Best Humor Books 2024By Sara Humor is subjective, but there's no denying the power of a good laugh. A funny book can brighten your day, lift your spirits, and leave you with a newfound appreciation for the absurdity of life. Whether you enjoy witty observations, laugh-out-loud slapstick, or clever satire, there's a humor book out there waiting to become your new favorite. To help you find your next literary giggle fest, we've compiled a list of some of the best humour books of all time. From classic novels like "A Confederacy of Dunces" to contemporary memoirs like "Bossypants," these books are guaranteed to tickle your funny bone. Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband? By Lizzie Damilola Blackburn (2022) Yinka wants to find love. The problem? Her mum wants to find it for her. When Yinka’s cousin gets engaged, the aunties are desperate to help her find a date to the wedding, but Yinka is taking matters into her own hands. Themes of self-esteem, self-love and faith are explored, all done in a cleverly amusing way that means you will whip through this – and I’m sure you’ll recognise some overbearing relatives along the way. A Guide to Midwestern Conversation, by Taylor Kay Phillips Taylor Kay Phillips’s A Guide to Midwestern Conversation is a wildly entertaining, precisely critical, and lovingly mocking taxonomy of the people of “flyover country.” Of her own quintessentially midwestern brethren, Phillips (a staff writer at Last Week Tonight With John Oliver) breaks down the elements of the aggressively normal — those friends, relatives, and acquaintances who are content to drive around, eat a lot of casseroles, reluctantly entertain guests, engage in gift-giving one-upmanship, and never ever say what they’re thinking or feeling. If you have a passive-aggressive person in your life, even if they aren’t from the Midwest, you will find A Guide to Midwestern Conversation rather cathartic. The Snapper by Roddy Doyle (1991) Few people have written with as much zest and fun about modern Irish identity as Dubliner Roddy Doyle. In his marvellous Barrytown series the dialogue around the Rabbitte family in The Commitments, The Snapper and The Van crackles with life, humour and tenderness. Doyle has also written highly amusing children’s books, incidentally, especially The Giggler Treatment. The Time Meowchine: A Talking Cat’s Y2K Quest to Save the World, by Marty Beckerman What can I, as a critic, tell you when the book’s subtitle lays everything out so bluntly and hilariously? You’re either going to read this right now or permanently reject it with disgust over its dad-joke title and spoofy sci-fi elements. Clearly influenced by The Time Machine and Slaughterhouse-Five, it’s actually a well constructed time-travel novel with a palpable authorial commitment to eliminating paradoxes and plot holes so common in the genre. Dr. Tara Switcher lives in 2040 in a hellish, post-climate-change world with a robot cat. That timeline is the result of the book’s other timeline, which begins in 2000, where Tara is a Nader-loving young environmentalist living amid Y2K anxiety. Thanks to her talking cat and brilliant technology, Tara might be able to reverse global and personal catastrophe by changing the past. It’s funny but poignant, ridiculous but bittersweet. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾ by Sue Townsend (1982) “I have never seen a dead body or a female nipple. This is what comes from living in a cul-de-sac,” writes teenage diarist Adrian Mole, whose angst was universal thanks to the ironic wit and sharpness of social observation in Sue Townsend’s joyful The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾. The novel provides pure pleasure, not only in Adrian’s hapless pursuit of the Pandora Braithwaite, the girl with the “treacle-coloured hair”, but also in the depictions of marital disasters and suburban idiosyncrasies. Funny You Don’t Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials, by Jennifer Caplan It’s a cliché, if not a cringey joke at this point, to mention how humor is a big part of Jewish culture; Caplan’s history of comedy as it relates to the 20th-century Jewish experience is as entertaining as its subjects, examining how the last few generations of Jewish Americans have held humor in high esteem and use its tools to express cultural identity. Funny You Don’t Look Funny reveals that as the Jewish American community has changed, American comedy developed in parallel. Early 20th-century entertainment was very racially and culturally targeted — vaudevillian, ethnic-based humor and early sitcoms like The Goldbergs, for example. But 100 years later, because of mainstream entertainers whose Jewish identity influenced and permeated their works, which carry on the tropes of Jewish humor — Joseph Heller, Larry David, and the Coen brothers, in particular — Jewish comedy is American comedy. The Collected Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker (1944) Dorothy Parker was a trailblazing Jazz Age humourist who purveyed her jocularity in short stories, poems, screenplays and criticism. Her highly original rapier wit is as fresh and challenging now as when she was freelancing for the newly inaugurated New Yorker magazine in 1925. Among her memorable one-liners was “What fresh hell is this?”, words she uttered whenever the doorbell rang that remain as entertaining today. Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere, by Maria Bamford This memoir from the dazzlingly singular comic Maria Bamford is the backstory to her act, the setups to all her jokes and bits based on personal interactions with friends, relatives, and enemies. Turns out, Bamford’s onstage persona is very similar to her real self, at least according to Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult. Both Bamfords are forever self-analyzing, trying to find a reason for their shared perceived weirdness. And here is the record of that journey. Bamford has involved herself in numerous self-help programs, communities, and healthy activities, all of which she feels meet the definition of a cult. This book is a life story, but one where the author is more interested in the “why” of her past than the “how.” Packed to the rafters with hilarious, shocking and cringe-worthy anecdotes, this book reads like a joy-ride through Daisy’s life – and what a ride it is. From accidentally auditioning to be a pole-dancer to trying to reach the afterlife in the back of a pub, it feels like Daisy – who found fame writing and starring in hit BBC series This Country with her brother – was born to make us laugh. She also talks brilliantly on what it was like growing up with her mad family in rural poverty and trying to make it in an industry that often felt like it didn’t have space for her. Griefstrike! The Ultimate Guide to Mourning, by Jason Roeder It’s relatively easy to make fun of death. It takes true nuance and comic skills to skewer the deeply unpleasant and universally human experience of grief. Roeder, who’s previously written for The Onion and McSweeney’s, is up to the task with Griefstrike! -- a memoir in the form of a third-person faux manual. Roeder wrote the book as part of his own process in coming to terms with the loss of his mother, which serves as a selfless public service to those who need it. Humor can and should be defiant and transgressive against the overwhelming forces that dictate our lives, and there’s nothing more imposing than death, which we fearfully romanticize. (To wit: the “Surefire Eulogy Starters” Roeder offers, including “I’m going to keep this short, as my mother always said my speaking voice was a source of humiliation and sorrow.”) While earnestly offering legitimately helpful advice, Roeder shows readers that there’s a way to grieve beyond weeping one’s way through self-help manuals — that one can process it through laughter, an emotional response almost as powerful as sadness. Here, the reader laughs with the dead and grief-stricken, never at them. Grown Ups by Marian Keyes (2020) A family party often makes for the most entertaining of settings, and Grown Ups by comedy queen Marian Keyes is no exception. Three brothers and their three respective wives and children are all gathered for one such event – but when one of the wives accidentally hits her head, she can’t help but spill all of the family secrets. It’s the characters in this story that make it so unbelievably funny, and Keyes is just as brilliant at writing them all, from the the very youngest to the grandparents. Misfit: Growing Up Awkward in the ’80s, by Gary Gulman Gary Gulman’s memoir is a two-for-one deal. Three-quarters or so is a collection of hilariously self-deprecating anecdotes and episodes about a well-lived upbringing, the theme of which is that the author was an old soul, an old man and unabashed fraidy cat dealing as best and as detached as he could from whatever life threw at him in the 1980s. As if to prevent the rosy-glassed nostalgia from taking over, and in a move that reflects his light-dark stage act, Gulman intercuts the whimsical delightfulness with a through-line of a contemporary — and devastating — depressive episode. Misfit is thus transformed from one of the funniest memoirs in years into a harrowing account of mental illness, too. Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938) With Evelyn Waugh, readers are spoilt for choice, because his novels Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, The Loved One and Decline and Fall (jestful from the opening page) all fizz with waggish genius. However, we’ve gone for Scoop, a cracking satire about the world of newspapers. Waugh perfectly skewers a Fleet Street baron (Lord Copper, owner of The Daily Beast), while protagonist William Boot, the nature columnist mistakenly sent to cover a conflict in the African Republic of Ishmaelia, is a marvellous comic creation. Waugh was an expert at characterisation, making us laugh in fiction that was, paradoxically, full of profound wisdom and insight. Escape From Hawaii: A Tropical Sequel, by Jack Handey With definitive Saturday Night Live sketches like “Toonces the Driving Cat” and “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer,” writer Handey proved himself a master of short-form comedy, and with “Deep Thoughts,” he showed he could do ultra-short-form comedy, too. He pretty much invented the Twitter joke. Somehow, Handey took that format — a whimsical paragraph setup that finishes in a hilarious, original, and absurd punch line — to long-form fiction, first with his 2013 novel, The Stench of Honolulu, and now with the sequel, Escape From Hawaii. To tell a story with beats and character development in which every paragraph includes amusingly circular wordplay, a laugh-out-loud quip, or both is a feat of high-level humor craft. Those jokes serve the already very funny plot, in which the obliviously annoying protagonist “Wrong Way Slurps,” imprisoned due to the events of The Stench of Honolulu, attempts to flee. In this narrative, Hawaii is a hellhole of a nightmare world, a land full of giant owls, sexy turtle-people, and predatory helicopter companies. And then there’s the actual hero and breakout character of Escape: Don, Slurps’s old frenemy, reimagined as a sentient and scrappy shrunken head. Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse (1934) P.G. Wodehouse remains to many the most celebrated comic novelist of the 20th century. There were 96 Wodehouse books published in the Guildford-born author’s lifetime, and he was still working on a story when he died in 1975 at the age of 93. There is a vibrant, stylish energy to the goofball relationship between the valet Jeeves and the idle Bertie Wooster, and fans of Wodehouse’s escapist novels, including the captivating Right Ho, Jeeves, relish the Edwardian slang – “cove”, “blighter”, “snifter” – that peppers Great Falls, MT: Fast Times, Post-Punk Weirdos, and a Tale of Coming Home Again, by Reggie Watts The rhythms, spontaneity, and wide-eyed curiosity of Watts’s singular musical-comedy act work monumentally well as a book. The experimental bandleader from Comedy Bang! Bang! and The Late Late Show doesn’t get deep and personal very often, but he does in his warm and often suddenly funny autobiography, less of a memoir and more a tribute to the people, places, and things that inspired his art and made him whole. Most affecting: Watts’s visceral and immersive first-hand account of the ’90s grunge boom and the comedy scenes from later in that decade along with some sweet and honest passages about his parents. The Burnout by Sophie Kinsella (2023) Sophie Kinsella has long been a trailblazer in the romantic comedy genre. Across all her work, you can’t help but laugh with (and sometimes at) her flawed, funny and relatable female protagonists. Her latest work, The Burnout, is no exception. It follows Sasha, a woman who is exhausted by her life and signs up for a wellness retreat. While there, she meets a fellow burned-out guest who has his own unorthodox methods for recovery. Kinsella tackles a timely topic with her quintessential wit, in this gorgeous love story. Kind of a Big Deal: How Anchorman Stayed Classy and Became the Most Iconic Comedy of the Twenty-First Century, by Saul Austerlitz Anchorman is one of the last great broad, blockbuster comedies, densely packed with over-the-top characters, jokes, catchphrases, and set pieces. It’s great to see it get the full, exhaustive, appreciative analysis and oral history, a treatment afforded to all iconic cultures. Saul Austerlitz was the perfect author for the job; he’s a comedy history professor and wrote Generation Friends about Friends. He takes comedy seriously and respectfully, but also lovingly and critically, the right approach for Anchorman, which, Austerlitz posits, was a flash point for funny films. Anchorman was clearly a blast to work on and a labor of love for star-writer Will Ferrell and director-writer Adam McKay. It was also difficult to make but allowed collaboration and improv, revolutionary concepts in filmmaking in the 2000s. Kind of a Big Deal also details in slow motion the schism brewing between Ferrell and McKay. One guy wanted constant, glorious, ridiculous jokes; the other wanted to take down society’s toxic dinosaurs. Anchorman has both, of course — as much anchor fights and jazz flutes as it does thoughtful commentary on gender politics and toxic masculinity. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932) The humour of talented female authors was often underplayed in the 20th century but one book was acknowledged by contemporaries as a comedy classic - Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm. It is a subversive, witty story about teenage orphan Flora Poste and her stay in Sussex with the doomed Starkadders. It's a book that has stood the test of time, with The Sunday Times calling it "probably the funniest book ever written." Hi Honey, I’m Homo!: Sitcoms, Specials, and the Queering of American Culture, by Matt Baume Baume is a pop-cultural chronicler with a focus on LGBTQ history and TV, and in Hi Honey, I’m Homo he lays out — with authority and a deep love — the enormous and crucial role that mainstream sitcoms played in increasing visibility, tolerance, and acceptance for gay and lesbian Americans. It’s a fascinating, and downright inspiring, look at the ways cornball sitcoms either expressly included coded messages, subtext, and characters that marginalized groups could identify with, like the witches who must keep their identities secret on Bewitched. Who even knew that a fine but forgettable show like the cop comedy Barney Miller (1975-1982) featured one of the longest-running and most richly developed plot arcs about a gay couple in TV history to that point? This says nothing of the bold allyship of The Golden Girls, or how Will and Grace and Modern Family showed middle America that coastal LGBTQ people were just, like, people. Hi Honey, I’m Homo is a heartbreaking historical document, but ultimately one that will leave the reader feeling proud of how something as maligned and disposable as the network sitcom used comedy to bring about such profound and important social progress. Related Articles:
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