# Remarkable (Funny) Books



## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

Some books have made me laugh now for scores of years. Every time I pick one of them up, I'll start reading or browsing through them and it starts all over again. Mind you, personal idiosyncrasy in deciding what's funny is probably even more extreme than deciding what's music or what's good music. But I think the book I'll reference now is a howl and sometimes brings tears to my eyes.

The slender volume entitled _N'Heures Souris Rames_, sometimes called The Coucy Castle Manuscript, purports to be painstakingly detailed translations of medieval French poetry, the minutiae of which are supported by exquisitely detailed and scholarly footnotes.  The translator and annotator of this treasure-trove of works previously unknown to modern scholarship is the gifted writer, editor and himself a poet, Ormonde de Kay. I picked up this book many years ago in a small bookshop, having read Barbara Tuchman's _A Distant Mirror_, about, among other things, the Count of Coucy. I started to browse through _N'Heures Souris Rames_, read a few of the poems in their original French and the English translations of M. de Kay, then glanced down at the footnotes of one of the poems, and saw, with growing delight, that I had latched onto a masterpiece of inspired leg-pulling.

I will say no more here, other than that the book was published in 1980 by the firm of Clarkson N. Potter, Inc.


----------



## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

Encouraged by the overwhelming wave of interest in my previous selection of a funny book (well I think it's funny), the Coucy Castle Manuscript, I submit next three books by Englishman Stephen Potter, a singularly keen observer of human behavior. He wrote and published these guides to personal success, _Gamesmanship, Lifemanship,_ and _One-Upmanship_, between 1948 and 1952. Gamesmanship is fully titled: The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship, or, The Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating. Excellent advice is offered on how to so dispirit, vex, or misdirect opponents in commonly-played games, that victory is easily achieved. Perfectly idiotic illustrations accompany the text.

Potter turned from games to everyday life itself in the next two volumes: how to drive a car and impress or frighten your passengers; how to travel by train; how to woo a member of the opposite sex; how to suggest that you are a skilled mountaineer even if you are terrified of heights; how to spend a weekend in the country as a guest and make everyone else feel that you had a better time than they did. His chapter on how to annoy people with your views on classical music is especially relevant. Again, idiotic illustrations illuminate the text. I date myself by saying that I loved Potter's works at first sight and at an early age indeed, and they have given me decades of pleasure and laughter.


----------



## Belowpar (Jan 14, 2015)

I do love a funny book so thank you for this. Will download the Gamesmanship book for an August holiday (pretty sure with a little searching there will be a legal free copy as its likely out of copyright). Not sure why I've never read it before as it pretty well known unlike your first choice.

The 3 books I remember laughing hardest at.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentlemen_Prefer_Blondes_(novel)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Confederacy_of_Dunces

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porterhouse_Blue

Although it's been several years since I've read them they do all seem relevant to day. Enjoy.


----------



## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

Belowpar said:


> I do love a funny book so thank you for this. Will download the Gamesmanship book for an August holiday (pretty sure with a little searching there will be a legal free copy as its likely out of copyright). Not sure why I've never read it before as it pretty well known unlike your first choice.
> 
> The 3 books I remember laughing hardest at.
> 
> ...


Thanks for the suggestions. The Loos book I've certainly heard of; any book involving H.L. Mencken will be of interest. I read Dunces, but, alas, it did not take. It irritated my pyloric valve. The Porterhouse Blue is unknown to me, so I'll give it a try also. Senses of humor are so variable that we should not be surprised at anyone's reaction to someone else's choices (though Morimur's gift often tickles my funnybone).


----------



## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

I suspect most people have never read a truly funny novel, so they avoid threads like this or, if pushed, name drop boring classics. You keep hearing that Cervantes is funny and possibly the greatest novel ever written, but I'm from the internet generation, so I found it lame and a bore (at least for the fifty pages that I persisted in plodding through it).

Now for an actually intelligent & amusing novel, I'd nominate In Viriconium by M. John Harrison. I've been desensitised to funny and I laugh, in a sort of empty fashion that you do after laughing too much too often, several times every day, but this book is still funny to me.


