Oh, Kayaker, you wound me !
I scrolled all the way through, just to see how long it would be before someone mentioned Jerome K. Jerome’s comic masterpiece, and what to I find? There is actually a person in the world who doesn’t like Three Men in a Boat ! It boggles the imagination.
For the record, I have read, re-read, quoted and guffawed over Three Men in a Boat for at least 50 years, and am close to tears every time I read the tinned pineapple scene.
Maybe it’s just my low sense of humor.
I should also note that many years ago I gave a copy of P.G. Wodehouse’s Leave it to Smith to a friend who was about to have a baby. She told me later she was the only one in Labor and Delivery who was laughing out loud.
To each his own, I guess. My gf read a novel she absolutely loved, and anxiously awaited me finishing what I was reading so I could read the book she enjoyed so much.
I forced myself to finish The Devil In The White City by Erik Larson. I hated every page.
To each his own of course. I’ve read a lot of Jerome K Jerome and enjoyed all of it. Three men on the Bummel (where they tour Germany on bicycles) is incredibly funny too.
I did allude to (Jerome)^2 in my brief discussion of the German language. It is dated but still quite amusing.
I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that autocorrect “fixed” “Psmith.” It tried for me just now.
Yeah not a fan. And….Elwood is genius. Straight up.
Nitpick: it’s non-fiction, not a novel.
(And for the record, I liked it.)
Since we expanded to anything funny every published, this might be a good spot to plug my new website, GreatForgottenHumorists.com.
I haven’t mentioned my humor collection here for a while, but it’s extensive. Thousands of books, basically every book of humor or about humorists in the 20th century. Fiction is not included, though there’s a fine line between humor and fiction.
None of the names I’ve started the site with are mentioned here. They’re truly forgotten. Yet the ones in the opening - George Ade, Richard Armour, Will Cuppy, Corey Ford, Oliver Herford, and Charles Wayland Towne - were literally bestsellers and widely and wildly famous in their day.
And I’m working on a big article about Chic Sale, whose little book The Specialist has sold 2,600,000 copies over the years. Really. A thousand quatloos to anybody who’s even heard of it.
And I threw in articles on rare oddities like Quick Books and Fishlove’s Hollow Books.
I think the site is finally just past beta so it looks ok. If you find any glitches anywhere, pm me. Thanks in advance.
Around 20 years ago I had someone [French] explain to me how German is suited to philosophy and dreams, while French was best for science and precision.
I didn’t like it, either. Larson has written some good books, but this wasn’t one of them.
That’s amazing. I love Larson’s work, and that one might be his best. But as already noted, it’s non-fiction, not a novel, and it’s not a humourous work. I thought the intertwining of the two stories was masterful, and the story of the massively challenging creation of the 1893 Chicago World Fair is fascinating in its own right. The book was a winner or shortlisted for some dozen awards.
A couple from Stephen Leacock (Canadian humourist):
Literary lapses (1910) and Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912).
The second is a novel, the first a collection of short pieces.
Both very funny.
Leacock is funny. But to this day and to my amazement, people from Bradford to Barrie to Orillia often get mad at his portrayal, written a century ago.
Do they really? A shame. Leacock is very good.
“She was as graceful as a meridian of longitude.”
“He threw himself from the room, flung himself on his horse, and rode madly off in all directions.”
I visited his house–gotta be forty years ago now. Ah yes, I remember it well.
I came along to mention Sharpe and Canadian Mordecai Richler. Both have several very funny books.
Sharpe’s works had him deported from South Africa. The first paragraph of Indecent Exposure may give a hint why.
