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What is the one passage in any book that has made you laugh the most?

Jonbo

Jonbo

New Member
Edited this because I changed my mind!

It has to be

"Racism was not a problem on the Discworld, because -- what with trolls and dwarfs and so on -- speciesism was more interesting. Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green."

Taken from Terry Pratchett's "Witches Abroad"
 
The Hatter was the first to break the silence. 'What day of the month is it?' he said, turning to Alice: he had taken his watch out of his pocket, and was looking at it uneasily, shaking it every now and then, and holding it to his ear.

Alice considered a little, and then said 'The fourth.'

'Two days wrong!' sighed the Hatter. 'I told you butter wouldn't suit the works!' he added looking angrily at the March Hare.

'It was the BEST butter,' the March Hare meekly replied.

'Yes, but some crumbs must have got in as well,' the Hatter grumbled: 'you shouldn't have put it in with the bread-knife.'

The March Hare took the watch and looked at it gloomily: then he dipped it into his cup of tea, and looked at it again: but he could think of nothing better to say than his first remark, 'It was the BEST butter, you know.'

Alice had been looking over his shoulder with some curiosity. 'What a funny watch!' she remarked. 'It tells the day of the month, and doesn't tell what o'clock it is!'

'Why should it?' muttered the Hatter. 'Does YOUR watch tell you what year it is?'

'Of course not,' Alice replied very readily: 'but that's because it stays the same year for such a long time together.'

'Which is just the case with MINE,' said the Hatter.

Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter's remark seemed to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English. 'I don't quite understand you,' she said, as politely as she could.

'The Dormouse is asleep again,' said the Hatter, and he poured a little hot tea upon its nose.

The Dormouse shook its head impatiently, and said, without opening its eyes, 'Of course, of course; just what I was going to remark myself.'

'Have you guessed the riddle yet?' the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.

'No, I give it up,' Alice replied: 'what's the answer?'

'I haven't the slightest idea,' said the Hatter.

'Nor I,' said the March Hare.

Alice sighed wearily. 'I think you might do something better with the time,' she said, 'than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers.'

'If you knew Time as well as I do,' said the Hatter, 'you wouldn't talk about wasting IT. It's HIM.'

'I don't know what you mean,' said Alice.

'Of course you don't!' the Hatter said, tossing his head contemptuously. 'I dare say you never even spoke to Time!'

'Perhaps not,' Alice cautiously replied: 'but I know I have to beat time when I learn music.'

'Ah! that accounts for it,' said the Hatter. 'He won't stand beating.
 
I won't write it here as it'll probably take up a lot of room (and hurt my poor fingers), but it has to be the passage from "The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole: aged 13 and 3/4" where the kids go on the bus trip and Adrian keeps an itinerary of their trip (September 19th - Class four D's trip to the British museum). I read this in high school and it was so similar to our school trips. Hilarious.
 
Confederates in the Attic, which is about American Civil War reinactors and Southern feelings about the American Civil War has a quote that I think is funny in a lets all get together and make fun of red necks kindof way. It is "I'm not an American, I'm a citizen of the Confederate States of America, which has been under military occupation for the past hundred thirty years". I can't remember who the person was that said it, but I think it may have been someone the author met in South Carolina.
 
For me, it's gotta be Dave Barry. One of his best shining moments occurs in Dave Barry's Guide to Guys, and it goes like this:

"What I can remember [about Boy Scouts] is being out in the woods on scout-troop camping trips, at 1:30 a.m., lying in a sleeping bag in a tent with three other guys... So we'd be lying there, trying to giggle as quietly as possible, and one of the guys - probably as a result of eating our usual Boy-Scout-camping-trip food, which consisted of semi-warmed baked beans mixed with Hershey's chocolate and Tang - would have some kind of gaseous nuclear chain reaction in his bowels, and there would be a sound like

BWAAARRRRRPPPPPPPP

and flames would come shooting out of the victim's sleeping bag and the tent walls would bulge violently outward, and the other three of us guys, in a desperate effort to escape before the tent was filled with the Deadly Blue Cloud, would lunge for the tent flap, still inside our sleeping bags, all trying to get out simultaneously, so that, from the outside, the tent looked like some bizarre alien space pod giving birth to giant crazed green worms."