----------



## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

P.S. I can't edit my message and I just now realised you intended this thread to be about weird, probably non-fiction books that are funny. Hmm, can't think of anything, sorry.


----------



## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

Chordalrock said:


> P.S. I can't edit my message and I just now realised you intended this thread to be about weird, probably non-fiction books that are funny. Hmm, can't think of anything, sorry.


Funny is funny, whether fiction or "fact". No filter intended. If you have funny, bring it on!


----------



## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

My taste in humor leans strongly toward the inane, the idiotic, the inexplicably and uniquely bizarre. No cartoonist better exemplified bizarre than the mysterious B. Kliban, the Frank Zappa of cartoonists, the prince of pen and ink surrealism. In a series of books published by Workman Publishing starting in 1977 with _cat_, Kliban offers drawing after drawing, many of which lack any captions or dialogue whatsoever, but which are truly inane. Subsequent books included _Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head, Whack Your Porcupine, Tiny Footprints,_ and _Two Guys Fooling Around with the Moon_. The cartoonist Larson owed much, much of his style, appeal, and success to B. Kliban--you can see the influence immediately. I will offer no examples here of Kliban's work, but would suggest _Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head_ as the quintessential Kliban book. The first time I read Never, I felt I was in the presence of someone with a unique mind.


----------



## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

Strange Magic said:


> Some books have made me laugh now for scores of years. Every time I pick one of them up, I'll start reading or browsing through them and it starts all over again. Mind you, personal idiosyncrasy in deciding what's funny is probably even more extreme than deciding what's music or what's good music. But I think the book I'll reference now is a howl and sometimes brings tears to my eyes.
> 
> The slender volume entitled _N'Heures Souris Rames_, sometimes called The Coucy Castle Manuscript, purports to be painstakingly detailed translations of medieval French poetry, the minutiae of which are supported by exquisitely detailed and scholarly footnotes. The translator and annotator of this treasure-trove of works previously unknown to modern scholarship is the gifted writer, editor and himself a poet, Ormonde de Kay. I picked up this book many years ago in a small bookshop, having read Barbara Tuchman's _A Distant Mirror_, about, among other things, the Count of Coucy. I started to browse through _N'Heures Souris Rames_, read a few of the poems in their original French and the English translations of M. de Kay, then glanced down at the footnotes of one of the poems, and saw, with growing delight, that I had latched onto a masterpiece of inspired leg-pulling.
> 
> I will say no more here, other than that the book was published in 1980 by the firm of Clarkson N. Potter, Inc.


That's a clever book! There's an excellent Shakespeare one; I'll look up the title when I get home.


----------



## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

Belowpar said:


> I do love a funny book so thank you for this. Will download the Gamesmanship book for an August holiday (pretty sure with a little searching there will be a legal free copy as its likely out of copyright). Not sure why I've never read it before as it pretty well known unlike your first choice.
> 
> The 3 books I remember laughing hardest at.
> 
> ...


I like Tom Sharpe, but I found both Porterhouse and Grantchester Grind (the sequel) grim and not funny - groaning under as much pointless, arxane and archaic ritual as Gormenghast. Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure really are brilliant; Sharpe has a target worthy of his satiric gifts: Apartheid South Africa.

Couldn't get through Confederacy of Dunces.

I'd recommend:
Wodehouse. Ring for Jeeves; The Code of the Woosters; 'Uncle Fred Flits By', and any of the Blandings novels with him in; 'Honeysuckle Cottage'; 'Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court' (which has a beautiful poem about slaughtering gnu); Hot Water
Gerald Durrell. My Family and Other Animals; Birds, Beasts and Relatives; The Garden of the Gods. 
Terry Pratchett - anything from Wyrd Sisters on
Stella Gibbons: Cold Comfort Farm
Sellar and Yeatman: 1066 and All That
George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman books - and The Pyrates!
Frederick Crews' Pooh Perplex and Post-Modern Pooh, in which AA Milne's bear undergoes critical analysis 
John Dickson Carr - detective writer, but several are howling farces with brilliant, fairly clued solutions (The Blind Barber, The Arabian Nights Murder, The Punch and Judy Murders)
Jasper Fforde
Spike Milligan's Puckoon (and, even though it's radio, The Goon Show)
Evelyn Waugh: Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, The Loved One
James Thurber's 'Macbeth Murder Mystery'
Douglas Adams : The first two Hitchhiker's books, and Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. The later ones are too cynical and misanthropic (especially Mostly Harmless) - and I've been cornered too often at parties by geeks whose idea of conversation is Hitchhiker and Monty Python references

