On April 20, 2024, a Facebook profile named Classic Throwback posted a picture of novelist Kurt Vonnegut alongside a quote about buying an envelope. The story in the post was titled, "Kurt Vonnegut tells his wife he's going out to buy an envelope."
According to the post, Vonnegut once told a story about how he enjoyed the idea of going out and buying one envelope at a time, saying he believed humans are "dancing animals." As of this writing on April 25, the post had received more than 253,000 likes and 87,000 shares.
The truth was this was a genuine quote correctly attributed to Vonnegut.
The quote displayed in the Facebook post came from a PBS interview with journalist David Brancaccio. Our source for this information is a CBS News article published just after Vonnegut's death in 2007. The interview took place before the publishing of an Oct. 17, 2005, article from The Bellingham Herald that printed the same text shown in the Facebook post.
The CBS News article included the following transcription from the PBS interview:
DAVID BRANCACCIO: There's a little sweet moment, I've got to say, in a very intense book — your latest — in which you're heading out the door and your wife says what are you doing? I think you say — I'm getting — I'm going to buy an envelope.
KURT VONNEGUT: Yeah.
DAVID BRANCACCIO: What happens then?
KURT VONNEGUT: Oh, she says well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.
I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know…
And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.
Brancaccio's reference of Vonnegut's "latest" book was the 2005 release of "A Man Without a Country." The envelope story appears in the sixth chapter, titled, "I have been called a Luddite."
Snopes contacted Brancaccio by email to ask about obtaining a video clip of this portion of the interview, because it did not appear to be publicly available online. We also attempted to reach out to photographer and author Jill Krementz — Vonnegut's second wife, who was referenced in the envelope story — to ask about the matter. This article will be updated if we receive more details.
'We Are Here on Earth to Fart Around'
On Feb. 4, 2004, Vonnegut told a lengthy version of the envelope story to a crowd during a lecture at Case Western Reserve University. The story begins at the 20:34 mark in a YouTube video posted by the university:
During the lecture, Vonnegut made a joke about his distaste of the fall of typewriters and the rise of computers, including jabs at Apple and Microsoft:
I tell you, is I myself have had a terrible experience. There's no longer such a thing as a typewriter. No longer such, and that's as though they took away my violin, you know, and I had been a good violinist.
But I think back in the old days when I had a choice between a typewriter or computer. I have an Apple now, which I just use as a word processor. It tries to talk to me sometimes and I just tell it to go engage in airborne intercourse with the hole on a rolling donut.
Moments later, he made an apparent reference to former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, then began the story about the envelope:
And so, I take these messy pages down two flights of stairs to the ground floor, where my wife works. And I dance on the way down. This is very good exercise. And, you know, what, Microsoft, what's the name of the guy who runs it, the richest man in the world? Anyway, he doesn't seem to realize we're dancing animals.
Anyway, I dance down the front steps, and doing some pretty good stuff, may I say. And my wife hears me going past her workstation there, and she says, "Where are you going?" And her favorite reading when she was a child was "Nancy Drew, Girl Detective." And so I say, "I'm going to buy an envelope." And she said, "One envelope? Why don't you buy 100 envelopes and put them in a closet up where you work?" And I pretend I haven't heard her.
Vonnegut went on to tell a detailed version of his story to the audience, later ending it by referencing a line that also appears in his 2005 book: "And let me tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody ever tell you any different."