That's more like ++C. You need "ADD 1 TO COBOL RETURNING COBOL"... which elicits another C++ joke: that it would have been nice to get to use the better version, but someone used the wrong operator, so what we have is certainly complicated but probably just more of the same.
My favorite, best told while among C programmers involuntarily debugging some gnarly C++ is, "Man, I swear, the dude that invented C++ doesn't know the difference between increment and excrement."