Amphetamine helps too

and shooting his wife, I guess.

Somewhere in my .mp3s I have the audiobook read by Burroughs and it's one of the funniest things I've ever heard.

Frank Zappa does a good reading as well.

Burroughs is hard to pin down. Some of the stuff he writes is obviously meant to horrifyingly hilarious, his spoken readings certainly do convey that, in the vein of Swift and what not.

On the other hand, Burroughs bought into a whole lot of weird, eccentric shit that shows up in his writing including gnostic mythology, pseudo-science language virus theories, dream realities, mysticism, alien invaders, and more that he apparently took very seriously. It is often hard to tell where his satire ends and his tin-foil hat theories of reality and the universe begin. He was a weird dude.

Don't forget this, as an example of Burroughs being better when performed: http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=49044