Coherent or incoherent? Angry or forgiving? Malevolent or loving? High-flown or colloquial? With or without quotations from Shakespeare, Martin Buber, and Montaigne? Hallmark should sell a card. All the great thoughts he had not reached were beyond enumeration; there was no bottom to what he did not have to say about the meaning of his life. And something funny is superfluous - suicide is funny. Not enough people realize that. It's not driven by despair or revenge, it's not born of madness or bitterness or humiliation, it's not a camouflaged homicide or a grandiose display of self-loathing - it's the finishing to the running gag. He would count himself an even bigger washout to be snuffed out any other way. For anybody who loves a joke, suicide is indispensable. For a puppeteer particularly there is nothing more natural: disappear behind the screen, insert the hand , and instead of performing as yourself, take the finale as the puppet. Think about it. There is no more thoroughly amusing way to go. A man who wants to die. A living being choosing death. That's entertainment.
Philip Roth, in Sabbath's Theater