And heartwrenching. I love those.
I just remembered a book that ranks very high on my funny books list:
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, a collection of stories told by famous physicist Richard Feynman about his life and adventures. I imagine many Dopers have read this one, especially the science-minded folk. The part about his fame (or infamy) at Los Alamos for being able to “crack” the combination locks on his fellow Manhatten Project scientists’ cabinets was especially amusing.
The follow-up book, What Do You Care What Other People Think? is good, too, but a lot of it deals with more serious subjects (the Challenger disaster, the death of his wife).
Hitchiker’s “trilogy” is my, without a doubt, guaranteed to make me laugh out loud each and every time I pick it up, number one favorite funny book. I have read them over and over (not to mention the radio play and the TV adaptation*) and I still laugh each and every time. You’d think I’d get bored, but somehow they just seem to get funnier.
Close second is Wodehouse’s “Jeeves” stories.
I can also second many that you guys already touched on, Barry, Hiaasen, Heller, etc, but those are the two that will get me every time.
Don’t throw things, but, I don’t believe I’ve read any Pratchett (at least not that I remember). Any advice on a good one to start with?
- movie? what movie?
As far as non-fiction goes, I remember laughing quite a lot when I read former Jeopardy champ Bob Harris’ “Prisoner of Trebekistan” a while back.
I just reread this, about 6 months ago - I liked it, but LOVED it when I was a college kid and physics major 
Also, I just couldn’t get int Catch-22, Pratchett, and Douglas adams. Bill Bryson is OK, Stephanie Plum novels are terrible, Carl Hiassen is OK. I think I tend toward non-humorous books, but when something hits me, my god, it steamrolls me with laughter.
Joe
I’d heard about Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman online. (I tried Gaiman’s American Gods, and loved it, then went on to read a lot more by him.) Good Omens was as good as promised. “It’s a funny story about Armageddon,” I told my husband. (He still isn’t a fiction reader. Pity him. )
I remember really laughing at the Red Dwarf book a long, long time ago, and one by Dan Greenburg? Greenberg? about women.
I am looking forward to Bill Bryson’s new book, from reading this thread!
Oh, good one.
Choose one from:
Guards! Guards! (indroducing the watch)
Mort (DEATH)
Lords and Ladies (the witches)
Thanks for the tip. I’ve added Guards! Guards! to tomorrow’s Amazon order. From the description, it sounds like it’s right up my alley.
Many of the titles already mentioned (particularly those by Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett).
Yes Man and Join Me by Danny Wallace
Nick Hornby’s About a boy
Dave Gorman’s Are you Dave Gorman
The best a man can get by John O’Farrel
*Cold Comfort Farm * by Stella Gibbons is one of the funniest novels ever written. I love handselling it at the store.
Shakespeare’s *Twelfth Night * cracks me up.
I wrote a theatre piece about Feynman for the science theatre program at the Bradbury Science Museum. While I was doing research for the piece, I asked my neighbor, a Manhattan Project physicist from Maine, whether he knew Feynman. He said, “Of cahse, deah! But we didn’t socialize. He was much too smaht fer me!”
Christopher Buckley is very funny. My favorite, No Way to treat a First Lady, might be a tad dated now (the two main characters are seriously Clintonesque). It probably still holds up, though. I read it a couple of years ago and it just about killed me.
Carl Hiaasen and Tim Dorsey fans should get a kick out of The Rabbit Factory by Marshall Karp. Very entertaining.
Should you read them in order, Hung Mung?
For the Witches books, start with Wyrd Sisters. Lords and Ladies is right in the middle of the sequence, and you will miss a lot of the references. In order, they go: *Wyrd Sisters, Witches Abroad, Lords and Ladies, Maskerade, Carpe Jugulum, * which leads into the Tiffany Aching books.
Another vote for Good Omens. You know, I’m an atheist, but I was born and raised Catholic so I got all of the biblical and religious bits. But my sons, whom I dutifully schlepped off to church so they’d have a basis for comparison, evidently didn’t stay in the fold long enough. They thought the book was amusing, but not knee-slapping funny like I did.
