But the novel's most immediately appealing quality is its humor: it's simply a very funny book. I remember reading aloud to friends Jack and Babette's precoital conversation about "entering," Heinrich's stubborn refusal to accept his senses' evidence of rain, and the uproarious one-upmanship of the American Environments department. Although DeLillo's earlier novels were also humorous, they carried a more sardonic, Swiftian edge that lacerated with a cooler precision. Many readers have found White Noise's humor more palatable because it is leavened by a warmth and compassion less obvious in DeLillo's earlier work.

Much of this warm comedy is derived from DeLillo's slightly skewed depiction of the postmodern family, where the once-solid core of mom, dad, and kids has given way to a loose aggregate of siblings, step-siblings, and ex-spouses rotating in various impermanent groupings. Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler Studies at the College-on-the-Hill in a town called Blacksmith, has four children: Mary Alice (age 19) and Steffie (9), from his first and second marriages to Dana Breed-love; Heinrich (14), from his marriage to Janet Savory (now known as Mother Devi); and Bee (12), from his marriage to Tweedy Browner. Only Heinrich and Steffie live with Jack. His wife Babette's three children are Denise (age 11), Eugene (8), and Wilder (about 2). As Thomas Ferraro points out, since Wilder is not Jack's child, this "family" can have been together no more than two years; moreover, not one child is living with a full sibling (Ferraro 1991, 17). This condition of permanent impermanence affects all of Blacksmith, a place of "tag sales and yard sales" where "failed possessions" testify to failed marriages (White Noise, 59). Things change so rapidly that even the family members seem unclear about the details. No wonder Jack sees the family as the "cradle of the world's misinformation" (81).