"How long was I in the army? Five foot eleven"

Spike Milligan’s line, “How long was I in the army? Five foot eleven,” brilliantly fuses absurd humor with linguistic playfulness, exemplifying his mastery of comic surrealism. The question posed typically seeks a duration, how much time one spent in military service. Instead of responding with a conventional temporal answer (“two years” or “from 1939 to 1945”), the speaker answers with their height. The result is a cheerful non sequitur, a mismatch between expectation and response, violating the usual logic of conversation.

This deliberate misdirection relies on the multiple interpretations of “how long.” When assessing “how long,” most would default to thinking of time rather than physical extension. Milligan hijacks this ambiguity, answering as if he were being asked for a measurement of length, not time. Five foot eleven is an entirely plausible answer to the question, “How tall are you?” The play on words exposes the frequent double meanings embedded in ordinary language and ridicules the seriousness with which society sometimes approaches mundane queries, especially those about military service, a topic often surrounded by solemnity.

At a deeper level, the joke could be seen as a subtle resistance to traditional narratives of war heroism and chronology. By refusing to answer with conformist data about his military service, Milligan sidesteps the demand for measured, linear storytelling and instead offers a jolt of nonsense. This deflation of expectation not only amuses but also critiques the way personal history gets formatted through bureaucratic or societal questioning.

Embedded in Milligan’s humor is a sense of play and absurdity central to his worldview. His comedic approach transforms the world’s logic into something pliable, unpredictable, and, ultimately, more human. He reminds us that humor lies in the cracks of language, where even the most ordinary question can open up to a burst of unexpected meaning.