Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion . . . I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

Vonnegut frames laughter and crying as parallel, bodily ways of releasing pressure when life becomes overwhelming. By calling both “responses to frustration and exhaustion,” he strips them of moral hierarchy—neither is noble or shameful; both are human coping mechanisms. His preference for laughter, justified with the deadpan practicality of “less cleaning up,” exemplifies his characteristic gallows humor: comedy as a survival tool in a world that often feels absurd, cruel, or simply too much. The line suggests that humor can be a deliberate stance—an economical, life-affirming choice to metabolize pain without being consumed by it.