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

Not detecting any Magnus Mills in that list.

Really need to read Lightning Rods. The Last Samurai is many things, and one of those things is hilariously funny at times

Where's Charles Portis? Why is every book list terrible?

Also, I recently read Angela Carter's Wise Children, which is amazing, and hilarious, and this list is incredibly American isn't it

I've only read three of them. Portnoy's Complaint seemed funny when I read it, but that was a long time ago. My Year of Rest and Relaxation was pretty good but not what I would consider laugh-out-loud funny. So I guess that leaves The Sellout as my vote.

that laff riot Oscar Wao

where is A Little Life? A joek on every page.

Mrs. Caliban also just depressing.

Chris L is otm x2

tales of the city is funny but some of the later ones are funnier

(ok i just looked this up bcz i couldn't remember all the other titles and discovered ppl also say "tales of the city" to mean the entire run, which gets them off the later-funnier hook but puts them on another hook imo)

There's funny, and then there's literary novel "funny"

For "Tales of the City", they said they are counting the first three novels in the series:

You can dip into these warm, accessible, heavily peopled and sweet-and-sour novels almost anywhere, but for the purposes of this list we're going to stick with the first three, which have been collected under the title "28 Barbary Lane."

I'm going for Adrian Mole because I am a provincial middlebrow lower-middle-class gen x Englisher and that is my soul food, but I would have liked the chance to vote for Second From Last In The Sack Race or a Flashman novel or just something a bit less wry and NYT-friendly.

The "Read this if you like" hints are particularly cute. E.g. "My Year of Rest and Relaxation" is recommended for fans of:

"Chaise Longue" by Wet Leg, Trazodone, Fran Lebowitz, clean sheets, Aubrey Plaza

Some post-1961 books that deliver solid belly laughs, not just wry half-grins:

Miranda July - The First Bad Man
John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces
Sam Selvon - The Housing Lark
Iris Owens - After Claude
Hunter S. Thompson - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Mark Leyner - Et Tu, Babe and My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist
Elif Batuman - The Idiot and Either/Or
Douglas Adams - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy

wtf like someone else said where is Charles Portis

saw this list this morning and my response was that it's such a narrow concept of "funny" - it's all either very dark humor or cutting satire or somewhere in between. feels like it was written by one person based on their very specific tastes, though it appears to have multiple authors. bridget jones' diary is an amusing outlier

ffs

wtf like someone else said where is Charles Portis

a very funny novel that i never see mentioned anywhere is treasure island!!! by sara levine

Delivering out loud belly laughs via written prose is one of the rarest talents.

How can you not mention Patricia Lockwood, who is actually funny? 'Pym' is ok, it's satirical and I may have had a mental "heh" at some points, but I certainly did not laugh.

Also agree that Charles Portis is the big miss from this list.

Also:
Donald E Westlake
Carl Hiaasen
Terry Southern

The Thought Gang by Tibor Fischer
Modern Baptists by James Wilcox
Bill the Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison
The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald
Vineland by Thomas Pynchon

Much prefer Something Happened to Catch 22, tho it's prob not as funny.

At least there's no fucking Pratchett, that's something.

Lol

they definitely seem to be avoiding genre fiction unless it's a literary fiction author dipping their toes into a genre exercise

i love muriel spark, joy williams, and helen dewitt. they certainly all have humor in their writing but it's never the point of their writing. "lightning rods" is probably the closest to "funny" of the books i've read on this list but it's also very fucked-up.

Can’t remember if I’ve read Bill, the Galactic Hero, perhaps I should investigate.

I read some others of his, kind of liked the one about the Atlantic Chunnel which has different names on the different sides.

If it’s even half as amusing as What Mad Universe I’m in.

Also Patrick DeWitt's books, those always get some good laughs from me.

haven't read that particular percival everett, and it may be problematic for me personally to find his writing humorous, but also he is both funny as shit and occasionally oscar-winning

Julian Barnes’s Talking It Over would be my nomination.

Keillor would be pissed or sad not to be on this list.

I love Catch 22, and I've only read three of the ones on this list but i suspect most of them don't hold a candle to it. But it's made me realise that funny novels are pretty lacking in my reading practise, I maybe manage one a year.

Tibor Fischer, Penelope Fitzgerald, and Patricia Lockwood seconded (though TF is now a Viktor Orban loving prick). I'd add O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker and The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem. That's pretty much it!

Spark's A Far Cry From Kensington because the phrase 'pisseur de copie' now forever floats around in my head.

