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I have to agree with you Biblio. This was the funniest book I've ever read. I'm actually getting ready to read it again to put some laughter back into my days. I've been feeling far to serious lately. My husband doesn't get my love of the book since he was one who couldn't make it through it. He tends to think it is nonsense, and I'm laughing at so much of the book while reading him funny passages. He just ignores me now when I have it out.Quote:
Originally Posted by BibliophileTRJ
all Discworld novels! especially the older ones. the new ones are cool too and I like them better on the whole, but the older ones are full of puns and thinly-veiled irony about English/ British cultureQuote:
Originally Posted by BlueSkyGB
For me it would probably be Don DeLillo's White Noise (even if I hated a lot of the book, the funny parts were hysterical), The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and.. I have to admit The Adventures of Tom Sawyer made me laugh out loud a few times as well.
Definitely Hitchhiker's Guide.
That is the first thing I thought of, but in addition I would also sayQuote:
Originally Posted by botkin
The Hounds of the Morrigan by Pat O'Shea
Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins
The Legend of Nightfall by Mickey Zucker Reichert
Lysistrata - the women try to stop the war by not sleeping with their husbands.
Don Quixote - as mentioned previously. This book is great.
I found Shakespeare's Love Labors Lost a delightfully funny play
David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. Probably the funniest book I've ever read.
Hitchhikers!:thumbs_up
Yes Hitchhiker's was really funny.
Has anyone else read or seen "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: Abridged" by the Reduced Shakespeare Company? Not literature particularly, but it really made me laugh a lot.
Morte D'Urban by American writer J. F. Powers is very funny. It isn't a novel, however, that many people have heard of apparently. It received the National Book Award way back in 1962
The novel is about a Catholic priest, Father Urban, and his dealings with other priests in the Order of St. Clement. Father Urban is ambitious, which isn't perhaps the best attribute for a priest to have. He gets banished, so to speak, to a small parish in rural Minnesota. Power's sense of humor is dry, but he tells a very good story.
Though not a prolific writer, Powers also wrote short stories and one other novel.
Youth in Revolt. C.D. Payne
Hello everyone!
93
Name 4 pieces of writing that made you laugh. :)
The Rape of the Lock (Alexander Pope)
Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll)
The Adventure of the Kind Mr. Smith (W. J. Locke)
He Went Out to Buy a Rhine (Robert Graves)
93 93/93
FenellaLovell
The Possessed
I totally second The Rape of the Lock.
There's another poem that I read in one of the poetry books I have, and it goes like this...
There's the wonderful love of a beautiful maid,
And the love of a staunch true man,
And the love of a baby that's unafraid,
All have existed since time began.
But the most wonderful love, the Love of all loves,
Even greater than the love of a Mother,
Is the infinite, tenderest, passionate love
Of one dead drunk for another....:D
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
Le Petit Nicolas (René Goscinny and Jean-Jacques Sempé)
I'm sure there are some more, but those are the two that first comes to my mind.
Don Quixote!! What a blast.
Molloy - Samuel Beckett
The Catcher in the Rye- J.D. Salinger
The Sun Also Rises- Ernest Hemingway
I've been having trouble with a fourth. I'll second Don Quixote!
Bored of the Rings. It is advised that one not eat or drink while reading it, because of the risk of choking.
Here's six:
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy -Adams
Sotweed Factor - Barth
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead - Tom Stoppard
Twelfth Night - William Shakespeare
Mason and Dixon - Pynchon
Pnin - Vladimir Nabokov
Don Quijote definitely.
Vile Bodies makes me laugh out loud and so has some Pratchett.
I didn't really find Carroll's Alice stuff funny.
Nick mentioned Molloy. He is right, that opening novel of Beckett's trilogy is very funny (in the way Waiting for Godot is funny.) But at the very same time, his work as a whole is melancholy, "nihilisitic." To be able to pull this off without depressing the entire world is a rare gift, indeed.
I see the same thing in Mark Twain, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Kurt Vonnegut.
Matt Beaumont: e. - a novel of liars, lunch and lost knickers
Matt Beaumont (again): Staying Alive
Tom Robbins: Fierce invalids home from hot climates
Maria Dahvanah Headley: The year of yes
Stuff by Nick Hornby usually makes me laugh out loud. Some of his books annoy me, but even then I usually laugh.
sogladatay
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams
Cat's Crade by Kurt Vonnegut
Confederacy of dunces
Lucky Jim by Kingsly Amis is hilarious.
Hey wait a minute, we've had the subject of this thread before. I remember bringing Lucky Jim up. While I'm at it, books by David Lodge are extremely funny too.
I got a real kick out of the Canterbury Tails
I found The God Delusion hilarious.
Top of the list would be Good Omens by Pratchett and Gaiman
in addtion, just about everything I have read by Tom Robbins, though I would have to say I think Still Life With Woodpecker, and Skinny Legs and all thus far were my favorites.
And I thought that the Hounds of the Morrigan by Pat O'Shea was pretty funny.
The Legend of Nightfall, my all time favorite fantasy book by Mickey Zucker Reichert also had a touch of comedy to it.
Candide
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Cat's Cradle
Wow! I just realized that most of the stuff I read is not all that humorous. That's going to change.
Catch-22 (Heller)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll)
most of Jane Austen's are fun
Pale Fire (Nabokov) made me laugh when I realized in the end it was all hoax
Good call. As I was reading this string and was assembling my list I overlooked Wodehouse. Jeeves is a hoot.Quote:
Originally Posted by mickeymack
I'll have to look those up, thank you! Read this one if you haven't already. http://www.lahacal.org/gentleman/twain.htmlQuote:
Originally Posted by Jean-Baptiste
He wrote instructions on how to rescue a lady from a burning building. :lol: It's absolutely hysterical.
Let's see, books...
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which everybody and their grandmother has mentioned already. XD
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy. Sir Percy in his fop-mode is priceless, as is Marguerite's encounter with this one disgusting innkeeper and the snuff/black pepper incident. (Never snort pepper, folks.)
Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. I didn't care for Holden as a person, so for me this book was mostly a good source of schadenfreude. I'm a horrible person. :thumbs_up
A Patchwork Planet, Anne Tyler. A former derelict tries to get his life back in order.
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee. Scout is just too funny. XD
Hamlet, Shakespeare. Hamlet's one-liners are pretty good.
Three men in a boat, jerome k jerome
Catch 22, Heller
Gridlock and another set in Australia [can`t remember title] Ben Elton
Gormenghast 1&2, Mervyn Peake
The Importance of being Earnest by Oscar Wilde.
Or any of Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, he's just so funny.
Ah, my first post - how very exciting!
The Diary Of A Nobody - actually made me hoot with laughter
Twelfth Night - Malvolio stuff is brilliant
Brideshead Revisted - Anthony Blanche is so funny. Every word he says makes me giggle naughtily.
However, Catch 22 just wound me up. By the end of the book i thought i was going mad - i used to hurl it across the room in sheer frustration!
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth
James Fennimore Cooper's Literary Offenses -- Mark Twain
Sick Puppy -- Carl Hiasson
Cat's Cradle -- Kurt Vonnegut
Second the vote for P. G. Wodehouse
A Confederacy of Dunces too.
Gulliver's Travels -- Swift