Are there any great works of literature that are not funny?

[MrDibble]

Originally Posted by Skald the Rhymer

There's not a lot of laughs in The Waste Land or anything by T. S. Eliot.

What?
"I grow old... I grow old...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled."
is one of the most hilarious stanzas in poetry, it's stuck with me since school.

[RealityChuck]

Many works by Edgar Allen Poe: "The Black Cat" and "The Tell-Tale Heart" come to mind.

Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream."

Theodore Sturgeon's "It."

[ministryman]

Originally Posted by MrDibble

What?
"I grow old... I grow old...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled."
is one of the most hilarious stanzas in poetry, it's stuck with me since school.

Do I dare to eat a peach?

[Exapno Mapcase]

Originally Posted by ministryman

Do I dare to eat a peach?

I really love your peaches
Want to shake your tree

Now that's poetry.

[Annie-Xmas]

Anyone who thinks the Bible is not funny should read David Plotz's Good Book. He read the Old Testament, summarized and commented on each chapter.

That book is extremely well written, interesting and laugh out loud funny.

[whc.03grady]

Originally Posted by ministryman

Seriously, the Bible does have a lot of humor....

Example 1: A man molests the sister of another man (Names are omitted because I'm too tired to dig out my Bible and I'm at work - It's Genesis 34, look it up). The penalty is death. The molester begs and pleads to marry the woman. No dice. The offended man says the molester can have her and everybody can be friends IF he and his tribe are circumcised.

So the man and his tribe agree. A few days later, the offended man and his tribe kill every last one of the now-in-pain men.

Pretty funny, huh? Kinda like a Old Testament Pulp Fiction scene....

Uh, I don't get it.

[Annie-Xmas]

That was the story of Dinah, daughter to Jacob and sister of Judah, Simeon, Levi, Naptali, Issachar, Asher, Dan, Zebeulon, Gad, Benjamin, Judah and Joseph of Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat fame.

[NDP]

Originally Posted by ministryman

Seriously, the Bible does have a lot of humor....

Example 1: A man molests the sister of another man (Names are omitted because I'm too tired to dig out my Bible and I'm at work - It's Genesis 34, look it up). The penalty is death. The molester begs and pleads to marry the woman. No dice. The offended man says the molester can have her and everybody can be friends IF he and his tribe are circumcised.

So the man and his tribe agree. A few days later, the offended man and his tribe kill every last one of the now-in-pain men.

Pretty funny, huh? Kinda like a Old Testament Pulp Fiction scene...

Originally Posted by whc.03grady

Uh, I don't get it.

From how I see it, the "joke" is that the tribe of the offended man (i.e., that of Judah, Simeon, Joseph, etc.) were always planning the massacre the other tribe no matter what. The request that they had to circumcise themselves was made only to just to dick with them (so to speak). In fact, it may have really been offered as a "go fuck yourself" type of proposal. They just didn't expect the other tribe would be dumb enough to actually do it.

[Lamia]

Originally Posted by Fretful Porpentine

I can't think of much humor in Greek tragedy, unless you count Orestes' nurse grumping about how much of a pain it is to take care of a baby. Irony, yes, but most of the time it's meant to be the "bitter twist of fate" sort of irony rather than the funny kind.

In Euripides's Orestes I remember there's a bit where Orestes is sleeping and Electra is watching over him. The chorus comes in and she tells them to be quiet so they don't wake him. But the chorus, being the chorus, can't really be quiet. They just keep saying they're being quiet, and the whole thing turns into a kind of "Stop it!"/"I'm not touching you!" exchange that I thought was pretty funny.

[drewtwo99]

Did many of Poe's works have humor? Surely he wrote some that were nothing but frightening/sad/depressing.

[Martian Bigfoot]

Originally Posted by Fretful Porpentine

I can't think of much humor in Greek tragedy, unless you count Orestes' nurse grumping about how much of a pain it is to take care of a baby. Irony, yes, but most of the time it's meant to be the "bitter twist of fate" sort of irony rather than the funny kind.

