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Humour

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I'm not talking about joke books; I'm talking about stories that want to make you laugh, and succeed at doing so.

Do you know any? Recommend away.

As a personal request, please try and include what kind of role humour plays in the book. This thread is meant for anyone looking to laugh, and whether your suggestion is generally funny all around or meant to be a parody of a serious subject, please write that out. It's best not to give the impression a certain book is light-hearted joking all around when it's some biting satire of the War on Iraq or something, and vice versa.

I'll get the ball rolling:

Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens, is actually pretty funny. It does a lot of the quirky character thing Dickens is known for - and there are quite a lot of minor characters who just make you laugh and then bow out - but also parodies the hypocrisies of early 19th century England, while also squeezing in a lot of (funny) criticism at workhouses. Some of the humour is dark, but lots of it is silly. It's very British.

A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy O'Toole, is the funniest book I've read. It's about a guy named Ignatius J. Reilly, a prat of a man who causes misfortune to others by simply existing. The humour is satirical, dry, and delivered by a cast of, well, dunces. It's hard to find a favourite character or scene. The way everything comes together at the end is something that would later become a hallmark of shows like Seinfeld. To be honest, I'm not sure how this won the Pulitzer (I suspect it's for its characters and a certain subtle aspect to Ignatius), as that prize usually implies some "literary" book (by reputation) or even dry one, which this wasn't.

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Wow, this is a difficult question. Almost every book that I've read in recent memory have had some pretty funny moments in them. Here are two books that I immediately thought of:

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Junot Diaz-- After reading the first page of this book--when the narrator starts hilariously insulting the (presumably) American reader for not knowing about their country's relationship to the Dominican Republic--I knew that it I would love it. Oscar Wao is such a believably pitiful character and a lot of the humor comes from how realistically Diaz is able to portray what a 21st century social outcast acts like. Also, there are a lot of good jokes about New Jersey.

Pym Mat Johnson--This whole book was insane; its a modern retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's only novel (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of NantuckettI), with a lot of Lovecraft references thrown in. The whole book is a critique of modern day racial politics/identity/etc, a topic that is normally the exact opposite of funny, but Mat Johnson some how manages to find the humor in it all.

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Catch 22, by Joseph Heller jumps immediately to mind. Very dark humour. Very cynical. Set in WWII. You probably know about it already.

Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut. I read this so long ago I can't really summarise it but I remember it being brilliant and weird.

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Good Omens by T Pratchett & N Gaiman. The Antichrist is born. There is an hilarious misunderstanding/baby mix-up and he goes home with the wrong family. Includes supporting cast of angels, demons, a Witch-Finder General, and the M25.

The Big Bow Mystery by I Zangwill. Seminal early locked-room mystery and scathing contemporary satire on Victorian London. Get the LibriVox audiobook recording by Adrian Praetzellis.

Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, by M Millington. You may have already read the website, or the newspaper column, or seen the blimp. A lightish read, heterosexual relationship focused, British male narrator in his mid- to late-twenties. At this point, probably available in every known language (including Welsh). Of his other books, A Certain Chemistry is good, I've been stuck at 5% of the way through Instructions for Living Someone Else's Life for about 9 months now, and I can't remember the name of the other one.

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Elif Batuman The Possessed—on her adventures with Russian literature, learning Uzbek, and wild literary conferences—is fantastic and the funniest book I've read in years.

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Elif Batuman The Possessed—on her adventures with Russian literature, learning Uzbek, and wild literary conferences—is fantastic and the funniest book I've read in years.

Did you like it? I remember that her criticism applied to her life was very annoying. It was SO egocentric and shallow I got tired pretty quickly. Each to his own I guess.

I think Proust can be pretty funny, but that's mainly because the dissonance between his meandering and incredibly detailed ways of seeing things which worked for me. And all of Saul Bellow's work I've read so far have been hilarious, he is just GREAT at writing good characters that interact in fun ways.

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Did you like it? I remember that her criticism applied to her life was very annoying. It was SO egocentric and shallow I got tired pretty quickly. Each to his own I guess.

Considering that the book is a memoir of sorts, it'd be weird if she didn't talk about herself. Personally, I loved all the instances where she wrote more about her personal life; Ms. Bautman is an interesting lady! Her descriptions of her time in Uzbek were fantastic, especially if you have any experience with that part of the world. I found the whole book the exact opposite of shallow.

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Considering that the book is a memoir of sorts, it'd be weird if she didn't talk about herself. Personally, I loved all the instances where she wrote more about her personal life; Ms. Bautman is an interesting lady! Her descriptions of her time in Uzbek were fantastic, especially if you have any experience with that part of the world. I found the whole book the exact opposite of shallow.

