I’m not sure if I phrased that right…memoirs, autobiographies, diaries, thinly veiled novels, written before 1970 I guess, that are funny.
Extra points if they are by women, more points if the women are mothers.
Two of my favorites are
Diary of a Provincial Lady by E. M. Delafield
and
The Snake Has All the Lines by Jean Kerr
but I like boys too! Like
Three Men In A Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
and
Life With Father by Clarence Day
The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald. She has some nasty things to say about her Native American neighbors, but otherwise it’s pretty funny.
None of these were written before 1970 but they all are primarily about experiences before 1970 if that counts.
Show biz memoirs that I liked- some probably hard to find now:
How to Grow Old Disgracefully by Hermione Gingold- very irreverent and sometimes shocking sense of humor
The Moon’s a Balloon, Bring On The Empty Horses by David Niven (anecdotes and tall tales, some of them bawdy even by today’s standards, of the Golden Age of Hollywood)
Change Lobsters and Dance by Lilli Palmer (a largely forgotten British actress but a good writer who in addition to being married to Rex Harrison knew or had experiences with several famous people of her era include the Duchess of Windsor and Helen Keller)
Palimpsest and Point to Point Navigation by Gore Vidal are far better than most of his fiction writings and even delve into the art of memoir writing. He’s known everybody- steprelatives [in a way] to Jackie Kennedy, friends with JFK and Tennessee Williams, affair with Anais Nin, interviewed Santayana and Churchill and many others, and of course had a lucrative career in Hollywood in the 1950s (closest friends with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, enemies with Charlton Heston). Worth a read for the D.C. of the 1930s-1960s and the Hollywood of the 1950s as well as the literary scenes in the U.S. and Europe.
Almost forgot:
Our Hearts Were Young and Gay by Cornelia Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough- it’s about two privileged girls (Skinner’s father was a famous actor, Kimbrough the child of well to do businessman) doing the grand tour of Europe in the 1920s and has some genuinely laugh out loud moments.
Four Jills In a Jeep written by Carole Landis about her USO adventures with Martha Raye, Kay Francis, and Mitzi Mayfair. It was written in 1944 and immediately became a movie in which the main characters played themselves. I’m sure it’s much cleaned up from the real experiences but still a good read.
Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson
Victor Borge, My Favorite Intermissions: Victor Borge’s Lives of the Musical Greats and Other Facts You Never Knew You Were Missing
Hilarious book, mini biographies of composers. If you have never seen him perform, you really should. Here he is on the Muppet Show.
She also wrote Nuts in May, more of her experiences as a mother, including one hilarious description of trying to get her teenaged son into a dinner suit; plus an account of visiting Rome with her parents and receiving an unexpected invitation to meet the Pope: Her mother’s most suitable dress was deemed to be cut too low in front, so Cornelia was sent out to find a piece of lace or something to bridge the gap, as it were. She went into a shop and tried to explain the problem to the shopkeeper, using all the Italian she knew, which was mostly boarding-school Latin; though meaning to ask for a handkerchief “with which to fill in my mother’s neckline,” she found out later she had asked for a cloth “with which to stuff down my mother’s throat.” 
Plus: Minnie Pearl’s autobiography, not riotously funny but very enlightening and impressive. What a woman.
I’ve read and loved a lot of the books mentioned! My first thought was, “Auntie Mame” by Patrick Dennis (1955), though I don’t know if it’s 100% true. Entertaining, though.
You know what I hate about SDMB? It’s got 10,000 ninjas, that’s what I hate…and they’re all so freaking fast.
I love Cheaper By the Dozen and All Creatures Great and Small.
I recently read and enjoyed My Family and Other Animals.
And the sequal Belles on Their Toes
Yes. These are wonderful.
My contribution:
Mark Twain’s “Roughing It” contains at least a germ or two of truth, and still makes me laugh out loud. The (obviously fictional) account of the coat-eating camel is joke-telling at its most clever.
.
Innocents Abroad is also great and has probably more true moments than most would suspect.
Thanks for so many good suggestions! I’m so excited. The only one I’ve read is Our Hearts Were Young and Gay which I loved, but I didn’t know about Nuts in May, can’t wait!
Keep em coming!
How to Talk Dirty and Influence People by Lenny Bruce. Much funnier than those videos circulating of him onstage reading transcripts from his drug and obscenity trials.
The Brass Ring by cartoonist Bil Mauldin. The main focus is on his wartime experiences, of course.
The Double Helix by James G. Watson. Not comedy per se, but it shows the human side of erudite men and women of science: scamming grant money, petty backbiting and politicking, spitting in each other’s beakers and whatnot.
Speaking of Twain, his official and uncensored autobiography is to be released in three parts starting this fall. The contents are a bit under wraps- it’s not known how much has never been released but at least some parts have not. He requested some parts of it not be published until a century after his death to spare his daughters (who disapproved of his religious views and “cussin’” and many of his other viewpoints) embarrassment, and he died in 1910.
I’m guessing the new material is nothing terribly shocking. On one of the video clipsthere was a segment about a broker named Paige who had lost him a substantial sum of money:
This was the first time I knew ‘nuts’ as a euphemism is over a century old. He also takes more double-barrel shots at religion than his more ‘ornery agnostic’ writings. While I doubt anything terribly shocking by modern standards will be revealed, it Twain so I’m definitely buying a copy of each volume. I do know it isn’t in a chronological style but more freeform.
Amazon for first volume.
“Patrick Dennis” is a pen name of Edward Everett Tanner, and the Auntie Mame books are fiction - Auntie Mame, Around the World With Auntie Mame. He wrote other books, too - Guestward Ho!, Tony, Genius, and The Joyous Season being some I recall. I have falling apart paperback copies of all but Guestward Ho! which I didn’t care for.
If you look here, you can find out a bit about ‘Patrick Dennis’ -
an seanchai
who remembers her sister reading ‘Auntie Mame’ out loud, and us all choking with laughter throughout.
And its sequel, Birds, Beasts, and Relatives. I came into this thread to recommend those two.
