I just logged back in to have a look around, intending afterward to find The Awful German Language afterward.
Well Done!!
Mark Twain’s essay is very amusing though my German is too weak to fully appreciate it. It reminds me of (and probably inspired) certain work by Jerome K. Jerome, George Mikes and David Sedaris. Read it for free here^ (nine pages):
^May be required to register if you visit this excellent site frequently.
Although the genre of service comedies has more memoirs than novels like Catch-22, the gold standard is The Good Soldier Svejk
That list offered up by the New York Times seems weird, inasmuch as I haven’t even heard of most of the titles. Removing the restriction of “since Catch-22” I would immediately cite my favourite humour writer of all time, PG Wodehouse. In that regard …
Thank you for mentioning the great and inimitable PG Wodehouse, not only a great humourist but a master of language who could turn a phrase like no one else. For me probably the best Wodehouse Jeeves novel is The Code of the Woosters, but to each his own. There are also numerous great and very funny Blandings novels, like Pigs Have Wings, about the scatter-brained peer Lord Emsworth, his domineering sister and delinquent brother and their various quirky guests. And of course there are many wonderfully funny novels that are “free-standing” as it were, and don’t fit into any recurring theme.
If we can branch out to short story collections, it opens up an enormous vista. As someone said, the short story is probably a better vehicle for humour than a full-fledged novel. Here Wodehouse again excels, and I’d cite the three “Mr Mulliner” collections, and the many other varied collections featuring Jeeves and Wooster stories, Blandings short stories, the Drones Club stories, and the Ukridge stories.
There’s also the many books by Dave Barry, most of which are collections of his newspaper columns, but some were written specifically as semi-fictional accounts on specific subjects, like Dave Barry Slept Here (a farcical “history” of the US), The Only Travel Guide You’ll Ever Need, and Dave Barry Does Japan, among others. Don’t believe anything you read in any of them! 
And if one can put aside his personal troubles, the humour of a younger Woody Allen – before he got old and cranky – was nothing short of pure genius. I’m referring here to the collections Getting Even, Without Feathers, and Side Effects. By the time he got around to Mere Anarchy many years later he was losing his touch, IMHO.
Me too.
Humour on multiple levels. From slapstick to dark social commentary humour.
My favorite funny novel, that hasn’t been listed yet, is: A Night of Blacker Darkness: Being the Memoir of Frederick Whithers As Edited by Cecil G. Bagsworth III, by Dan Wells. He’s not known for his humor (that I know of), but this is hilarious. Set in 1817 England, it is a horror/farce with more than a few 1817 authors as characters.
I have a copy of this, or rather, my wife does.
I on the other hand, have three different books of compilations of his columns in audio book format, great for long car-trips.
I don’t think it’s a novel, exactly, (more of a social documentary, I think) but the funniest book I have ever read was “Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About.”
Mrs Cretin introduced me to Wodehouse with Pigs Have Wings, which led to my binging on PGW’s complete bibliography. Loved nearly all of it but Pigs Have Wings will always be my favorite.
Heartily agree about the three Woody Allen books cited. (Not novels, however.) “Pure genius” indeed. There was a time when his standup, movies, and books were very funny.
Clearly, @TreacherousCretin, you are a gentleman and a scholar of impeccable taste! 
Yup…no question. Nothing else comes close for me. I’ve read it a few times. Listened to the BBC Radiophonics Workshop version many, many times. Seen the movie. Seen the TV version. Never gets old, never fails to make me laugh (the movie was the worst of them, the only one I am not keen on watching again).
Some may know Tom Sharpe through his Wilt series (even a film of the first one), but his two South African-set novels, Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure, are hilarious send-ups of Apartheid-era small-town society, especially the police.
After reading the Herriot books in the US (and excerpted in Reader’s Digest) with their treacly hymn-derived titles (“All Creatures Great and Small”, etc.), it was shock to me when I visited the UK and found the same books for sale there with completely different titles and cartoony covers
It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet
Let Sleeping Vets Lie
Evidently there was a UK film based on the first book, and using the title “It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet”, released in 1976 and accentuating the comic aspects:
So in the US the Herriot books are good, wholesome family-friendly entertainment with occasional humor and pathos, taking place in the exotic world of the British countryside. In the UK, these re comic novels with occasional sides of pathos, taking place outside the city.
Very different takes on what is basically the same material.
Much of the humour comes from the fact that most of his hilarious observations apply equally well to English; it is not precisely about German, except, of course, the parts where he touches upon German literature and culture and style.
However, I love Twain and he is very amusing, but languages are not intrinsically funny, German no more so than English or French or Italian, therefore how far can he really take the joke? He is clever, but to me it is not that side-splitting to hear how some languages have irregular verbs or grammatical gender and come to the astonishing realization that English shares some of these features as well.
I second Carl Hiassen’s novels. I think the one I laughed at hardest and longest was Tourist Season, where the “revolutionaries” fed out-of-staters to a crocodile.
Robert R McCammon’s Gone South is both hilarious and touching. If you’re not in tears by the time you finish reading it, there’s something wrong with you.
More UK Herriot covers
It’s kind of jarring nowadays to read his observation that German is poorly suited for describing violence because its phonology is so soft and gentle.
It’s not the language itself – it’s the way Twain describes it.
“We were in the awful presence of the German Language. When you see a literary German dive into a sentence, that’s the last you see of him until he emerges from the other side of the Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”
Surprisingly, that’s not from A Tramp Abroad or any of his novels set in Germany, but from a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I guess he thought it was too good a line to not use, even if he had to shoehorn it into the book.
More Herriot UK titles
The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith is a good’un.
Tobias Smollett is always good for beaucoup yoks as well.