What is your favourite funny novel?

Cafe Society
41

I laughed heartily. Not at the books but at the sight of three white people meticulously, delicately, and tiptoeing on a tightrope-ly wrenching their memories to create a carefully curated DEI list of humor. Well, not a list, but a museum exhibit. The angst and agony they must have gone through to produce this. And yet they included American Psycho. 10,000 to 1 Dwight Garner was the one pitching for it. (Gift link.)

Anyway. If they go back to the 50s before Catch-22, then why not Max Shulman, the creator of Dobie Gillis, who’s very dated today but was the epitome of 50s funnymen. Calvin Trillin, the New Yorker great, wrote a couple of funny novels before he turned to funny essays. Donald Westlake became a superstar by essentially inventing the comic crime novel. If Garner wanted a book that was so politically incorrect that people would throw it against a wall today, why not Bill Maher’s True Story, a rank and filthy and actively funny book that caught the real world of young comics on the road better than anyone else ever will. I bet more people in 2024 care about comics than Wall Street Yuppies.

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Considering the Donald Trump trope in American Psycho, I don’t feel we can dismiss its relevance in our current culture.

43

Paperback Writer by Mark Shipper. A hilarious fictional account of the Beatles’ rise to fame…and their 1979 reunion album.

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‎Nitpick: John Kennedy Toole

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England, Their England by A. G. McDonnell.

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Bank shot

47

Very true. Whenever I see Trump I want to laugh hysterically.*

* Linked to the wrong person. This was meant for @Little_Nemo.

Stephe, Paperback Writer was definitely a good book.

Made me think of Great Jones Street, an early novel by the great DonDeLillo, mostly about Bob Dylan. More weird funny than ha-ha funny.

48

I wore those books out. If you can read them for the first time without a belly laugh, you’re broken.

49

Skipping past Pratchett and Adams, it’d be Hughart’s Bridge of Birds for me.

50

I will also nominate PJ O’Rourke. Holidays in Hell is awesome and non-partisan. Although not a novel!

51

I’ve really enjoyed Jason Pargin’s books also. Even the titles are funny!
Books by David Wong (Author of John Dies at the End) | Goodreads

52

I didn’t post this because I thought we were restricted to post Catch-22.

YES! Mark Twain can be amazingly funny. I strongly recommend my personal favorite Roughing It. Laugh Out Loud material that was written over 150 years ago. Of course it was only 110 years old the first time I read it. I never get tired of re-reading it.

53

From this list I’ve read Heartburn and The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, age 13 3/4.

The funniest book I’ve ever read is Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s also one of the best books I’ve ever read.

54

His essays, “The Awful German Language”, and “James Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” are hysterically funny.

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A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh.

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Haven’t read The Awful German Language but agree about the Fenimore Cooper piece. Twain makes you literally laugh out loud.

57

I can thoroughly recommend Tom Holt.
A british author, very much like Terry Pratchett, he writes “mythopoeic novels (which
parody or take as their theme various aspects of mythology, history, or literature
and develop them in new and often humorous ways)”, a number of historical novels and
comedy fantasy.

58

Time for another plug on the SDMB for my all-time favorite: Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York. I don’t think I’m alone in identifying with hapless Sheila who’s looking for life in all the wrong places.

59

If I was in one of my more patrician moods I would have nodded to something by PJ Wodehouse or Mr. (harrumph) Waugh, but all I gotta really add was how annoyed my stepmom got (while vacationing with the old man in Hawaii back in early 70s) on the beaches of Waikiki as he wouldn’t stop laughing while reading Catch-22.

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Enjoy!