 What is ironic about Wayne’s laughing in the face of violence?—First when he leaves his parents house and again when he chases Red.
Wayne, unseen, sneered down from the head of the stairs. They were squareheads one and all, marking moron time in a gray dream. School over, waiting for the draft and all. You got to remember about all these dangerous repressed impulses piling up with nowhere to go, like they say. What do we know about adolescent trauma and like that? Blab-blab about the same old bones, and end up chewing them in the same old ways. Squareheads going around either unconscious or with eyes looking dead from the millennium in the office waiting to retire into limbo. One thing—when he was jockeying a rocket to Mars or maybe firing the pants off Asiatic reds in some steamy gone jungle paradise, he'd forget his punkie origins in teeveeland. So he'd waited in his room, and it wasn't easy sweating it out alone waiting for the breakout call from HQ. "Hell," Wayne said, grinning straight into the old man. He was still laughing as he whoomed the Olds between the pale dead glow of houses and roared up the ramp onto the Freeway. Ahead was the promising glitter of adventure-calling neon, and he looked up at the high skies of night and his eyes sailed the glaring wonders of escape. He strode under a sign reading Public Youth Center No. 947 and walked casually to the reception desk, where a thin man with sergeant's stripes and a pansy haircut looked out of a pile of paperwork. "Thanks, sarge dear," Wayne said and took the elevator up to the Armory. Finally he said, "So make up your mind, bud. It's a big city and you're starting late. You can get a cat, not a mouse, and some babes are clever hellcats in a dark alley." "A corporal with no hair and still a counterboy. The corporal waddled back with the revolver and the switchblade disguised in a leather comb case. He checked them on a receipt ledger, while Wayne examined the weapons, broke open the revolver, twirled the cylinder and pushed cartridges into the waiting chamber. The big stone-walled office, alive with stuffed lion and tiger and gunracks, seemed to grow smaller. It had a head shaped like a grinning bear. If he didn't watch himself he'd begin feeling like a pea among bowling balls. "Wayne Seton," said Captain Jack as if he were discussing something in a bug collection. His legs seemed sheathed in lead as he bit inwardly at shrinking fear the way a dog snaps at a wound.
 His real feelings about violence are the opposite of what his maniacal laugh suggests. It turns out he isn’t a heartless killer.
 His laughs suggest he enjoys violence, but really they are a cry for help.  His real feelings about violence are the opposite of anything comical. He takes his job with the state very seriously.  His real feelings about violence are the opposite of what his maniacal laugh suggests. It turns out he isn’t a heartless killer.  Wayne’s laughing suggests that he is always in control, when in reality it is actually his mother and Red who know the truth about the world.