Hungry Joe

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Hungry Joe is a fictional character in Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22. He is noted in the novel for constantly trying to photograph women nude, claiming to be a photographer for Life Magazine (which, ironically, he actually was before the war). His pictures hardly ever come out as he almost always forgets to take the lens cap off or put film in the camera.

Like most men in the novel, he tries to have sex with these women as well but always fails — as he can't decide to sleep with them or photograph them. Hungry Joe is one of the few characters in the novel who successfully completes the required numbers of missions but, like the rest of them, is not allowed to go home. He enjoys doing missions since that is the only time he is ever able to sleep without having nightmares. When he does have nightmares, which is almost every night, he screams in his sleep incessantly. Huple's cat repeatedly sleeps on his face, suffocating him until the last moment when he wakes up. Hungry Joe eventually suffocates to death when he fails to wake up.

In the movie adaptation of Catch-22 (Directed by Mike Nichols) Hungry Joe is instead killed by McWatt by accident when he tries (as he often does) to scare Yossarian by flying his plane at low altitudes overhead of him. McWatt, in scaring Yossarian, flies into Hungry Joe, chopping him in half with the plane's propellor blades. In the novel, it was Kid Sampson that suffered this fate instead of Hungry Joe.Template:Fict-char-stub