Major Major Major Major

Major Major Major Major is a fictional character in Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22, whose name and rank is the title of chapter 9.Philip D. Beidler comments that "one of the novel's great absurd jokes is the character's bewildering resemblance to Henry Fonda".

The other joke about the character is his name. The novel relates that Maj. Major was named "Major Major Major" by his father, as a joke – passing up such lesser possibilities such as ""Drum Major, Minor Major, Sergeant Major, or C Sharp Major". The addition of the rank of Major was the result of "an IBM machine with a sense of humor almost as keen as his father's". Heller echoes the eponymous character in Edwin Arlington Robinson's poem "Miniver Cheevy" in his initial description of Maj. Major as "born too late and too mediocre". The character is further described as having "three strikes against him from the beginning – his mother, his father, and Henry Fonda, to whom he bore a sickly resemblance almost from the moment of his birth. Long before he even suspected who Henry Fonda was, he found himself the subject of unflattering comparisons everywhere he went. Total strangers saw fit to deprecate him, with the result that he was stricken early with a guilty fear of people and an obsequious impulse to apologize to society for the fact that he was not Henry Fonda." After his promotion to squadron commander by Colonel Cathcart, "[p]eople who had hardly noticed his resemblance to Henry Fonda before now never ceased discussing it, and there were even those who hinted sinisterly that Major Major had been elevated to squadron commander because he resembled Henry Fonda. Captain Black, who had aspired to the position himself, maintained that Major Major really was Henry Fonda but was too chickenshit to admit it."

Maj. Major was portrayed by Bob Newhart in Mike Nichols' 1970 film adaptation of the novel. Beidler asks, rhetorically, what to make of this, given that Newhart's lack of any resemblance to Fonda eliminates the entire joke. He provides one answer, namely that the joke was simply discarded because Henry Fonda himself no longer physically resembled the Henry Fonda of the 1955 film Mister Roberts, let alone the Fonda of World War Two, whose wartime career had in part resembled some aspects of the fictional Maj. Major, in that Fonda, after transferring to service HQ in New York City, was abruptly promoted to Lieutenant Junior Grade in a style similar to that of Maj. Major's promotion. Working from the basis of a resemblance to Henry Fonda, and from the thesis that people in the novel were, contrary to Heller's claims, heavily inspired by people and events from his own wartime experiences, Daniel Setzer deduces that the real-world inspiration for the character of Maj. Major was Randall C. Casada, who was Heller's squadron commander when he was stationed on Corsica.

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