Well all Russian lit. wasn't written about her, which is the feeling I got from that book.

Good for you though, didn't mean to piss on your fire.

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Catch 22, by Joseph Heller jumps immediately to mind. Very dark humour. Very cynical. Set in WWII. You probably know about it already.

Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut. I read this so long ago I can't really summarise it but I remember it being brilliant and weird.

I second these recommendations. Both are quite cynical at their core, but also absurd and funny.

Stanisław Lem's The Cyberiad is definitely worth checking out. It's a collection of cyber-medieval stories about two extremely capable constructors and the machines they build either for themselves or the kings of some distant planets. In the true fairy-tale fashion, nothing works as expected and hilarity and/or chaos ensues. Quite absurd and, strangely enough, often cynical to the extreme.

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Anansi Boys is the funniest book I've read in a while. Neil Gaiman writes the best characters and the dialogue feels remarkable natural, even when talking about completely insane shit. There is a great paragraph in which he hypothesises that some spiders have necrotic venom because they think it's funny. Reading American Gods would be essential to get the most out of it, but reading American Gods is pretty essential anyway. Also if you have any affection for the Anansi stories it is interesting to see them told in a more honest and uncensored way than usual.

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I am a big fan of the unbridled insanity of Jasper Fforde's work, starting with The Eyre Affair and going on from there. The conceit of his most famous series, the Thursday Next series, is that it takes place in an alternate universe where literature is major pop culture, and so therefore attracts criminals, which thereby requires policing. The first book involves a dastardly villain kidnapping Jane Eyre from her novel and holding her for ransom, and the most recent book involved dopplegangers, Enid Blyton fundamentalists, and the impending destruction of the city by a vengeful god. I also enjoyed Shades of Grey, which is an interesting take on the dystopia novel.

I imagine he's not for everyone - there's a lot of punnery, for instance, and there's quite a bit of metahumour, such as the joke about changing the ending to Jane Eyre to a happy one - but I enjoy that, despite it being seemingly very gonzo humour, Fforde takes his narrative very seriously. He's aware he's writing mysteries, and does an excellent job of ensuring his mysteries are unpredictable but fair, and of making the insane world he's created feel reasonable.

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I saw Shades of Grey on a shelf yesterday, but didn't go for it. Do you think it's worth going for in hardcover?

Edit: Hey, I found it in mass market paperback. So I got it.

Edited by Kroms

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"I'm not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare—or, if not, it's some equally brainy lad—who says that it's always just when a chappie is feeling particularly top-hole, and more than usually braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping." - PG Wodehouse, My Man Jeeves

So PG Wodehouse is pretty terrific. I've been going through a rough patch and I'm super stressed all the time, and it got to the point where any book I read immediately got under my skin. I'd be reading anything and if someone got so much as a cut I'd get upset. It was stupid of me.

Then I read some PG Wodehouse and, by jove, that's what I needed! Stories where the worst thing that happens is that someone picks a tie that doesn't go well with their shirt.

I've tried a bit of Pepper and a bit of Jeeves and Wooster. They're sort-of similar, but Jeeves and Wooster are funnier. It's nice to have a book where that above quote is, by far, the darkest thing that could happen. Seriously, there are some stories where people are upset because of ugly mustaches. That's as far as it goes.

I recommend going through some. Top-notch stuff, and lots of it copyright-free, so you should be able to read it off of Gutenberg or your favourite eBook site.

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I'll second Wodehouse! (I actually didn't enjoy the Jeeves book I read very much, but the "Psmith" -- the P is silent, as in physics, or pshrimp -- books are some of my favorites. If you can stomach long play-by-play chapters about cricket matches, by all means start with "Mike and Psmith" -- but I started with "Leave it to Psmith" and then jumped back, and they were still excellent.)

Recommendation:

"The Squires Tales" series by Gerald Morris is comprised of nicely-crafted Arthurian adventure stories, most of which contain (as a primary or secondary theme) some calling out or criticism of the more superficial or misguided aspects of knighthood and/or "courtly love" (he also shows up certain types of French Minstrels, Religious Hermits and Royal Courtiers -- and by implication their modern equivalents). Usually this is done by having sensible characters and ridiculous characters stuck traveling together, so that they may engage in chuckle-worthy bickerings...some of his characters act more or less naturally, and some of them are painfully and deliberately knightly (impromptu vows of silence, or archaic language, or hunkering down at some river for years at a time to force a joust with every passing knight).