Still, you wouldn't call a Greek tragedy humorless, certainly not drab, or dull, or simply dark, or boring. While tragic irony may not be humor per se, I think it may function in a way sort of like humor (and twist endings in more contemporary literature or film are sort of the same thing): One theory about why jokes are funny says that a joke works by creating an expectation, and then subverting that expectation in the punchline. The realization that something is different from what we expected, or, by extension, that a familiar structure has been turned on its head, creates a release. In jokes, it makes us laugh, in tragedy, it makes us... want to go kill ourselves. Well, either that, or experience catharsis, I suppose, if you believe Aristotle.

Hmm... did I just have a thought?

*Goes off to start writing thesis*

[Thudlow Boink]

Originally Posted by drewtwo99

Did many of Poe's works have humor? Surely he wrote some that were nothing but frightening/sad/depressing.

I can't think of much humor in Poe's best or best-known work, but he did attempt a few humorous, satiric pieces, such as "A Predicament" and "Never Bet the Devil Your Head."

[Biffy the Elephant Shrew]

Originally Posted by drewtwo99

Did many of Poe's works have humor? Surely he wrote some that were nothing but frightening/sad/depressing.

Some of Poe's stories are outright comedy, such as "The Man That Was Used Up" and "X-ing a Paragrab."

[j666]

Originally Posted by Lamia

In Euripides's Orestes I remember there's a bit where Orestes is sleeping and Electra is watching over him. The chorus comes in and she tells them to be quiet so they don't wake him. But the chorus, being the chorus, can't really be quiet. They just keep saying they're being quiet, and the whole thing turns into a kind of "Stop it!"/"I'm not touching you!" exchange that I thought was pretty funny.

That sounds hilarious. Really.

Why don't I read more Euripides?

[whc.03grady]

Originally Posted by NDP

From how I see it, the "joke" is that the tribe of the offended man (i.e., that of Judah, Simeon, Joseph, etc.) were always planning the massacre the other tribe no matter what. The request that they had to circumcise themselves was made only to just to dick with them (so to speak). In fact, it may have really been offered as a "go fuck yourself" type of proposal. They just didn't expect the other tribe would be dumb enough to actually do it.

Right, I get that, I just don't get how ministryman thinks it constitutes humor. I'm not trying to be prudish; but if something like this occurred in a great film like Pulp Fiction, I don't see how it'd be a humorous part of the film. Not that it'd necessarily be a bad part, just that it wouldn't be a funny part.
I suppose it's just an example of how far some people will stretch the Bible to try to make it a relateable [sic?] document, like trying to point out how it has its funny moments. It doesn't.

[BrainGlutton]

Originally Posted by Maastricht

I agree. Dickens humor is often about catchphrases repeated often in incongruous circumstances. Like Pip's older sister, who bosses both her kind husband and Pip around, yet keeps sighing that she works so hard and gets no respect and "I'm never out of my apron". I thought it pretty funny how she keeps playing the martyr with that apron.

Or that lawyer (not sure about his name) who bites his finger. A bad habit, like nail biting, right? No. That lawyer has turned his finger biting into an art, into a mighty weapon that sways judges and intimidates suspects and clients.

The lawyer (Jaggers is his name) provides some of the funniest scenes in the book, actually; especially when he has his clients and clerks recruiting perjurious witnesses but insists (loudly and furiously!) on maintaining full deniability.

"Here's Mike," said the clerk, getting down from his stool, and approaching Mr. Jaggers confidentially.

"Oh!" said Mr. Jaggers, turning to the man, who was pulling a lock of hair in the middle of his forehead, like the Bull in Cock Robin pulling at the bell-rope; "your man comes on this afternoon. Well?"

"Well, Mas'r Jaggers," returned Mike, in the voice of a sufferer from a constitutional cold; "arter a deal o' trouble, I've found one, sir, as might do."

"What is he prepared to swear?"

"Well, Mas'r Jaggers," said Mike, wiping his nose on his fur cap this time; "in a general way, anythink."

Mr. Jaggers suddenly became most irate. "Now, I warned you before," said he, throwing his forefinger at the terrified client, "that if you ever presumed to talk in that way here, I'd make an example of you. You infernal scoundrel, how dare you tell ME that?"

The client looked scared, but bewildered too, as if he were unconscious what he had done.

"Spooney!" said the clerk, in a low voice, giving him a stir with his elbow. "Soft Head! Need you say it face to face?"

"Now, I ask you, you blundering booby," said my guardian, very sternly, "once more and for the last time, what the man you have brought here is prepared to swear?"

