
Nazi Germany.
And after a while, after like, you know, 15 years, and he's living in this
attic under his real name.
He doesn't try to hide at all.
If you go to the mailbox of his apartment, it's his real name, Howard W.
Campbell Jr.
And after a while, he starts to get lonely.
And he makes a chess set.
He carves a chess set and he finds a guy in the building named George Kraft.
It sounds like the guy from the Brady Bunch who the girl makes up to say she's
dating.
That's George something else.
George Kraft is his friend in the building.
They start talking about the war and playing chess.
He doesn't know George Kraft is a Russian spy.
The Russians hated the Nazis.
George Kraft kind of figures out who Campbell is or knows.
I mean, again, he's not hiding anything.
Sometimes people would be like, are you, you know, you have the same name as
the propagandist.
He doesn't care.
He's like so depressed and broken.
He's just kind of getting through life.
But Kraft, the Russian spy, leaks the information that this is who it is living
in America.
And he leaks it to these like white supremacists living in America.
A guy by the name of the Reverend Dr. Lionel Jason David Jones, DDSDD.
A total fucking loser, white supremacist.
Has some mom and dad's money.
Makes a newsletter, like an anti-Semitic newsletter.
And this is well after World War II.
Gets kicked out of dental school for like having guns.
Like, you know about this person right now.
Like, there are people like this today who are just like this guy.
Self-important people with money online saying anti-Semitic shit.
He's old now.
But he has kind of renewed his efforts to publish this newspaper.
He's excited when he finds out that Howard W. Campbell Jr. has been found.
And he shows up in New York.
All of a sudden, people know that Howard Campbell is alive and living in Greenwich
Village.
He starts getting hate mail.
I think someone comes and beats him up.
But all of a sudden, the Reverend Dr. Lionel Jason David shows up with an entourage
and a visitor.
He brings this young woman upstairs with him.
And he's like, hey, I loved your speeches.
I think you can help me.
I think with you joining the cause, we can do something in America and bring
Nazism back.
And you think, oh, that's fantastical.
It was not fantastical.
There were people in the 60s trying to bring back Nazism.
Vonnegut lived with many of them in Indianapolis and hated them.
Hated people like this.
He was drawing on his own life.
There are people today trying to bring Nazism back.
And they bring with them a guest.
It's a young woman.
A woman walks up the stairs.
And Howard Campbell's like, holy shit.
Who the fuck is that?
And she's like, it's Helga, your wife.
I have survived this bombing.
I am still alive.
Everything you've been hoping for is here.
It's been brought to you by these white supremacists.
He's so happy.
He's crying.
He's going crazy.
Takes the wife upstairs.
They're like too uncomfortable to make love.
But he's in love with his wife.
He has his wife back.
George Craft is like, oh my God, I'm so taken aback by this.
The Reverend Dr. Lionel Jason David Jones, DDSDD, is so heartened to see 