War & Peace Quote by Spike Milligan

A war story collapses into a dad joke, and that’s exactly the point. Spike Milligan takes the solemn, chest-thumping question "How long were you in the army?" and answers it as if it were about height: "Five foot eleven". The gag works because it refuses the expected currency of military memory: years served, battles fought, medals earned. Instead, it offers a measurement that’s literally beside the point, turning a narrative of duration into a snapshot of the body.

Milligan’s intent is not just to be funny; it’s to puncture the cultural ritual of asking veterans to perform their past on demand. The question invites a tidy biography, a clean timeline that reassures the listener that war can be packaged and politely consumed. Milligan’s reply yanks the conversation out of that comfort zone. By misunderstanding the question on purpose, he implies the premise is flawed: the experience isn’t best captured by time served, and maybe it shouldn’t be mined for conversational gravitas at all.

There’s subtext, too, about what the army does to a person. Height is what remains when the story is stripped away; it’s the irreducible fact of the physical self. Coming from Milligan, who served in WWII and later wrote candidly about trauma and breakdown, the joke reads like a defensive maneuver: humor as misdirection, wit as a way to control the terms of disclosure. It’s classic Milligan - surreal, sideways, and faintly irritated - a one-liner that doubles as a critique of how we demand legible, heroic narratives from people who lived through chaos.