"Statistics have shown that mortality increases perceptibly in the military during wartime"
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Deadpan is doing the heavy lifting here: Allais takes a statement so blindingly obvious it barely qualifies as information and dresses it up in the starched authority of "statistics". The gag lands because it mimics the self-important tone of institutional expertise while delivering a conclusion any child could reach without a spreadsheet. It is satire aimed less at war itself (though it certainly grazes it) than at the language cultures use to launder brutality into something discussable.
The subtext is a critique of how bureaucracies and newspapers convert human bodies into "perceptible increases" and "mortality rates", as if the horror of wartime can be domesticated by metrics. By invoking statistics, Allais skewers the modern fetish for quantified truth: the idea that a number confers seriousness, neutrality, even inevitability. In his hands, quantification becomes a comedic weapon, exposing how easily data-speak can anesthetize moral attention.
Context matters. Writing in late 19th-century France, Allais lived in the shadow of the Franco-Prussian War and amid a booming press culture that trafficked in official reports, patriotic rhetoric, and the rising prestige of scientific language. His line reads like an early warning about technocratic euphemism: when institutions want to describe catastrophe without sounding accountable, they reach for the passive voice and the comforting glow of "studies show". The joke is that the study is redundant. The sting is that the redundancy is the point.
The subtext is a critique of how bureaucracies and newspapers convert human bodies into "perceptible increases" and "mortality rates", as if the horror of wartime can be domesticated by metrics. By invoking statistics, Allais skewers the modern fetish for quantified truth: the idea that a number confers seriousness, neutrality, even inevitability. In his hands, quantification becomes a comedic weapon, exposing how easily data-speak can anesthetize moral attention.
Context matters. Writing in late 19th-century France, Allais lived in the shadow of the Franco-Prussian War and amid a booming press culture that trafficked in official reports, patriotic rhetoric, and the rising prestige of scientific language. His line reads like an early warning about technocratic euphemism: when institutions want to describe catastrophe without sounding accountable, they reach for the passive voice and the comforting glow of "studies show". The joke is that the study is redundant. The sting is that the redundancy is the point.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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