Book Thread Spin-off - The Funniest Books

ninetyeightytwo 2017-03-20 20:10:40 UTC #1

Some of the funniest books I've ever read:

Kingsley Amis - Lucky Jim
Charles Dickens - David Copperfield
Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
Patrick De Witt - Ablutions
Douglas Coupland - JPod
Sue Townsend - Adrian Mole: From Minor to Major
John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces

So what are the funniest books that YOU'VE read?

pinkybrain 2017-03-20 20:13:10 UTC #2

Peter Kay- the sound of laughter

cutthelights 2017-03-20 20:13:34 UTC #3

Catch 22
The Ginger Man
Hitchhikers Guide

ninetyeightytwo 2017-03-20 20:14:08 UTC #4

The one where he's dressed as Maria on the front! What a riot.

Antpocalypsenow 2017-03-20 20:15:27 UTC #5

The Sellout - Paul Beatty

badcustard 2017-03-20 20:17:49 UTC #6

PG Wodehouse: Literally any book by PG Wodehouse
The Fist of Fun novelty cash in book
Adrian Mole

kiyonemakibi 2017-03-20 20:20:41 UTC #7

Joseph Heller - Catch-22
Bill Bryson - Notes From A Small Island/Neither Here Nor There
Woody Allen - Complete Prose (yeah, I know...)

NotEvenDreams 2017-03-20 20:22:12 UTC #8

The Thought Gang - Tibor Fischer
Holidays in Hell - PJ O'Rourke

drspaceman 2017-03-20 20:22:51 UTC #9

A Comedy of Errors (in Shakespeare's tongue).

Another vote for A Confederacy of Dunces and Catch 22...

Gert 2017-03-20 20:25:53 UTC #10

Ginger Man seconded along with lots of other Donleavy!
Actually all your choices are on the money.

Ruffers 2017-03-20 20:25:57 UTC #11

Seconding Catch 22 and Lucky Jim
Also So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away by Brautigan, very beautiful and bleak at points but the bit where he's interviewing the hamburger chef practically had me on the floor laughing. Also any of the memories of the fat fishing couple who brought their entire lounge to the lake kept getting funnier every time he went back to it.

keith 2017-03-20 20:26:12 UTC #12

Apathy and Other Small Victories by Paul Neilan is my All Time Book.

Gert 2017-03-20 20:26:31 UTC #13

Ayoade on Ayoade

Ruffers 2017-03-20 20:27:28 UTC #14

Going to order this now!

cutthelights 2017-03-20 20:28:13 UTC #15

Donleavy lives up the road from my family home! He's in his nineties and pretty eccentric. Johnny Depp visited him years ago to talk about making a movie of The Ginger Man but nothing ever came of it

ttf 2017-03-20 20:49:54 UTC #16

coupland is my all time favourite but j-pod is the first book of his I couldn't even follow, like it didn't coalesce in my head as a comprehensible story, might be because it was after the point my attention span atrophied to its current state.

Been a while but I remember thinking Happiness TM by Will Ferguson was pretty funny at the time

shinymcshine 2017-03-20 20:50:10 UTC #17

Homeland by Sam lipsyte is fucking brilliant. Get it et, folks.

shrewbie 2017-03-20 20:52:24 UTC #18

BS Johnson - Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry
anything by Magnus Mills especially Restraint of Beasts
Samuel Beckett

desertshore 2017-03-20 21:02:22 UTC #19

gargantua and pantagruel

three men in a boat

a confederacy of dunces

most jack vance and robert aickman stories

dingaling 2017-03-20 21:03:50 UTC #20

Catch 22 is funny? Shit, I just assumed it was really po-faced and boring! That's why I never read it!

Everything Is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer*
Under the Net - Iris Murdoch
The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman - Bruce Robinson

*until the suckerpunch that left me sobbing myself to sleep one Christmas, lol