I saw Harry Turtledove’s “Guns of the South” in the History section of a bookstore.
For years, Barnes and Nobles put Morely’s book (text book?) on reading Mayan dates in the New Age section.
Gulliver’s Travels is commonly though of as a children’s story (usually in bowdlerized versions), helped along by the Max Fleischer cartoon based upon in. But the original novel is very much adult - biting satire.
Also, many of Grimm’s fairy tales.
I found a copy of The Basic Cookbook, a book about the computer language BASIC in the cookbook section of a stall at a flea market.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland may have used humor but it was to disguise it’s pseudoscientific argument about the absurdity of i. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was an accomplished mathematician who made impressive advances in fields like Linear Algebra, however, he didn’t truck in this new nonsense some of his colleagues were calling Imaginary Numbers.
Any Peep Show fans here or am I the only one?
Hollywood has a long history of comedy trailers for non-comedy movies. One that stands out to me is American Ultra. Marketed exclusively as “funny Jesse Eisenberg as stoner is secretly Jason Borne,” the trailer squeezes every possible laugh from the films first ten minutes. The actual movie can’t even pull off a bait-and-switch, descending immediately into a depressing in-from-the-cold espionage tragedy.
Bicentenial Man was marketed as a wacky comedy. Instead it’s a long meditation on what it means to be human.
Nightbreed was marketed as a slasher film. Instead, it’s a fairy tale for adults about a broken misfit who finds belonging and becomes a hero.
Heck, the coverage of the Apollo 11 mission won a Hugo Award.
The Hugos have traditionally been somewhat flexible in what works qualify.
This, I need to hear more about. I’m a staunch defender of rights for rotational numbers (“imaginary” is pejorative), but I didn’t pick up on any of that in Alice.