Mike looked hard at my guardian, as if he were trying to learn a lesson from his face, and slowly replied, "Ayther to character, or to having been in his company and never left him all the night in question."

"Now, be careful. In what station of life is this man?"

Mike looked at his cap, and looked at the floor, and looked at the ceiling, and looked at the clerk, and even looked at me, before beginning to reply in a nervous manner, "We've dressed him up like—" when my guardian blustered out,—

"What? You WILL, will you?"

("Spooney!" added the clerk again, with another stir.)

After some helpless casting about, Mike brightened and began again:—

"He is dressed like a 'spectable pieman. A sort of a pastry-cook."

"Is he here?" asked my guardian.

"I left him," said Mike, "a setting on some doorsteps round the corner."

"Take him past that window, and let me see him."

The window indicated was the office window. We all three went to it, behind the wire blind, and presently saw the client go by in an accidental manner, with a murderous-looking tall individual, in a short suit of white linen and a paper cap. This guileless confectioner was not by any means sober, and had a black eye in the green stage of recovery, which was painted over.

"Tell him to take his witness away directly," said my guardian to the clerk, in extreme disgust, "and ask him what he means by bringing such a fellow as that."

[BrainGlutton]

The bit in Catcher in the Rye where Holden, expelled from his school and departing his dorm late at night, screams, "SLEEP TIGHT, MOTHERFUCKERS!" (or words to that effect) is the closest thing to a funny bit in the book. And at that, it's the kind of funny that will never get an actual laugh unless read out loud in an English class, or used in a screen-adaptation.

[BrainGlutton]

Originally Posted by drewtwo99

Did many of Poe's works have humor? Surely he wrote some that were nothing but frightening/sad/depressing.

Well, there's one or two dryly funny bits in "The Cask of Amontillado."

"THE thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge."

"Luchesi cannot tell Amontillado from Sherry." (Amontillado is a kind of sherry.)

"There were no attendants at home; they had absconded to make merry in honor of the time. I had told them that I should not return until the morning, and had given them explicit orders not to stir from the house. These orders were sufficient, I well knew, to insure their immediate disappearance, one and all, as soon as my back was turned."

"These vaults," he said, "are extensive."

"The Montresors," I replied, "were a great and numerous family."

"I forget your arms."

"A huge human foot d'or, in a field azure ; the foot crushes a serpent rampant whose fangs are imbedded in the heel."

"And the motto ?"

"Nemo me impune lacessit ."*

"Good !" he said.

*"No one attacks me with impunity," or, more whimsically translated, "Don't tread on me." Foreshadowing the end of the story, you see.

I broke and reached him a flaçon of De Grâve. He emptied it at a breath. His eyes flashed with a fierce light. He laughed and threw the bottle upwards with a gesticulation I did not understand.

I looked at him in surprise. He repeated the movement - a grotesque one.

"You do not comprehend ?" he said.

"Not I," I replied.

"Then you are not of the brotherhood."

"How ?"

"You are not of the masons."

"Yes, yes," I said, "yes, yes."

"You ? Impossible ! A mason ?"

"A mason," I replied.

"A sign," he said.

"It is this," I answered, producing a trowel from beneath the folds of my roquelaire.

"You jest," he exclaimed, recoiling a few paces. "But let us proceed to the Amontillado."

[Suburban Plankton]

I just finished reading "The Sun Also Rises". There were a number of scenes in which the characters were doing things that they found humorous (at least some of them), but I don't think there was a single thing in the entire novel that I'd call "funny".

[Jaledin]

Caesar's bell. Gall. Has absolutely no humor. The great war epics have word play, and some funny-ish bits, but Caesar is the greatest writer of literature who is always serious, all the time. Perhaps he didn't intend his work as literature, but it is considered such today, unlike, for example, the scholastics or some purely didactic poems. The extant fragments I've read from e.g. Epicurus are not funny, but not really literature, either.

*under the volcano*? Fun but not really funny. Joseph roth's books aren't that funny, nor are Broch's. hölderlin not that funny, nor Rilke. D'aubigné's *les tragiques* isn't funny iirc about the bartholomew day massacres. Maurice scève isn't really funny either, but the word play is fun. But not funny.

[Dendarii Dame]

Any humor in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Sanctuary must've passed me by, if it was there.

