But seriously...

It's not that I don't take [the Gautama] Buddha seriously, or in any way disagree with anything that he actually--I know for sure--said; but I've always thought that Alice B. Toklas's and Gertrude Stein's deadpan advice to the annoying young woman who importunately besought life-guidance from them, to "commit suicide," sidesplittingly funny:  Despite (or maybe because of) the fact that Buddha explicitly said that that was the sort of advice we must never, ever dispense.  I think perhaps that the Ineffable One might, in all fairness, have phrased it--less as an adjuration not to--more as a general rule that will always have bad consequences if you disobey it.  

Like, for example, when I went to repay Douglas last night (the foodstamps that I had borrowed from him last week) in his little day-nest outside the 'Animal Shelter'--and finding him grievously afflicted with an influenza, and I said to him as I left. "Well, you should be thinking seriously of suicide."  And oh how funny that was not.  It no sooner fell from my lips than I was heartsick, and I immediately retracted it, saying, "No, I don't mean it.  That was a joke"--but watching my friend's pitiful attempt to laugh at it made it all so much worse.   My conscience has been pounding me like my own worst enemy ever since.