"While McMurphy laughs. Rocking farther and farther backward against the cabin top, spreading his laugh out across the water—laughing at the girl, the guys, at George, at me sucking my bleeding thumb, at the captain back at the pier and the bicycle rider and the service-station guys and the five thousand houses and the Big Nurse and all of it. Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy" (Kesey 237).
This passage from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest reveals a type of verisimilitude that gives off a glint of reality. For those who are unsure, verisimilitude is a kind of hidden truth that one can link back to real life. One can relate to a statement with this type of verisimilitude in real life. The verisimilitude occurs within this passage within the last lines mostly. To summarize briefly, this takes place in the novel after McMurphy starts fighting back again against the Head Nurse and convinces her to let him take the other Acutes on a fishing trip. They're out fishing and start to catch a sort of huge fish, adding on to everything going on already. Within that, Kesey drops a bomb of wisdom on the reader in the last line, saying: "Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy." Readers can relate to this if they had once been at a point in life where they get hurt or things just go wrong, and they laugh at it just to keep from getting angry or negative. In a way, it's very true. Even musician Maynard James Keenan says (to tie back to this kind of verisimilitude): "Once you take yourself too seriously, your art will suffer."
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