Who are some great authors that never took themselves too seriously...

Who are some great authors that never took themselves too seriously? I am really getting tired of reading heavy-handed shit and an author's somber serious persona leaking through the pages. I want to read an author who is really good artistically but has the intelligence to make fun of themselves, or can break the tension once in a while.

Mark Twain?

Stephen King

cioran is extremely edgy but you can almost see him secretly smiling while he's at it

Papa Pinecone for sure.

Dav Crabes

weirdly enough this is exactly the reason I couldn't stand mark twain - his writing seems to have the "i'm not serious like those other writers" feeling of complacency without any interesting or relevant ideas

I'm pretty sure Joyce never wrote a serious word his entire life desu

Pynchon
Hunter Thompson
Burroughs
Any author writing cyberpunk
Giorgio Manganelli

Kind of agreeing, but not in his first book - A Short History of Decay, maybe, but he starts off as extremely self-serious

Robert Walser. He's not necessarily funny or light-hearted but there is no grandeur, no heavy edifice he is building. His eyes are those of a being from another world. One gets the feeling he found himself trapped in this body and candidly went along with it to amuse himself for a while--and aren't we all thus trapped? Except he seems to have seen more clearly that it was just for a little while.

Yeah, I mean the later work. He was a bretty intense young man.

I'm reading his first work and it's brimming with teenage edginess--I don't detect much irony either. I'm hoping he got to see himself in the mirror later on and smiled--and put that inner, hidden smile in his later works.

He did. Also pretty sure he practically disowned his early works, insofar as he could be bothered to.

Satan trips of bullshit

the quints that defeated the trips

Montaigne is probably the pinnacle of insightful/deep while completely light and sincerely amicable

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checked

Gf satan fgt c u in lum lol

>falling for the self-deprication meme

Well yeah, but the guy was just having a good time writing, much like Bierce

>quint of gods defeat trips of satan

...

Dimitri Verhulst, not sure if his books are translated though

I love Montaigne, been reading Essays for the past couple months. He really captured how strange the movements of thoughts, feelings, and mood are. He's kind of helped me sort myself out.

I went on a bad trip a few months ago and reading him has been comforting w/r/t being a human

Catch 22 and Confederacy of Dunces are two great novels that do not take themselves too seriously.

Gaddis

Otto (The Recognitions), Gibbs Eigen and J R (J R), McCandless (Carpenter's Gothic), Oscar (A Frolic of His Own), and the man in the bed (Agapē Agape) are all caricatures of various aspects of his own life that all have unsavory, goofy, and sometimes downright ridiculous mannerisms, ideas, and tendencies.

Lsd?

Yep

once a japanese woman went to Cioran and asked him if should she kill herself or not, and he said yes. She took him seriously and commited sudoku

Mishima was a madman though