Forget the Internet. Forget broadband videos. And forget comedy for one ADD-addled second.
Because we have lost one of the greatest novelists, satirists and humorists of all time: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Last night, Mr. Vonnegut died in Manhattan at the age of 84 after suffering brain injuries from a recent fall.
Vonnegut often spoke of the world being divided into winners (an oligarchy of politicians, rich people and corporations) and losers (everybody else, namely the world’s poor). So, it’s worth positing that, based on his exit from this life, he may have also considered himself a “loser.”
That’s because, despite his best efforts, he was unable to succumb to his lifelong cigarette addiction. He once famously wrote:
“I am going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, manufacturers of Pall Mall cigarettes, for a billion bucks! Starting when I was only 12 years old, I have never chain-smoked anything but unfiltered Pall Malls. And for many years now, right on the package, Brown and Williamson have promised to kill me.”
But that didn’t happen. He survived being a chain smoker with the same begrudging attitude that he survived being a P.O.W. during the bombing of Dresden in World War II. Always sardonic, but never too nihilistic.
OK, maybe a little. A lot of his interviews in the past few years were pretty dark. A conversation he had with Douglas Brinkley in a recent Rolling Stone was particularly haunting.
But you always got the feeling that Kurt Vonnegut had earned the right to judge humanity as harshly as he did. And that was because—like all of the greatest humorists—he clearly understood and loved life with a little more zest than the average Kilgore Trout.
He once wrote, “If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph…”
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC.
That’s downright positive, I must say.
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