Funny Recommended Reading

[TheRabidWalnut]

To go alongside all the other recommended reading threads - I thought I'd start this one, with only one rule!

If the book didn't make you laugh, you can't post it here

Lets have the obligatory:-
Anything by Terry Pratchett
Anything by Douglas Adams

Any my choices:-
Are you Dave Gorman by... Dave Gorman. It truly is a magnificent tale of obession and adventure! (It says so right on the cover)

Grave Peril bu Jim Butcher. Going to a Vampire's maskerade dressed as a bad b-movie vampire cracks me up.

[Icewalker]

How about books that are only comedic, ie, America; The Book.

[Sewer_Bandito]

Any book with the words "Dave Berry" written on it.

[DreadArchon]

I don't usually do funny...

Hmmm, Nuklear Age (http://www.amazon.com/Nuklear-Age-Brian-Clevinger/dp/0595325114/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-0613444-3738824?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1183560064&sr=8-1) comes to mind.

It's a tale of incompetence in the face of adversity.

Or is it a story of adversity in the face of incompetence?

Well, anyway, there's a robot, a giant monster, a line of evil toys, a mind control plot, sub-orbital death beams, kidnappers, bad movies, a super powered gang, an usurper, and a maniacal villain hell-bent on world domination.

Not all at once, though. I mean, really, could you imagine coordinating the fight scene? Or reading it? You'd have to take notes just to keep track of who hit what and why.


Everything else on my bookshelf is pretty serious.

[LCR]

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole!

[Hermit]

Tom Holt's written some rather funny stuff. Paint Your Dragon and Valhalla come to mind, though I've read most of his books and enjoyed them all. Recently read the first in a series of four books he's done about a firm of wizards providing various magical services, which was good too.

[lacesmcawesome]

Any book with the words "Dave Berry" written on it.

Quoted for Mega-Truth

Also, the ENTIRE Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series... except for maybe "Young Zaphod Plays it Safe" which is a weird short story that kinda sucks.

[Jorkens]

Anything by Flann O'Brien (aka Myles na cGopaleen).

But particularly The Third Policeman (the jacket describes it, accurately, as "a thriller, a hilarious comic satire about an archetypal village police force, a surrealistic vision of eternity, the story of a tender, brief, unrequited love affair between a man and his bicycle, and a chilling fable of unending guilt") or At Swim Two Birds, (a bit harder to understand than Finnegan's Wake but a damn sight funnier) or the collection of his newspaper articles, The Best of Myles.

Once you get into his sometimes rather deadpan absurdist humour, it's among the funniest things you'll ever read. I want to put a quote up to illustrate this, but it doesn't really work in isolation, without enough to absorb you.

Oh, I'll give it a go. From the frontpiece of The Third Policeman:

Human existance being an hallucination containing in itself the secondary hallucinations of day and night (the latter an insanitary condition of the atmosphere due to accretions of black air) it ill becomes any man of sense to be concerned at the illusory approach of the supreme hallucination known as death.
- DE SELBY

[smellie_hippie]

Zelazney: Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming, If at Faust You Don't Succeed and A Farce to be Recond With.

An excellent trilogy.

[Frosty Flake]

'Might Is Right' by Ragnar Redbeard (a penname, I think). I don't even know if it's serious or not but when I read it I was rolling in the grass laughing in the middle of a park with tears in my eyes... I never actually could finish it.

[Faramir]

Anything by PG Wodehouse.

[StupidFatHobbit]

Anything by PG Wodehouse.

Damn it, I thought I'd be the first to say Wodehouse! I like the Jeeves and Wooster books/short stories best, followed very closely by the Blandings books.

Early/mid Terry Pratchett. His more recent books don't do much for me. I think "Good Omens" is much funnier than anything Pratchett has come up with on his own. I liked Douglas Adams when I was a kid but now it's sort of ... meh. I guess my tastes have changed.

John Steinbeck's "Cannery Row." It's not all humour, but the funny parts are awesomely funny and the rest is poignant in a good way.

I'd say Oscar Wilde, but most of his funniest stuff was quotations, not actual books or stories, except for a few like "The Canterville Ghost." I wish he had written more humour.

"The Devil's Dictionary" by Ambrose Bierce is always good for a laugh or two thousand.

Mark Twain, of course.

Dave Barry.

[dish]

Much stuff I find funny has already been suggested, but how about Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome? Classic comedy.

[Argent]

Hard to find because most of her stuff's out of print, but Esther Friesner, beginning with "Elf Defense."

[waspsmakejam]

"And to My Nephew Albert I Leave the Island What I Won Off Fatty Hagan in a Poker Game" by David Forrest

I love that book, hysterically funny.

And another vote for Wodehouse.