War & Peace Quote by John Candy

The joke lands because it treats one of the heaviest institutions in American life like a budget gym membership. "Join the army. It's free" is a deliberately absurd consumer framing: enlistment as a discount hack, not a moral decision, economic necessity, or patriotic calling. John Candy leans into that mismatch between stakes and motivation, then twists the knife with "while I'm here I'll lose a few pounds" - the punchline that turns the military into a wellness retreat and his own body into the real battlefield.

The intent is classic Candy: self-deprecation that never asks for pity, only permission to laugh at the indignities of being a big guy in a culture that treats weight as both personal failure and public entertainment. He doesn't deny the stereotype; he weaponizes it, steering the audience away from cruelty and toward complicity. If he's the one making the joke, the room can't pretend it's punching down. It's a protective maneuver disguised as chumminess.

Context matters, too. Candy's era was saturated with recruitment imagery that promised purpose, belonging, and a cleaned-up masculinity. This line undercuts all of it by implying the army's most compelling benefit is cost savings and calorie burn. It's not anti-military so much as anti-myth: a comic refusal to let grand narratives stand unmocked. The subtext: institutions sell heroism; regular people show up with messy, unheroic reasons - and comedy is where those truths get admitted.