Non-fiction:
Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue 
Mary Roach's Stiff


----------



## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

SimonTemplar said:


> I like Tom Sharpe, but I found both Porterhouse and Grantchester Grind (the sequel) grim and not funny - groaning under as much pointless, arxane and archaic ritual as Gormenghast. Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure really are brilliant; Sharpe has a target worthy of his satiric gifts: Apartheid South Africa.
> 
> Couldn't get through Confederacy of Dunces.
> 
> ...


The problem with Pratchett and other low-brow humorists is you have to grimace more often than you get to laugh. I've found more luck with writers who aren't explicitly humorists, but just happen to have humor in their works.


----------



## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

SimonTemplar said:


> That's a clever book! There's an excellent Shakespeare one; I'll look up the title when I get home.


_Guillaume Chequespierre and the Oise Salon_, by John Hulme.


----------



## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

Chordalrock said:


> The problem with Pratchett and other low-brow humorists is you have to grimace more often than you get to laugh. I've found more luck with writers who aren't explicitly humorists, but just happen to have humor in their works.


Not sure whether 'low-brow' is the term for a writer who draws on science, philosophy and Shakespeare.


----------



## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

SimonTemplar said:


> Not sure whether 'low-brow' is the term for a writer who draws on science, philosophy and Shakespeare.


Well, it reads like mass-market comic fantasy with some elements of satire. It also sells like mass-market fantasy, and it seems to be read by the same people who read mass market fantasy, it's like Harry Potter of humorists, so I call it low-brow.

I didn't expect someone might disagree with me on this. Do you seriously think Pratchett was some sort of intellectual, rather than just a popular satirist and humorist? I would find that puzzling.


----------



## Antiquarian (Apr 29, 2014)

All the above posts have been helpful, bringing back to memory comic gems that I enjoy. Looking through my library, I came across a number of books by Edward Gorey, _The Unstrung Harp, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, The Utter Zoo_, and others. Not exactly novels, or typical children's books, but immensely amusing nonetheless.


----------



## Klavierspieler (Jul 16, 2011)

Me likes the good ol' _Cheaper by the Dozen_ and its follow-up, _Belles on their Toes_.


----------



## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

Chordalrock said:


> Well, it reads like mass-market comic fantasy with some elements of satire. It also sells like mass-market fantasy, and it seems to be read by the same people who read mass market fantasy, it's like Harry Potter of humorists, so I call it low-brow.
> 
> I didn't expect someone might disagree with me on this. Do you seriously think Pratchett was some sort of intellectual, rather than just a popular satirist and humorist? I would find that puzzling.


Pratchett's books aren't mass-market fantasy, certainly not in the Feist/Jordan/Howard sense. Yes, they're fantasy, and yes, his readers numbered in the millions [1], but they included people whose tastes probably didn't run to triple-decker pulp sword-and-sorcery - among them A.S. Byatt and Reginald Hill.

He was, if you like, the Dickens of our age: a genuinely popular entertainer who used his novels to say serious things.

His books burst with vitality and uncommon sense; his style was clever and exuberant, with dazzling wordplay (unsurprisingly, he admired Chesterton); and he was impressively well read - he riffs off physics, Greek philosophy and Farquhar, as well as Hollywood, musicals, Wagner and politics. His characterisation was impressive; the minor, comic characters have all the vivid immediacy of a Dickens sketch, while the major characters develop and deepen over the series.

The earliest Discworld books are parodies, but he was finding his feet; from _Wyrd Sisters_, he figures out the potential of Discworld. Later books - _Small Gods_, _Men at Arms_, _Jingo_, _Hogfather_, _Night Watch_, _The Truth_ - are complex, sophisticated books that deal with Important Themes (society, war, religion, life, death) and human emotions - and are also funny.

