I thought about mentioning Ade, Cupy, and Armour, whom I’ve read, but I don’t really find them laugh-out-loud finny. Same for H. Allen Smith.
They were truly of their time. Ade’s satire of his times is only occasionally relatable today. Cuppy’s masterpiece was The Decline and Fall of Practically Everyone. His other books don’t live up to it. Armour is like a late-night comic. Nobody can make that volume of jokes all work, but the good ones make up for the meh.
I suffer from the fate of oversatiation. I don’t laugh out loud at anything anymore, even live stand-up. I maybe nod and think, good one. But when I see a good one I want to tell people about it. Nobody has thoroughly written up these people; that makes them irresistible. And nobody should deny their historical importance even when they no longer provoke ROFLMAO responses.
Yes! Psmith.
If not autocorrect, then it was a mortifying lapse on my part, especially given how often the main character mentions that “the P is silent.” Ouch !
I like his meeting with the ghost of the Cardiff giant. Only it’s the ghost of PT Barnum’s replica giant, not the original, itself a phony. Or something like that 
I’m still not sure what my favorite funny novel is—there are probably a number of them I’m not remembering right now. But a couple that I don’t think have been mentioned yet in this thread:
Alice’s Adeventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll): probably the first novel (at least in the broad sense of book-length fiction) I read that made me think, “Hey, this is funny!”
Wobegon Boy (Garrison Keillor): probably my favorite of Keillor’s books.
I adore Armour’s retelling of literature. “Friar Lawrence is President of the Optimist Club of Verona” will never not make me laugh. Somehow my friends and I stumbled on him in high school and our essays on MacBeth were heavily influenced by him.
One of my favorites is Charles Portis’ “True Grit”.
I also enjoyed a lesser-known Portis novel,“The Dog of the South”. In that one, protagonist and narrator Ray Midge underakes a “journey at the age of twenty-six from Little Rock (Pulaski County) deep into Central America to British Honduras (Belize), to get back his Ford Torino, his American Express and Texaco credit cards, his shotgun, his good raincoat, his tape recording of Professor Buddy Casey’s lecture at Ole Miss on the Siege of Vicksburg, and his wife Norma, all of which he says were stolen from him by Guy Dupree, Midge’s unhinged colleague on the copy desk of a Little Rock newspaper.”
I have a fond memory of part of the road trip in which Ray was driving a car which had seen better days. There were multiple holes in the floorboards, and it was discovered that at a certain highway speed, gum and hamburger wrappers and other lightweight detritus would remain perfectly suspended on air currents within the vehicle.
I’ve only read a few books by Christopher Moore. The Stupidest Angel was the funniest so far.
Wait until you read Lamb. Or Fluke. Or Island of the Sequined Love Nun.
(What? Me hype an author I love? Never.)
I don’t know if anyone else thinks this, but Albert Camus has been funny to me in a strange way. The Fall is particularly odd. It almost feels like a really drunk George Costanza or a proto Zapp Brannagan or something like that. The Stranger also by Camus was that way too. They call him a moralist. These two books were basically monologues of two quite possibly very disturbed characters.
There’s also The Wasps by Aristophanes. That shit was funny and I may be nuts for saying so. Such a strange sense of humor that I may no longer have access to since I last read it earlier in my life.
Based on this thread I picked up my first Moore book, A Dirty Job, and simply love it.
Six chapters in it was only LoL once, but the writing is so captivating. I got sucked in by the first paragraph and now I can’t tear myself away.
IMO, not quite the clever turn-of-phrase of Pratchett but moves the story along at a better pace.
And I am a big fan of Pratchett’s DEATH books, so this is a great starter book for me.
Interesting to see Goodreads take on the funniest novels is much closer to your choices than the NYTs oddly curated list.
My favorite line: “I thought there would be more color.”
I think the books on the NYT list had to be funny and literarily significant. You know, important.
I did notice that the title of this thread asks for your “favourite funny novel,” while the list is titled “22 of the funniest novels…” These are not the same thing: “funniest” implies that we should be judging just on the single dimension of how funny the novel is.
And because humor is so subjective, a list like the NYT one is less than useless.
For example, I personally find Douglas Adams to unbelievably over-rated. But that’s just me. Millions find him excellent and hysterical, which is wonderful for them and his estate. Both co-exist without conflict. I would find a list from the NYT useful only in the negative.
This is a good point.
My favourite is Metzger’s Dog, by Thomas Perry. I’ve read it several times.
I haven’t read any of them, and hadn’t ever heard of most.