It might all sound a bit didactic except for the aforementioned bickering, and also the fact that his protagonists have flaws and silly mistakes aplenty, too...and perhaps above all, a willingness to include a casual decapitation on any page at the drop of a hat (coz, y'know, knights!).

Most of the time, I read through these books and chortle at the silly people while simultaneously making a mental note to stop acting that way myself. =P

I have sworn myself to silence now, so that I will not accidentally spoil any of the books.

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Also to throw in three of my old favorites

"Young Adult Novel" by Daniel Pinkwater, which is a young adult novel about a group of junior high school boys who write satirical young adult novels starring a character named "Kevin Shapiro" (satirizing mainly the fact that 75% of the Young Adult shelf in every library nowadays is books about suicide, divorce, or body image problems)...who are then stunned to discover that a new child has joined their school and his name is: Kevin Shapiro. O_O

Also, The Mezzanine! It's a 144-page book about one man's thoughts while riding an escalator up to the next floor of an office building. It has digressing footnotes on almost every page, some of which take up half the page. I love this book, but I've never actually met anybody in real life who loved it half as much after I forced them to read it.

And, How to Be Funny, by Jovial Bob Stine (incidentally author of the Goosebumps series which was popular when I was a child and yet which I never read). I know that the cover and title combine to make it seem like the worst book ever, and that it treads halfway over into joke-book territory, but as it contains instructional chapters on things like how to make a joke last fourteen minutes and also has a scientific chart of various fishes' top speeds, I found it to be an invaluable guiding light in my formative years.

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John Hodgeman's Complete World knowledge will tell you everything you ever needed to know... with completely untrue, yet humorous, facts. The final book is a bit annoying since it has way too much ALL CAPS because THE DERANGED MILLIONAIRE MUST BE HEARD?!

While not a gut-burster, I enjoyed Edward Lear's Complete Nonsense. It's Victorian limericks and world play and I find the made up word quite scroobious... umbragious even!

OK, I haven't actually read this one, but there is a Black Jack Justice novel, I follow the series which is great and it's the same writer, it's a good Noir comedy, while still remaining true enough to Noir standards, if not making fun of Noir tropes, but in a more clever way that just pointing and laughing at them.

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I recently read Pride and Prejudice, by (you won't guess) Jane Austen, and was amused by how similar some aspects of it are to today's dating process. It's a book heavy on the irony, written with her tongue firmly-in-cheek. Some of the dialogue between Darcy and Elizabeth is crackers. I don't know if the book's as feminist as some people make it out to be, but it's funny and fun and I'm happy I read it.

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Catch 22, by Joseph Heller jumps immediately to mind. Very dark humour. Very cynical. Set in WWII. You probably know about it already.

Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut. I read this so long ago I can't really summarise it but I remember it being brilliant and weird.

Nailed it in one!

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Have to echo the Catch-22 recommendation.

 

To this day it's the only book that I've read and literally cried laughing while doing so. It seems like I can't go a year without giving it a re-read. 

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Having just finished Catch-22 I'd have to agree it's pretty funny at certain points, but at other times I just found the humour to be repetitious. I got the point that it was supposed to be about the madness of warfare etc, but good God do those conversations go on needlessly to the point of killing the joke. Side note: the whole Nately's whore thing is just bull plop.

 

I also have to recommend some Vonnegut, I recently read Timequake, and while it seems like quite a polarizing book judging by Good Reads comments, I thought it was really funny. It's essentially a nostalgic trip through Kurt Vonnegut's life with a semblance of a story chucked in so things don't get too serious. John Dies at the End also turned out to be funny in a gross-out-dick-joke kind of way. I'd never even heard of Bizarro fiction, and normally the name of the genre would be enough to put me off, but I gave it a shot and really liked it. 

 

Also, DaveC, can you remember specifically what moment made you cry with laughter in Catch-22? Sadly, I don't think I've ever cried whilst laughing at a book.

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I gave-up on Catch-22 three chapters in. The first chapter is funny, and with a point. The second chapter reads like an experimental draft in dire need of editing. The third chapter continued this trend, and I realized I'm too tired these days to put in the required mental effort to figure-out why there's a dead man in blah's tent. I'm setting it aside for now.

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I nearly gave up on it pretty early on too. There's some truly interesting bits that really got to me, especially some of the darker chapters later on. The novel seemed to really take a turn right near the end when every thing became super intimidating and pretty dark, but I could totally understand why you'd give up on it though. There was points where I read it and thought "Yup, I get it. Yup, I get it. Uh-huh, still getting it." There was no way that book needed to be as long as it was. 

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