Funny novels

[blackhorse]

I'm looking for recommendations of humorist author's. I've just about exhausted my P.G. Wodehouse collection and am now on the look-out for other hilarious comedic writers who are or could be considered benevolent/objectivist friendly when it comes to writing funny stories.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Blackhorse,

The following books by Lawrence Sanders are not exactly comedy, but if you enjoyed the story "Good Copy" by Ayn Rand, Sanders's highly benevolent upbeat main characters remind me a great deal of the sense of life portrayed in it. And there are some very funny passages.

The entire Archibald McNally series.

The Tenth Commandment with the delightful (and small) Joshua Bigg.

Other books by Sanders are excellent crime mysteries, if you like that genre, or some rather weird ideas I don't recommend too much, like The Seduction of Peter S., where oodles of women go chasing after the guy for no apparent reason, inverting the standard male-female attraction roles.

There are several books in the McNally series, so if you like one, you can buy others (there are about 13).

Michael

[Reidy]

Robert Rodi writes thickly-plotted farces that I can recommend. He addresses a gay audience, but you don't have to be gay to enjoy them (just so you'll know what's up when the librarian / bookstore cashier gives you a certain look). My favorite is Kept Boy. Drag Queen, Closet Case and Fag Hag are also worth reading. The last takes place in the libertarian / survivalist milieu. I didn't enjoy the last one I saw, Bitch Goddess, a roman à clef about Joan Collins.

Edited January 31, 2007 by Reidy

[reason.on]

I thoroughly enjoyed John Kennedy Toole's, "A Confederacy of Dunces" when I was in college.

I've always kind of thought of the book as the smart-mouthed cousin of "The Fountainhead" (which I read much later in life). Instead of guideposts to greatness and happiness, *A Confederacy of Dunces* presents the negative, guideposts to insignificance and misery (it is a satire).

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

A Confederacy of Dunces is a novel written by John Kennedy Toole, published in 1980, 11 years after the author's suicide. The book was published through the efforts of the writer Walker Percy (who also contributed a revealing foreword) and Toole's mother, quickly becoming a cult classic. Toole won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981. It is an important part of the 'modern canon' of Southern literature.

The title derives from the book's epigraph by Jonathan Swift: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." (Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting)

The story is set in the city of New Orleans in the early 1960s. The central character is Ignatius J. Reilly, an intelligent but slothful man still living with his mother at age 30 in Uptown New Orleans, who, because of family circumstances, must set out to get a job. In his quest for employment he has various adventures with colorful French Quarter characters.

RCR

Edited January 31, 2007 by R. Christian Ross

[omphalos]

It's odd, but the two funniest books which came to mind are both about immigrants.

The Inscutable Americans by Anurag Mathur

and

Sour, Sweet by Timothy Mo.

The Inscrutable Americans is probably the funnier of the two, esp. if you have some experience w/ Indian culture or have lived there for a while.

Neither book pokes fun at America or its immigrants, but rather you're laughing with the characters as they acclimate to life in the USA.

Edited January 31, 2007 by omphalos

[Ross Barlow]

P. J. O’Rourke is not a novelist, but the man makes me laugh like few other writers.

Warning: He is profane and irreverent.

*Parliament of Whores* (1991) is an excellent indictment of how special interests capture government power in a mixed economy. Some of the particular issues are dated but not the principles involved. I think he works with Cato now.

*Republican Party Reptile* (1987) is my all-time favorite compilation of his essays. Next to that is *Holidays in Hell* (1988). I have missed most of his later books, mainly because a lot of bookstores will no longer carry such politically incorrect stuff.

-Ross Barlow.

P.S. – I love P. G. Wodehouse.

[Chris Grieb]

P J is still profane and he does work at Cato. He was on Book TV for three hours last month. I would recommend watching him in place of the guy who say 9-11 happened because of sex and Rock & Roll.

[Robert Jones]

I'm a huge fan of Christopher Buckley, esp. "Little Green Men," "God Is My Broker," "Thank You for Smoking," and "Florence of Arabia." His books are wonderfully cynical, sort of like Billy Wilder's movies, and he's much more a libertarian than his father.

[Chris Grieb]

I meet Christopher Buckley at Cato when P J O'Rourke spoke. He is much more libertarian than his father.

[Charles R. Anderson]

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis was funny and enjoyable.

I always enjoyed Mark Twain and O'Henry.

[Ross Barlow]

Evelyn Waugh’s *The Loved One* (1948) satirizes the American funeral business and English ex-pats in America. If you like English humor (humour?), try this short novel.

-Ross Barlow.

[Rich Engle]

P.J. for sure. Just the stuff in Esquire magazine alone is worth its weight in gold. The old stuff he did in National Lampoon rocked. The books are wonderful, what couple I've read.

I don't know about O-friendly, but you can't go wrong for yucks reading Hunter Thompson books. Not so much the early stuff like "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"...go for the essays, and his later books.

Philip Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint" is one of the funniest books I've ever read, to this day.

A good taste of Hunter is the eulogy he wrote for Nixon "He Was A Crook" Try this on and see if you like:

http://www.counterpunch.org/thompson02212005.html

A little taste from there, Thompson goest tiger-style:

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.