Three Men In A Boat by Jerome K. Jerome. A timeless classic, a tour de force of comic writing. Countless ‘modern’ types of humour can be traced back to this amazingly perceptive book.
JKJ also wrote Three Men On The Bummel, a ‘bummel’ being a meandering trip or excursion (in this case a cycling trip through Germany and Austria). Many people think Bill Bryson is a good, funny travel writer, and he is. But JKJ was doing the same thing, much better, about 90 years earlier.
The Gun Seller by Hugh Laurie. Laurie is best-known over here (UK) as a comic actor and sidekick to Stephen Fry, but this, his thus far only novel, is an amazing tribute to his writing skill. It’s a genuine action thriller, but manages to be deliciously laugh out loud funny too. There’s a joke about ‘tissues’ (that’s not a spoiler)which had me in fits.
Story of My Life by Jay McInerney is very short (two or three days reading, tops) but also has lots of deadly bulls-eye laugh-out- loud snort-your-coffee lines. This is not a spoiler, but wait until you get to the ‘in touch with his child’ line, and see if you don’t agree it’s one of the finest bits of wordplay ever to see the light of day.
Good As Gold by Jospeh Heller. This, Heller’s third, tends to get overlooked which is a shame. It’s shorter and more accessible than his first two outings, and has a rich helping of deliriously funny scenes, one-liners and characters. Gold’s exchanges with his family, his Washington employers and this future father-in-law are as painful as they are well-observed and funny.
Most of Damon Runyon’s output is well worth reading and richly funny in a very warming way. There’s an excellent compilation of more or less all his short stories in two volumes, called From First To Last and On Broadway respectively, which is well worth having a look at.
Also try Dorothy Parker for her reviews and essays, especially her Constant Reader book reviews, and more or less anything by James Thurber.
If you fancy a little high-brow excursion, and an education, try getting to grips with Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. This dates from the mid 18th century, and I won’t say it’s exactly an easy read. However, anyone interested in humorous writing and the art of comedy really should be aware of this masterpiece, which is in many ways the first true ‘comic’ novel.
There are countless comic devices and satirical techniques still in use today which Sterne more or less invented in this fiendishly ambitious and truly seminal book. Think about ‘zany’ TV shows like ‘Monty Python’ which subvert the medium to comic effect (e.g. the programme is supposedly over, and returns to the BBC channel ident, except it’s still actually part of the programme). Sterne got there first, by about 220 years. The time scheme is in places insanely compressed, and in others equally insanely expanded. There are entire chapters which are actually all contained in a footnote to an earlier chapter, although the reader tends to have forgotten this by the time Sterne points it out. There is a page that is intentionally blank, and another which is just printed with a solid black void. Sterne is constantly subverting the reader’s expectations and the normal ‘conventions’ of the novel form, even though he was writing at a time before these conventions were properly established. Not exactly a laugh-out-loud hoot, I grant you, but witty, funny and far more than just an historical curio.