M*A*S*H was not the first film to satirize war --  the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup tackled the topic in 1933. And Robert Altman was not the first director to use layers of overlapping sound; Orson Welles, among others, had employed the device decades earlier. But the two techniques serve one another particularly well in Altman's third and most commercially successful film.

With M*A*S*H, Altman was trying to represent real life, and to do away with the artificial clarity of film dialogue. The loudspeaker announcements, the doctors and nurses talking at once, and the sounds of sawing bone and clanking surgical tools require an audience comfortable with (or at least, tolerant of) movie multitasking. And Altman not only presented concurrent conversations, he conflated fore and background, so that it isn't always apparent what we're "supposed to" notice about what's going on onscreen.

Altman began using this technique back in the 1950s, shooting advertisements in Kansas City. It wasn't always well received: Reportedly, he was fired from his first feature, Countdown, for letting the actors talk on top of each other. Regardless, Altman would continue to use cascading audio, all the way up to his last film, A Prairie Home Companion. Of his signature style, the director said "Sound is supposed to be heard, but words are not necessarily to be heard. I am trying to divorce the audience somewhat from literature and from theater, which is based on literature. In those areas it's the words the character uses that [are] important. I think in film it's what the character does not say, what you don't hear."

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