Fran Ross was a joke writer for Richard Pryor and that novel is crammed with lols

Didn't know that about Fischer, depressing.

Re: Bill, the Galactic Hero - my copy has blurbs from The Irish Times ("The Catch-22 of SF") and Pratchett ("Simply THE funniest science fiction book ever written", like he would know).

Never heard of Fran Ross before, thanks for the rec.

Spark's written funnier than A Far Cry from Kensington; Joy Williams' short stories are haha-funnier than her novels. Etc.

a very funny novel that i never see mentioned anywhere is treasure island!!! by sara levine

― na (NA), Thursday, 14 March 2024 19:41 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I was coming to say this. Possibly the funniest novel i've ever read.

Both The Idiot and Either/Or by Elif Batuman had a decent number of belly laughs.

This seems to be a good list of good books, but a shitty list of funny books? Seems like it's been assembled for the kind of people who laughed at every joke in a Woody Allen movie.

I'm reading and enjoying A Far Cry... but it doesn't seem especially funny ha ha.

I voted for Heartburn, which has many, many good jokes that are funny as opposed to smirky/amusing. Otherwise I'd vote for At Freddie's which has a lot of great one-liners.

As a teenager I thought Tim Sandlin's Grovont novels were pretty funny but I'm gonna guess they don't hold up that well.

Has Tom Robbins fallen out of favour? It’s been a long time since I read his books but I always thought he was extremely funny

There are some extremely depressing novels here (Mossfegh) that I’ve also found very funny so I like that about this list

i don't think i've read any percival everett but his profile in the new yorker this week is pretty funny

not mad at the list because i think i share the authors’ sense of humor and like the books on here that I’ve read, but something by sam lipsyte should be on here imo

Bizarre list, the ones of these I've read I don't think of as "funny" at all. Batuman, Confederacy of Dunces, esp. Mark Leyner mentioned above much better choices. If we were really going to do dark/wry/funny, fuck it, I'd put The Bell Jar and A Fan's Notes on this list instead of what's there.

Don't know if they're top 22 but Carl Hiaasen has some funny novels...

This is a good 'subjective nature of humour' thread because I would say Confederacy of Dunces is one of the funnier novels on the list.

i am not sidney poitier was genuinely very funny, voted for that one

i guess what irks me about the nyt is that they _are_ working within a certain niche, a genre. i like lit fic, but there's this idea that lit fic is somehow a superior form of fiction. the whole "great american novel" thing. i wouldn't claim that "hitchhiker's guide" douglas adams is one of the funniest novels of the late 20th century - the man wasn't even a novelist. at the same time i wouldn't claim it was one of the funniest _science fiction_ novels of the late 20th century...

i guess if anything i'd say lit fic has a sort of "unmarked" status. i don't like it when things are given an unmarked status.

a very funny novel that i never see mentioned anywhere is treasure island!!! by sara levine

― na (NA), Thursday, 14 March 2024 19:41 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I was coming to say this. Possibly the funniest novel i've ever read.

Grabbed this from the library, thanks for the rec!

Other lit fic that I found very funny at times - Joshua Cohen's 'The Netanyahus', Adam Levin's 'The Instructions' (I know that one is divisive and it's been awhile, but I enjoyed it quite a bit at the time).

Charles Willeford books make me laugh pretty hard, with the unpublished Grimhaven being the funniest, most fucked up attempt at career sabotage I've ever read.

Thank you o nate, for mentioning Mark Leyner. My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist and Tetherballs of Bougainville were favorites when I was younger.

Treasure Island!!! seems awesome, thanks for the rec. ILB comes through again.

i loved my cousin, my gastroenterologist on first read but every time i've thought abt picking it up again i find i'm thinking "why do i need to, i know how it works"

maybe i shd try again, it must be 30 years lol

Actually, I never read it again either! Never occurred to me to! But I did read The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack and that book is just as weird and glorious as the title makes it sound.

Can I throw an iron into the fire by suggesting this list is lacking both Tom Sharpe and James Herriot

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.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

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.

Also Patrick DeWitt's books, those always get some good laughs from me.

My Struggle is pretty funny

Otm. The “I’m Garfield” story absolutely kills

The Patridge book mentioned above is incredible — a Silmarillion-level-density of gags with an exceptionally high hit-to-miss ratio (it’s practically all hits) — it’s a staggering and freakish piece of work. I agree it’s potentially “too British” but it doesn’t do the Alan Bennett/Victoria Wood thing of over-relying on bathos.