It was Heroes Day in Piemburg and as usual the little capital of Zululand was quite unwarrantably gay. Along the streets the jacarandas bloomed unconscionably beside gardens flamboyant with azaleas while from a hundred flagpoles Britons and Boers proclaimed their mutual enmity by flying the Union Jack or the Vierkleur, those emblems of the Boer War which neither side could ever forget. In separate ceremonies across the city the two white communities commemorated ancient victories. At the Anglican Cathedral the Bishop of Piemburg reminded his unusually large congregation that their ancestors had preserved freedom from such assorted enemies as Napoleon, President Kruger, the Kaiser and Adolf Hitler. At the Verwoerd Street Dutch Reformed Church the Reverend Schlachbals urged his flock never to forget that the British had invented concentration camps and that twenty-five thousand Boer women and children had been murdered in them. In short Heroes Day provided everyone with an opportunity to forget the present and revive old hatreds. Only the Zulus were forbidden to commemorate the occasion, partly on the grounds that they had no reputable heroes to honour but for the most part because it was felt that their participation would only lead to an increase in racial tension.
This isn’t a novel exactly. It’s sort of a parody of self-help books. It’s from before Catch -22. I don’t remember it that well, since I only read it once long ago. But I remember finding it hilarious:
The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship by Stephen_Potter
Agreed. Literary Lapses was his first book, and I believe it was self-published. Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town could be regarded as a humourous novel, but as the title implies it’s really a series of sketches tied together by a common thread, a sweetly funny examination of the foibles of a small town that is actually as gently loving as it is satirical. Another one that’s extremely funny is Nonsense Novels, which satirizes different styles of popular fiction. Another short story collection tied together by a common theme is Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich, in which the satire is rather more biting than Sunshine Sketches.
If you’re not familiar with Wodehouse, be aware that his writing is all about the English aristocracy, so it’s full of butlers, footmen, personal valets like Jeeves, and elegant country houses like Lord Emsworth’s castle. A lot of what he writes about is what Wodehouse once called the “knut”, a now-archaic Edwardian term for an idle upper-class man about town, like Bertie Wooster and all his friends.
So Wodehouse may not be for everyone, although not being familiar with that environment is no big obstacle because you soon catch on – like the fact that multi-day visits to large country houses are a routine part of the aristocratic social life, and that dinners are elaborate multi-course affairs for which one dresses in formal wear, with the assistance of course of one’s personal man-servant. And if that man-servant happens to have an enormous brain like Jeeves, he also serves to apply his intellectual prowess to getting you out of the latest fix you’re managed to get yourself into, such as accidentally getting engaged!
Also be aware that there’s much, much more to Wodehouse than just Jeeves and Wooster. There are three books’ worth of Mulliner short stories that I think are even funnier, plus all the Blandings novels and short stories featuring the dreamy peer Lord Emsworth, the Drones Club stories (where all the knuts hang out and throw bread rolls at each other) and the hilarious Ukridge stories. Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge is one of the boys but suffers from constant money problems because his wealthy aunt refuses to support his decadent lifestyle, so he’s always hatching get-rich-quick schemes. The very best of these (called, I believe, something like “A Home from Home”) is about Ukridge being left to look after his aunt’s mansion while she travels abroad, and proceeding to turn it into a luxury rooming house, a plan which proves successful and lucrative until the aunt’s unexpected return.
Nonsense Novels! I couldn’t remember that title–thanks for supplying. (Not sure why I didn’t just look it up, but…I didn’t)
And I am not familiar with Arcadian Adventures. I’ll have to see if I can get ahold of a library copy. Thanks.
Dialect humor is rightfully disparaged by people today. But there are always exceptions.
Leo Rosten as a young man taught English as a Second Language courses in New York in the 1930s, then full of Eastern European immigrants struggling with the language. He listened, as well as Twain parsed eight different accents for Huck Finn.
He wrote, under the name of Leonard Q. Ross, a series of short stories for The New Yorker about one such class. The mainstay was the irrepressible Hyman Kaplan, whose mangling of the English language was toweringly great, even more so than the others who suffered through the course with him. Each accent was meticulously delineated.
The stories were celebrated and collected as The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N, after the way Mr. Kaplan wrote his name, in three colors, on every paper. I remember thinking these were the funniest short stories ever, but I haven’t reread them in the recent climate. Another set of stories, The Return of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N appeared under Rosten’s real name later but didn’t have the same sparkling magic.