22 of the Funniest Novels Since Catch-22 (according to the NY Times)

i think Stanley Elkin might be my fave funny serious writer. The Magic Kingdom is a very funny book about terminally ill children going to Disney World. its amazing. but all his books are so funny. Peter Devries might be second on my list. and then maybe Bruce Jay Friedman. i dunno. there are lots of funny writers out there. Harry Crews used to make me laugh. and Barry Hannah. Lydia Davis can give them all a run for their money though.

Mark Leyner was so funny at his best! just saw him mentioned above. I loved the t.v. comedy writer Jack Douglas when I was a kid. The Neighbors Are Scaring My Wolf is a very influential book to me. Nobody reads him anymore though. and all his books are out of print. there are lots of people like that. funny people lost to the sands of time.

did they do the 1961 thing for that list so that the whole list wasn't Wodehouse? because he is still so very funny. i would swap out one of those on the list for one of the early funny lorrie moore books. they were so funny! i don't know if martin amis has ever made me laugh. i think david lodge has.

I think it's specifically meant as a list of books that are "funny" in a "RIYL Catch-22" sort of way. Unclear why that particular book is the benchmark.

Here, you will not find books stuffed with jokes. For the most part, our picks will not induce knee slapping. (“Any man who will not resist a pun will not lie up-pun me,” the great Eve Babitz wrote.) The humor these authors embrace traverses the gamut, from sardonic to screwball, mordant to madcap, droll to deranged. Writing in Heller’s shadow, but in an idiom all their own, these novelists apply his satirical tool kit — along with their own screwdrivers and shivs — to whole other categories of human experience, from race and gender to dating, aging, office cubicles and book publishing itself.

Don't need a consensus, but would be cool to see ILBer's personal top fives...

Think I wrote somewhere that much of my favourite literature/films/TV/music could be described as "wildly ambitious supposed works of comedy which I don't find funny at all but which create worlds to explore" - don't know if there's a word for this, but it seems to be the key to getting into new things for me.

I once recommended Mark Leyner to a friend, back in like 1996. He hasn't trusted me since.
Every time i try to recommend any book to him, his standard response is "this isn't another 'corn dog' book, is it?"

the back end of antkind by charlie kaufman is insane, like i dont know what im reading (& ive read it twice) but notwithstanding that it is an incredibly funny book

i've never read Catch-22. i must have been absent from class that month. i've never read Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death either.

it wasn't until i actually found an early copy of Slaughterhouse-Five that i discovered that it came out in 1969! for some reason i thought it came out in the 50s.

I did read half of Something Happened once. Always meant to go back to it. That book is crazy. In a good way, I think.

I haven't read most of these, but I gotta say that The Sellout is one of the funniest books I have ever read.

one literary funny book i like is Comemadre by Roque Larraquy.

it is about a machine that cuts peoples' heads off.

"Simply THE funniest science fiction book ever written"

John Sladek is forgotten, I guess, but The Reproductive System is really funny.

Not forgotten by me, although I haven’t read that one yet.

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Grebt turnout!

Huh, I've read a couple of Baker's novels but not that one. Guess I should give it a shot.

I'm definitely going with the first Alan Partridge novel, I, Partridge: We Need To Talk About Alan. Maybe the humour's too British for American audiences, but it had me laughing like a lunatic for hundreds of pages. I don't suppose I'd find many of the books in the NYT list very funny at all.

And what about Thomas Bernhard? Or Michel Houellebecq?

Ah, it says the funniest novels in English. So that rules out Thomas Bernhard and Houellebecq.