Cat's Cradle is one of my favorite books, but to be honest, I've never found it that funny - at least not in the sense that it makes me laugh much. What do you find so funny about it?
Everything about it is funny. Humans are absurd, and Cat’s Cradle revels in the absurdity. It’s funny in the same way atom bombs are funny, that our species would hate itself so much as to make a weapon that could destroy us all, and like, we ignore it almost all of the time? Bokonon and the dictator becoming their roles is absurd, but aren’t people this absurd?
Also, there are a lot of chapters. Every single chapter break is there to let a punchline sink in. It’s a literary pause for laughter.
Sometimes it’s a whole scene, but sometimes the only reason for a new chapter is comic timing. Or to shove more jokes in the chapter titles, of course. So I wouldn’t say they were discrete, as a break could come in the middle of a scene.
Seeing Vonnegut use chapter breaks for all sorts of purposes — dramatic, comic timing, scene breaks, suspense, etc — really encouraged me to use shorter chapters in some of my own writing, along with some of the techniques. Just like metadata is data, chapter breaks, line breaks, and white space are text. Of course the more you use it for tricks, the more you see the fourth wall, which might not match your tone — like all techniques there’s always a trade-off. More tonally serious works that use short chapters tend to avoid chapter titles, for instance.
Also, there are a lot of chapters. Every single chapter break is there to let a punchline sink in. It’s a literary pause for laughter.