Fourth this. Especially the two he wrote before the Aubry/Maturin series: The Golden Ocean and The Unknown Shore . Especially the second, which has two characters- “Foulweather Jack” Byron and Tobias Barrow- who are prototypes of Aubrey and Maturin, sixty years earlier. When it’s not being ROFLMAO funny, it’s an incredible, and mostly true, story of what men can survive in the way of shipwreck, starvation, freezing cold, and hostile savages.
Robert Asprin’s Myth series is very funny. Some jokes are groan-worthy puns, but the situational and character-related gags are consistently good.
Bujold is entertaining in general and laugh out loud funny at times. The humor mostly comes from the characters. Miles is, of course, the biggest source of humor.
Stephen Brust has some smart-assed quips and views that I think are pretty funny. Check out his Dragaera books.
The Walter Slovotsky character in Joel Rosenberg’s Guardians of the Flame series is the funniest character. There are “quotes” from him heading some of the chapters. Example: “I always have a fallback position whenever I take a risk. If all else fails, I’ll die horribly, at great length, and in great pain. Mind you, it’s not a good fallback position…” The books are mostly serious but there’s a lot of dry or dark humor in places.
I’ve become a K.J. Parker fan recently. Every book has at least a few passages that make me laugh. Besides being dryly funny, his books feature some very realistic warts-and-all fantasy worlds. So far, the Fencer books are the ones I liked best.
Oddly enough, I think that some of Stephen King’s turns of phrase are quite amusing. And of course Tom Robbins is pretty darn funny. Absurdist humor is pretty much his stock in trade.
Totally forgot about Bujold. “A Civil Campaign” was hilarious. The whole series is gold but that book was the funniest.
:smack: IIRC Wyrd Sisters starts “When shall we three meet again?” which is obviously where Witch stories should start.
I recon Lords and Ladies is the best Witch book but silenus is right it’s even better if you’ve got to know the characters already.
For those who have piped up for Douglas Adams’ HHG books, you do know that the first incarnation (and the funniest) was the BBC radio series? If you’ve only read the books you really ought to seek out an audio version.
Of course both Adams and Pratchett are best appreciated in the original Klingon.
I was just coming to this thread to mention him. A lof of people think he’s rip-off of Carl Hiassen, but for my money he’s in a world all his own.
I’ll wander off the well-trodden paths of the thread a bit–
I’ve read Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart at least a dozen times, and it still makes me laugh aloud each time. Any time Li Kao starts scheming, it’s time to batten down the hatches, and Number Ten Ox’s deadpan delivery of the narrative makes it even funnier. The two sequels are both good, but can’t match Bridge.
Calamity Trail by Dan Parkinson is an odd, difficult-to-classify book. I generally don’t care for Westerns, and it looks like a Western at first glance. It’s got all the right bits: A young man going west to seek his fortune, gunslingers, horses, Indians, stagecoaches, trains, whiskey, and gold mines. It has to be a Western, right?
Well, sort of. Or maybe it’s a fantasy novel dressed up as a Western. Or maybe it’s a comedy pretending to be a fantasy. Or some of all three. It follows the adventures of a naive young artist trying to strike it rich so he can return and marry the girl of his dreams–exactly the sort of fellow you’d expect to get eaten alive in the rough-and-tumble West. Of course, most naive young artists aren’t–apparently–living embodiments of the forces of chaos. So young Charles Henry Clayton wanders blithely from crisis to crisis, leaving a spreading wake of odd contraptions and bizarre disasters behind him.
I find the way Clayton’s most innocent actions snowball into vast, sprawling tangles of coincidental mishaps hysterical.
The Taltos books have their moments, but it’s the Khaavren Romances (The Phoenix Guards, Five Hundred Years After, and The Viscount of Adrilankha) that really slay me. It’s not that the specific gags are that hilarious (although many of the chapter titles amuse me greatly), it’s the combination of atmosphere and writing style. They’re sort of like laughing gas. You just slowly drift into a strange realm where everything is funny.