[1] More than 85 million books sold worldwide in 37 languages, according to Wikipedia.


----------



## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

It is clear from the above posts that there are wide differences among people as to what constitutes humor--in that sense, it's just like the situation in art and music and almost everything else in human affairs. I welcome all the suggestions, though--someone would do well to offer "samplers"--collections of bits and pieces and excerpts from funny writings gathered together like candies in a box so people could match their own sense of funny to the selections therein, and select some items or authors for further reading.

Somebody mentioned The Goon Show of yesteryear, of which Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan were mainstays and which was the precursor to the equally mad Monty Python--it's been a long time, but I remember laughing myself silly over the Goons on the radio, as I laughed over the Pythons. Carol Burnett sketches. The immortal Ernie Kovacs, with his portrayal of the noted poet Percy Dovetonsils, and music from Chinese opera while the camera shot close-ups of just someone's nose. Now that's funny! In this current vale of tears, we need funny.


----------



## Balthazar (Aug 30, 2014)

I'll second _A Confederacy of Dunces_ and throw two more into the mix:

_The Wild Party_ (a novel in verse) by Joseph Moncure March and

_Tom Jones_ by Henry Fielding.


----------



## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

Strange Magic said:


> I welcome all the suggestions, though--someone would do well to offer "samplers"


I could try doing that, but I would have difficulty deciding what amount of context is enough and how to present that context. There would also be the risk of making any quotation here stick out annoyingly if someone actually does read a book I've suggested.

I think I'd rather shield my favorites from too much promotional nonsense. If someone reads a lot and is curious, I have provided title and name of author, which should be enough. If not, then eh, not my loss.


----------



## Belowpar (Jan 14, 2015)

RE Terry Pratchett, I must admit I've avoided him despite noticing he's got quite a sophisticated following. Some prejudice I've picked up from don’t know where.

So if I were to take just one of his books on holiday it would be..?


----------



## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

Belowpar said:


> RE Terry Pratchett, I must admit I've avoided him despite noticing he's got quite a sophisticated following. Some prejudice I've picked up from don't know where.
> 
> So if I were to take just one of his books on holiday it would be..?


Small Gods. It is not part of a series (like the watch, the witches, etc) and one of his best.


----------



## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

Art Rock said:


> Small Gods. It is not part of a series (like the watch, the witches, etc) and one of his best.


Small Gods would be a good choice, but, as you point out, it's a non-series book, so mightn't be representative. Maybe The Truth or Going Postal, which are non-series books set in Ankh-Morpork?


----------



## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

Belowpar said:


> RE Terry Pratchett, I must admit I've avoided him despite noticing he's got quite a sophisticated following. Some prejudice I've picked up from don't know where.
> 
> So if I were to take just one of his books on holiday it would be..?


Good blog post on Pratchett here: http://richardhcooper.blogspot.com.au/2015/03/terry-pratchett-remembered.html


----------



## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

Strange Magic said:


> It is clear from the above posts that there are wide differences among people as to what constitutes humor--in that sense, it's just like the situation in art and music and almost everything else in human affairs. I welcome all the suggestions, though--someone would do well to offer "samplers"--collections of bits and pieces and excerpts from funny writings gathered together like candies in a box so people could match their own sense of funny to the selections therein, and select some items or authors for further reading.
> 
> Somebody mentioned The Goon Show of yesteryear, of which Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan were mainstays and which was the precursor to the equally mad Monty Python--it's been a long time, but I remember laughing myself silly over the Goons on the radio, as I laughed over the Pythons. Carol Burnett sketches. The immortal Ernie Kovacs, with his portrayal of the noted poet Percy Dovetonsils, and music from Chinese opera while the camera shot close-ups of just someone's nose. Now that's funny! In this current vale of tears, we need funny.


Peter Cook. The Frog and Peach; EL Wisty; and Interesting Facts.

And the Derek and Clive sketches are the epitome of wit and good taste.

The Two Ronnies... Crossed Lines. Barker's monologues are clever; the archaeology and Indian cooking sketches are outstanding. The Cockney rhyming slang sermon.


----------

