 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.
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? Squareheads going around either unconscious or with eyes looking dead from the millennium in the office waiting to retire into limbo. 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. 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. 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. If he didn't watch himself he'd begin feeling like a pea among bowling balls. You big overblown son, he thought, I'll show you but good who is a punk. They kept a guy on the fire until desire leaped in him, ran and billowed and roared until his brain was filled with it. "Your beast is primed and waiting at the Four Aces Club on the West Side. A copcar stopped Wayne as he started over the bridge, out of bright respectable neon into the murky westside slum over the river. Wayne waved the pass card, signed by Captain Jack, under the cop's quivering nose. The Olds roared over the bridge as the night's rain blew away. He turned off into a rat's warren of the inferiors. Wayne's fearful exhilaration increased as he cruised with bated breath through the dark mazes of streets and rickety tenements crawling with the shadows of mysterious promise.
 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.