In primary school, I learned pretty quickly that there were two ways to find yourself lying on the playground concrete, holding your stomach and gasping for air. A fist or a knee from an older or bigger kid straight into the guts: that’d do it every time. The other way was by laughing so much I couldn’t possibly stay vertical. Many of my school years were punctuated by equal parts roughhousing and cacking myself, but it is the latter that I remember clearly. I can recall exactly what I was laughing about in each of those moments of euphoric, almost hysterical glee, and how deep in my core that laughter reached, whereas all the violence blurs together. Humour impacts me more than any other emotion, and this extends to my reading preferences.

Kurt Vonnegut understood the power of humour to be able to communicate ideas more than sombreness ever could. For gallows humour, he stands in celebrated company: Oscar Wilde, Joseph Heller, Roald Dahl and Billy Shakespeare. This humour exists not only within Vonnegut’s books, where inanity and wit ran parallel in a race to the bottom (a bottom, in Vonnegut terms, is really the top), but also in his attitude towards himself, as a writer, and also as a human being. ‘Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak,’ he once said, referring to both books and those who author them. Or, as he put it more politely, ‘I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far.’ Vonnegut, perhaps showing the way for authors such as David Foster Wallace and Jennifer Egan, demonstrated that authentic messages can be conveyed through askew and darkly funny means.

In ‘Mr Vonnegut in Sumatra’, from his essay collection The Brain-Dead Megaphone, George Saunders, writing on Vonnegut, says that humour ‘is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to. The comic is the truth stripped of the habitual, the cushioning, the easy consolation.’ Vonnegut is an expert at this, often revealing important details or plot points so abruptly and without fanfare that the reader is taken by surprise. In Slaughterhouse-Five some of the biggest events of World War II are described quickly before being cast aside in order for the characters to do what characters do best: be human. Being surprised as a reader is a wonderful experience, and in Vonnegut’s best books we are surprised at almost every page.

Saunders, in the same essay, writes of the lessons he takes as a writer from Vonnegut:

Your real story may have nothing to do with your actual experience. … In constructing your black box, feel free to shorthand those experiences, allude to them sideways, or omit them entirely. Joke about them, avoid directly exploiting them, shroud them in an over-story about aliens: you know what you know, and that knowledge will not be shaken out of your stories no matter how breezy or comic or minimalist your mode of expression, or how much you shun mimesis.

Tackling weighty topics obliquely is a way to dupe a reader into confrontation with The Big Issues, even subconsciously, and a writer who concurrently pokes fun at the idea of literature itself, by not kowtowing to the expectations of the overly intellectual literati, allows the reader breathing space in which he or she can flow with the current of the work, unclenched enough to look into the subject matter, and thus look into themselves. There’s no better way for an author to take themself seriously than to not take themself seriously at all, at least most of the time. A friend recently outlined to me – convincingly – that writers who view themselves and their work humourlessly are almost the worst kind of people. It reminded me of a wonderful Geoff Dyer quote from a Paris Review interview, which goes:

I’m so revolted by writers taking themselves seriously that, as a kind of protest, I’ve deprioritised the role of writing in my life. I do it when I’ve not got anything better to do – and even then I often do nothing instead. What I really like is doing the laundry.

Vonnegut was always first in line to crack a joke, but he was the last to consider his vocation as a joke. I remember some time ago reading an anecdote about a dinner party he once attended at the house of a writer, where all the guests were writers, and the topic quickly moved to the daily trials of sitting before the page, and just how unpleasant it was. They all hated it, and bonded over their shared antipathy. But one voice piped up, a writer who said that actually, she enjoyed every minute of the writing process and loved being a writer. Vonnegut said that the room fell silent, and that he thought of only one thing, and he believed he could see the same sentiment in the faces of everyone else around the table: that this particular writer who’d spoken up was the only person in the room whose writing was actually really quite crummy, really lousy and insubstantial.

Vonnegut’s honesty with himself, about himself, was legendary, both in his books, and in real life. He was known to go around and openly grade his books in terms of quality. (You can actually see him do so in an old Charlie Rose TV interview.) It is such a heartening sight to watch a hugely respected author be so candid towards his life’s work, while totally having fun doing so. Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five and Mother Night get A-pluses, while Slapstick gets an F.

He was also noted for making lists and rules, often to do with writing. The most famous are his 8 Rules for Writing a Short Story. This list is Vonnegut all over: droll, weird, funny, but also honest and true. How often the absurd and the funny observations are also the most genuine.

Vonnegut, in his own Paris Review interview, summed up his approach to his work when he said: ‘If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again.’ I, for one, am glad he is such a joker, and I will keep falling, holding my sides, cacking myself with laughter.

Sam Cooney is the publisher and editor-in-chief of The Lifted Brow. His writing has been published widely, including in Meanjin, Island, Going Down Swinging, Seizure, The Rumpus, Sleepers Almanac and The Australian, and as a founding part of the McSweeney’s Silent History geofiction project. He teaches at universities in Melbourne and is a member of the Emerging Writers’ Festival’s Program Advisory Committee.