Books that make you laugh

[Mr. Tea]

Oh, I forgot: these are great, too:

Crap Towns: the 50 Worst Places to live in Britain

The Law Of The Playground

And this could be the funniest book I've ever read:
Real Ultimate Power: The Official Ninja Book

From here: http://www.realultimatepower.net/

 

[h-crimm]

pull up dat dostoevsky

"I am a sick man, I am an angry man, I am an unattractive man. I think there is something wrong with my liver."

If the "notes from a rathole" fans are still around.
You need to go back to the 1913 version, trust me.

"I am ill. I am full of spleen and repellent. I conceive there to be something wrong with my liver, for I cannot even think for the aching of my head. Yet what my complaint is I do not know...."

 

[petergunn]

If the "notes from a rathole" fans are still around.
You need to go back to the 1913 version, trust me.

funny how translations make so much difference... i've read a few versions of Celine's "journey to the end of the night" and some are so vanilla compared to others...

 

[rewch]

rabelais seconded... just in to book iv of gargantua & pantagruel...

tristram shandy definitely but i hadn't realised until reading gargantua & pantagruel quite how large sterne's rabelaisian debt was...

three cheers for three men in a boat

 

[Sick Boy]

Nietzsche: any book really.
His rhetorical questions and grandiloquent vitriol are hilarious.

"I fall unawares into an Anacreontic mood. Nature, which gave the bull his horns and the lion his chasm of teeth, why did nature give me my foot? ... To kick, Holy Anacreon! and not only for running away; for kicking to pieces these rotten armchairs, this cowardly contemplativeness, this lascivious historical eunuchism, this flirting with ascetic ideals, this justice-tartuffery of impotence!"

Justice-tartuffery of impotence. Bars.

 

[luka]

i was about to say nobody but then i saw what sickboy said and remembered the chapter headings of nietzsches autoiography
'why i am such a genius' etc i dont hold it in contmept. i sort of relate to it, its knowing and very funny, and also at least half serious.

 

[craner]

Classic.

 

[slim jenkins]

Read "Fairytale of New York" by JP Donleavy

Yes to that.
And 'The Pickwick Papers'.

I don't buy 'comic' novels but Donleavy had me laughing out loud, really.

 

[hucks]

And I think Gogol and especially Daniil Kharms are really really funny, but I don't laugh out loud, somehow. .

I really like Kharms, but yeah, it's more smiling than laughing out loud

The Best of Miles by Flann O'Brien made me laugh so hard it hurt, though. And I probably only got about a third of the jokes, cos I don't speak gaelic. And wasn't living in Ireland in the 1940s. Or any time since, for that matter.

 

[Kate Mossad]

Get In The Van - Henry Rollins
The Confessions Of - Aleister Crowley
Take It Like A Man - Boy George

 

[grizzleb]

Classic.

Used to make me cry with laughter. Want to read them again but I'm afraid it might ruin my memories of it.

 

[cobretti]

Roger's Profanisaurus.

 

[craner]

It really wouldn't: it would enhance them. I think that edition has a good claim to being the greatest Asterix book of all, though this is an endlessly contested subject.

 

[BareBones]

That nietzsche quote is amazing. i've never read any nietzsche before, should i?

tao lin's "Eeeee Eee Eeee" consistently made me laugh out loud.

 

[swears]

Infinite Jest, particularly Michael Pemulis: "This is like, fucking elegant, man."

 

[BareBones]

i was gonna say IJ but i've already gone on about it loads and didn't want to repeat myself. but yeah, definitely. that whole eschaton section is one of the funniest things i've ever read.

 

[empty mirror]

Rabelais - Gargantua and Pantagruel
Swift - Gulliver's Adventures

i've loved the bits of rabelais that i've read

i very nearly just started on Gulliver's... but picked up Flannery O'Connor instead

And, Moby Dick. Seriously there is some funny funny shit in that book. just don't expect it to be about a whale.

moby dick was a riot. particularly the first few chapters.

i just read Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer
it was funny and wild

dfw's essays are hilarious

the good soldier svejk is easily the funniest book i've ever read
insanely funny

i want to say i laughed at a lot of vonnegut books but i fear that they haven't held up since i haven't read him since i was a teenager

 

[Corpsey]

Woody Allen - Without Feathers
Flaubert - Madame Bovary
Swift - Gulliver's Travels
The Onion - Our Dumb Century
Colemanballs vol 1-2450

Armando Iannucci's book has some great bits in it but is somewhat inconsistent.

 

[luka]

do you lot actually laugh when you read these books? out loud? cos ive read a lot of these books and maybe a thin smile played across my lips a couple of times but nothing i'd actually describe as laughter..... moby dick? gulliver? dickens? i hope youre not the sort of people that laugh ostentaiously during peformances of shakespeare

 

[Benny Bunter]

I find George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series hilarious and entertaining. They're about the continuing adventures of Harry Flashman, the cowardly bully of Tom Brown's Schooldays fame. Not only are they funny but also educational as he gets to meet all the leading men and women of the 19th C as well as tries to escape from every shocking battle and filthy dungeon of same. Some of them are eye-openers esp. when you connect them with present day stuff, such as Afghanistan, slavery, colonialism etc (if you're as ignorant as me, that is).

..

My housemate is obsessed with the Flashman books, I'm sure I'll get badgered into reading them at some point. I do find those sort of Victorian-era intrepid explorers and adventurers hilarious. I thought Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was really funny for that sort of thing.

And I always get a good laugh out of a lot of Bukowski's stuff, even if he is a bit of a horrible c**t.