“People don’t use that word anymore,” Penelope tells him, but her mild rebuke merely provokes him.

“I don’t have a molecule of prejudice,” he rails. “I’ve been in battle with every kind of man there is. I’ve been in bed with every kind of woman there is — from a Laplander to a Tierra del Fuegian. If I’d ever been to the South Pole, there’d be a hell of a lot of penguins who looked like me. Cook!”

It’s the penguins that do the trick, really, sending Harold’s macho bluster so far over the top that — as ugly as he’s being, as despicable as he is — the audience laughs. Jeff Wise, who directed the play, says he is astounded every time.

But Vonnegut, of course, meant to get that response. A cultural critic at a combustible moment, he used dark and zany comedy to skewer and ridicule. When he ventured from novels into playwriting with “Wanda June,” which opened on Broadway in the wake of his 1969 antiwar masterpiece, “Slaughterhouse-Five,” he was sending up a particular breed of man: a swaggering, bellicose bully who subscribes to a cult of manliness that valorizes combat, loves nothing more than slaughter, and views the purpose of women as sex, reproduction and servitude.

The Wheelhouse revival, running through Nov. 29 at the Duke on 42nd Street, initially opened last spring at the Gene Frankel Theater downtown. There it proved a stealth hit, partly for its spirited lampooning of toxic masculinity and fetishization of gun violence.

“This is a simple-minded play about men who enjoy killing — and those who don’t,” Penelope, played by Kate MacCluggage, tells the audience right at the top.