Dave Barry's Complete Guide to Guys, Ballatine Books, 1995
 
Tasslehoff Burrfoot heaved a sigh. Plunking his small body down on a chair, he looked around, sighed again, and made an announcement.
"I'm bored."
Now, at the sound of these dreaded words, anyone who had lived long on Ansalon would have made every attempt to flee for his life. Go up to any seasoned warrior and ask him, "Pardon me, sir, but which would you rather be locked up in a room with - an army of ogres, a regiment of trolls, a brigade of draconians, a red dragon.. or a bored kender?"
The warrior will pick the ogres, trolls, draconians *and* the red dragon hands down, every time. He will tell you, as will everyone you meet, that nothing on Krynn is more dangerous than a bored kender.
Unfortunatelu, Usha, having never lived among kender, didn't know this...

-tas in the Dragons of Summer Flame
 
I have to site Dave Barry as well. He has a section in his book Dave Barry hits below the Beltway where he goes off on Florida, the people, and two crazy mayors. It is hilarious because its true. That section is one of the funniest things I have ever read.
 
Chapter 18 of Life, The Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams always cracks me up. It's when we find out why the bowl of petunias said "Oh no, not again."
 
Sadly, most of my books are in storage right now so I can't pull the quotes...

I'm almost certain it'd be from The Sirens of Titan or Candide though.
 
Here's one for you, True:

"'But then, to what end,' said Candide, 'was the world formed?'
'To make us mad,' said Martin."
 
Although I haven't made up my mind as to the overall literary merit of DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little, there are some great one-liners, such as when the overeating detective looks for slices of meat and Vernon says: “I am the meat.” I particularly liked the way his mother rules Vernon’s life. Eg: “She controls what you wear by keeping everything else damp in the laundry.” And: “…we take the moral high ground with our eyebrows.”


Geoff
 
The Pooh Purplex

I was in college from 1967 to 1971 at St. John's in Annapolis, MD, in the Great Books program (Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Locke, Hobbes, Tolstoy, Hegel, etc etc etc).

I remember getting hold of a copy of "The Pooh Purplex" which was a spoof on all the different styles of literary analysis. I remember laughing frequently and obscenely, in the dining hall, and wherever I was. There were essays in there like "The Underside of Pooh" that were Freudian sexual analyses. Then there was a Humanist analysis. Then a religious analysis seeing Christ figures everywhere. I was in a place where everything was so serious, and of course we were constantly analyzing everything, and it was just so comical to read something like that at the time.

I still have my original copy. I have not re-read it in 40 some odd years. I do not know if I would laugh as hard now.

I just dug my copy out of the book shelves.

"The Pooh Perplex" was by Frederick C. Crews, first published in 1965 by E.P. Dutton.

I don't believe the word "Postmodern" was in use in the mid 1960's. I may be mistaken. But Frederick Crews has now come out, apparently, with a similar book entitled "Postmodern Pooh". I only just now became aware of this in a google search to see if the original book is still in print, which it certainly is.
 
"Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food. Frequently there must be a beverage."

I forget which Woody Allen book that came from. I think it was Without Feathers, but all three of his humor books are great.
 
The one that always sticks in my mind is the game of draughts* between Chichikov and Nozdryov in "Dead Souls"; I'll post a little of it....

'I know the sort of poor player you are!' said Nozdryov, moving a piece.
'It's ages since I held a draughts piece in my hand!' said Chichikov, also moving forward a piece.
'I know the sort of poor player you are!' said Nozdryov, moving a piece, and at the same time nudging forward another piece with the cuff of his sleeve.
'It's ages since I... I say, what's all this! Put it back!' protested Chichikov.
'Put what back?'
'That piece of course!' said Chichikov and even as he said this he could see before his very nose another piece well on its way to becoming a king - God only knows where it had come from. 'No', he said, rising from the table, 'it's quite impossible to play with you! That's no way to play: moving three pieces at a time'.
'What do you mean, three pieces? That was a slip. One was pushed accidentally - look, I'll move it back.'
'Then where did the other one appear from?'
'Which other one?'
'This one, about to become a king'.
'I like that, as if you don't remember!'

K-S




*Chinese Chequers to my North American cousins.
 
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