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Laugh Out Loud Funny

Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Dirk Gently series - Douglas Adams
Discworld books - Terry Pratchett
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Only Forward - Michael Marshall Smith
Collected Short Stories - Saki
The Man who was Thursday - G.K. Chesterton (an odd one, but the grand chase scene had me in stitches!)
 
actually there were some lines in War and Peace that made me laugh. I can't remember them though and I'm not reading again any time soon. It was great though.

Terry Pratchett
Jack Vance - Tales From A Dying Earth (the Cugel stories)
 
He was mentioned in passing, but I'll highlight him again - the person who unfailing has me in stitches is Bill Bryson. My favourite is 'Notes From a Big Country', which is bite-sized essay-style writing that you can dip in and out of.
 
Catch 22

:D
Themistocles said:
In an anarchic, black kind of way, yes. It's an utterly disjointed, at times incomprehensible, story, but brilliant nonetheless.
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very true - this is very dry and witty book (just finished reading it yesterday) and as Themistocles says - sometimes incomprehensible - but one of the best none the less.
 
Some comedy Malcolm in the Middle books, they also do a show on it too, but I'm sure many know that.
Well the books are funny, just like the show.
 
Oh dear... how could I have forgotten...

The Sot Weed Factor by John Barth is one of the funniest, cleverest books I have ever read.

:D buddi
 
Oh wow, I didn't realise there were Malcolm in the Middle books! I think that programme's hilarious! I'll have to buy the books I reckon.

Catch-22, I've only read the once but I thought it was pretty funny (in a serious way). I'll have to read it again very soon I reckon - I'll probably get more of the jokes aswell now that I'm a little older (and possibly wiser).

My standout funny book was The Catcher in the Rye though. The first couple of times I read that I was laughing myself inside-out most of the time. I'm reading it at the moment now, but I'm not really finding it all that funny. I suppose it's because I know exactly what happens and also I think I'm a more serious person since I read it last. Hmm...
 
Glad to see someone reference Bill Bryson, a very funny "travel" writer.

I find myself chuckling often whenever reading a Spenser novel by Robert Parker. Bad Business, his latest, is particularly funny in its plot (not the usual case as far as the humor goes), where he is hired to follow an adulterer and runs into other private eyes who are tailing the woman the adulterer is meeting and the woman who hired him. Parker is a master of the repartee of the hard-boiled detective and the humor is abundant.

O
 
Right now I'm reading Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair, which is both highly original and very, very funny. And the good news is, there three more books in the series!

Cheers
 
Glad to see Wodehouse mentioned, even if only briefly and seemingly somewhat hesitantly.
The Jeeves series in general is just a total riot, as far as I'm concerned. Dated? Eh, I don't really think of that in novels, probably because I admittedly do read a lot of older novels, and like to be taken into those times.
What makes Wodehouse so wonderful to me isn't the comedy of the tales, so much as the marvellous way he spins the English language around. There's nothing, I believe, that makes me laugh as much as reading Wodehouse tends to do. Naturally, one might need a very dry sense of humor for it to appeal though.

I've picked two random(ish) Wodehouse quotes from a website, just in case anyone's curiosity might be piqued:

Honoria . . . is one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welter-weight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge.
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He trusted neither of them as far as he could spit, and he was a poor spitter, lacking both distance and control.
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Back on page 1 Tom Sharpe got a mention for Wilt but I'd reccomend any of his books. My first wife banned me from reading them in bed because the laughter was a bit disruptive to her sleep patterns.
David Nobbs: A Bit Of A DO, Reginald Perrin, Second To Last In The Sack Race. A wonderful, very british author.
And I recently read a biography of Anthony Burgess that made me laugh out loud but I suspect that that was just me.
 
Øystein said:
Glad to see Wodehouse mentioned, even if only briefly and seemingly somewhat hesitantly.
The Jeeves series in general is just a total riot, as far as I'm concerned. Dated? Eh, I don't really think of that in novels, probably because I admittedly do read a lot of older novels, and like to be taken into those times.
What makes Wodehouse so wonderful to me isn't the comedy of the tales, so much as the marvellous way he spins the English language around. There's nothing, I believe, that makes me laugh as much as reading Wodehouse tends to do. Naturally, one might need a very dry sense of humor for it to appeal though.

I've picked two random(ish) Wodehouse quotes from a website, just in case anyone's curiosity might be piqued:
Click to expand...

Yes! I agree completely. Wodehouse is mentioned (by me, among others) in the Stephen Fry thread somewhere.

He is so SILLY!!
 
The first one that comes to mind is "Raised Eye Browns" (I believe thats the name) the arthur had been Groucho Marx's secretary when he was younger.

The other one where I did laugh, and the book was a lot of fun to read is called "Wolf" by last name is Margolis. He is a dog trainer in Los Angeles and basically its situations he ran into as a dog trainer. In fact, he had a half hour show on public TV.
 
I loved Wodehouse. I read him because I heard somewhere that Douglas Adams was a huge fan, and I really enjoyed it. Very clever, innocent fun.

Cheers
 
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