[koeeoaddi]

I don't think I cracked a smile once reading Crime and Punishment. Or for days afterwards.

[carnivorousplant]

Originally Posted by koeeoaddi

I don't think I cracked a smile once reading Crime and Punishment. Or for days afterwards.

Jude the Obscure...no, his thinking that foreign languages were adding "o" at the end of English words...
Ah! Tess of the D'Ubervilles.

[BrainGlutton]

Wuthering Heights. The nearest thing to comic relief is Joseph, and him you just want to shoot.

[BrainGlutton]

There was nothing even slightly funny in Ayn Rand's Fountainhead or Anthem, if they even count as literature. Never read Atlas Shrugged, but I've never read or heard anything about it that would lead me to expect a single chuckle.

There is nothing funny in Plato's Republic. Not much funny in even the lightest of the dialogues, really, not even the Symposium.

[Lamia]

Originally Posted by BrainGlutton

Wuthering Heights. The nearest thing to comic relief is Joseph, and him you just want to shoot.

I remember one of my friends saying she thought the scene where Heathcliff and Isabelle (?) got into an argument that involved the throwing of knives to be fairly amusing.

[Left Hand of Dorkness]

Originally Posted by Skald the Rhymer

Raymond Chandler was born the same year as him, and Chandler's work is reliably somber, with only occasional and brief moments of light-hearted dialogue to leaven the grimness.

Maybe I'm just sleepy and missing a whoosh, but my favorite thing about Chandler is how he makes me giggle with a hilarious turn of phrase on virtually every page. Some samples

Originally Posted by Raymond Chandler

"On the dance floor half a dozen couples were throwing themselves around with the reckless abandon of a night watchman with arthritis "---Playback (Chapter 8)

"Tall, aren't you?" she said.
"I didn't mean to be."
Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.
---The Big Sleep (Chapter 1)

[j666]

Originally Posted by Jaledin

Caesar's bell. Gall. Has absolutely no humor. The great war epics have word play, and some funny-ish bits, but Caesar is the greatest writer of literature who is always serious, all the time. Perhaps he didn't intend his work as literature, but it is considered such today, ...

No, they're not. People have been dissing Caesar as near illiterate as makes no nevermind for millennia.

Me? I love the ablative absolute.

[Jaledin]

? The style of Caesar is, from what I know, pretty much sui generis. Nobody has any love for Jerome's vulgate style, but it's way more illiterate and coarse than Caesar. Caesar is probably still taught for second year HS students as literature many places. Yeah I guess he does use a lot of the absolute, but I'd bet Vergil uses the absolute far more often. It's a convenient way to express something quickly and clearly, which is the whole point of those little war reports. What is funny to me is that Caesar always has the barbarians speak in grunts and horrible Latin, whereas Caesar's own dialogue is proto-Ciceronian in parataxis and polish. I take it back -- that still makes me laugh. But I read Caesar when I want to read terse, effective prose with restricted diction -- fun, but not funny, except probably inadvertently so.

[carnivorousplant]

Originally Posted by Left Hand of Dorkness

Maybe I'm just sleepy and missing a whoosh, but my favorite thing about Chandler is how he makes me giggle with a hilarious turn of phrase on virtually every page. Some samples

General Sternwood: "Have you met my daughter?"

Phillip Marlowe: "Yes, she tried to sit in my lap. I was standing up at the time."

Perhaps that isn't humorous, but indicative of...whats her name...Carmine?...being totally whacko.

[Left Hand of Dorkness]

Originally Posted by carnivorousplant

Perhaps that isn't humorous, but indicative of...whats her name...Carmine?...being totally whacko.

I think it's pretty funny. Chandler is one of my favorite humorous writers.

[GreenElf]

Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are very serious.

[Maastricht]

Originally Posted by BrainGlutton

Wuthering Heights. The nearest thing to comic relief is Joseph, and him you just want to shoot.

This must be a winner. Plenty of drama, but humor or comic relief? God no.

[Jaledin]

She was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window. Chandler's hilarious.

[Boyo Jim]

Originally Posted by Left Hand of Dorkness

Maybe I'm just sleepy and missing a whoosh, but my favorite thing about Chandler is how he makes me giggle with a hilarious turn of phrase on virtually every page. Some samples

Thanks for that link. This quote became my instant favorite:

"I'm an occational drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard."