THE WRITTEN WORD
Comedy & Humor Writing
12 books
Twelve books that take humor seriously — not as a break from serious subjects but as a mode of engaging with them that is sometimes more accurate and more useful than any other approach. The list covers the great American humorists, the British comic tradition, the specific achievement of writers who can make you laugh and break your heart in the same paragraph, and the critical writing that tries to explain why humor works the way it does. Comedy is harder than drama — there's nowhere to hide when a joke doesn't land — and the writers here are the ones who made it look easy enough that you forget how hard it is. The list includes satire, essays, novels, and at least one book that is technically a work of history and is one of the funniest things written in the 20th century.
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A Mencken Chrestomathy
H.L. Mencken
Mencken selected and organized this anthology of his own work in 1949, covering democracy, religion, politicians, the American South, the medical profession, and the general intellectual condition of his fellow citizens. He was wrong about enough things to require noting — his antisemitism is real and documented — and brilliant about enough things to remain essential: no American writer has ever attacked received opinion with comparable precision and comparable pleasure simultaneously. Note: Mencken argued from a broadly libertarian-misanthropic position and was an equal-opportunity offender with no consistent political home. The political satire entry on this list. Cross-references to the Political History & Power list, where the politicians he was mocking are documented without the comedy, and to the Essays & Longform Journalism list.
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Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis
Jim Dixon is a junior medieval history lecturer at a provincial English university who despises his subject, fears his department head, and has acquired a girlfriend who makes every interaction with her a small ordeal. The novel follows his attempts to survive a disastrous guest lecture, a catastrophic weekend at his department head's house, and a professional situation he lacks the courage to simply walk away from. Published in 1954, considered by Evelyn Waugh, Philip Larkin, and Christopher Hitchens to be the funniest English novel of the 20th century, and none of them were charitable judges. The deep cut on this list for the demographic: Amis is on the Whiskey list for Everyday Drinking, but Lucky Jim has nothing to do with drinking. Cross-references to the Coming-of-Age Fiction list.
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Last Words
George Carlin & Tony Hendra
Carlin spent fifty years developing one of the most rigorous comic worldviews in American stand-up — from clean early work through the Seven Words obscenity case to the late-career rage that produced his finest material — and dictated this autobiography in the last years of his life. It is rawer and angrier than Born Standing Up and less interested in craft analysis than in accounting for a life: the drug years, the marriages, the specific experience of being professionally funny for five decades while temperamentally unsuited to contentment. The second comedian memoir on this list and the counterweight to Martin — where Martin documents building something, Carlin documents burning through something. Cross-references to the Drug Culture & the Counterculture list for the 1970s and the Political History & Power list for the political comedy dimension.
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Scoop
Evelyn Waugh
A nature columnist named Boot is sent to cover a civil war in a fictional African country because a newspaper magnate confused him with a more famous Boot. Waugh had covered Abyssinia for the Daily Mail and the satire of foreign correspondents — their expense accounts, their invented dispatches, their total ignorance of the countries they were supposedly explaining — was precise in 1938 and has only become more precise since. The political satire entry on this list. Cross-references to the New Journalism & Literary Nonfiction list, where the real foreign correspondents Waugh was satirizing appear in their own unironic accounts. Read alongside Lucky Jim for the full picture of mid-century British fiction's contempt for professional pretension, and alongside Decline and Fall if you want Waugh earlier and angrier.
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The Code of the Woosters
P.G. Wodehouse
Bertie Wooster has promised to steal a silver cow-creamer from a fascist uncle, is being blackmailed by a fiancée he doesn't want, and must prevent Jeeves from accepting employment elsewhere. Wodehouse published this in 1938 and it has been making readers laugh continuously since. The case for Wodehouse to the skeptic who considers him too British: no writer in English has constructed a funnier sentence, and the sentences accumulate into plots of clockwork precision that produce a specific pleasure unavailable elsewhere. The canonical British comedy entry on this list. Under 250 pages. Cross-references to the Everyday Drinking entry on the Whiskey list, where Kingsley Amis — who considered Wodehouse the greatest writer in English — makes the case more elaborately. The reader who finishes this and wants more should go directly to Right Ho, Jeeves, which is equally good and covers different catastrophes.
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Three Men in a Boat
Jerome K. Jerome
Three friends and a dog take a rowing holiday on the Thames in 1889 and Jerome documents everything that goes wrong in a tone of elaborate self-deprecation that has made readers laugh for 135 years. Jerome invented the rueful male narrator who is aware of his own incompetence and finds it more interesting than competence would be — every travel humor book since, including every Bill Bryson, works in the space Jerome opened. The Victorian anchor on this list and the short entry at under 200 pages. Cross-references to the Travel Memoirs list. The reader who finishes it wanting more should go to Three Men on the Bummel, the sequel, which takes the same three men to Germany on bicycles and is nearly as good. Jerome is the funniest writer most readers have never been pointed toward.
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Letters from the Earth
Mark Twain
Twain wrote this between 1909 and his death in 1910 and instructed that it not be published for a century. His estate published it in 1962. Satan writes letters back to Heaven describing humanity and particularly humanity's religion — the specific theology of prayer, the afterlife as humans have imagined it, the sexual arrangements attributed to God, the overall probability that a species capable of inventing the fly would be taken seriously by the universe. Twain's public work was funny; this is savage. The deep-cut American entry on this list: most readers know Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, or The Innocents Abroad — all on other AoM lists — and none of them contain this Twain. Under 250 pages. The reader who finds it too comfortable should read "The War Prayer" immediately afterward, which is shorter and angrier.
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Born Standing Up
Steve Martin
Martin spent ten years doing stand-up in increasingly large venues, figured out how to work at arena scale when it had never been done, and then quit at the top because he had run out of things to do with the form. The memoir he wrote about those years is not a showbiz autobiography — it is a craft document: how the act was built, what failed and why, how the specific insights that made it work were developed through thousands of performances across a decade. The comedian memoir entry on this list. Under 250 pages. Cross-references to the Craft, Skill & Mastery list, where the methodology of achieving excellence through deliberate practice is the primary subject, and to the Books About Film & Cinema list for what happened to Martin after the stand-up career ended. The reader who wants the counterpoint to Martin's controlled self-examination should read Last Words by George Carlin.
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My Life and Hard Times
James Thurber
Thurber's account of growing up in Columbus, Ohio — the night the dam broke when it didn't, the dog that bit everyone in the family except the visiting aunt, the grandfather who believed the Civil War was still being fought — is the best short book of American comic memoir ever written. It runs to 130 pages, each one funnier than the last, and the Thurber voice — a man to whom inexplicable things happen and who has stopped expecting otherwise — is available nowhere else in American literature. The New Yorker school entry on this list. Cross-references to the Essays & Longform Journalism list. The reader who finishes it wanting more should go to The Thurber Carnival, the collected edition, which contains everything including the drawings, which are also funny.
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Cold Comfort Farm
Stella Gibbons
Flora Poste, a sensible Londoner with very little money and no desire to work, invites herself to stay with her Gothic rural cousins and proceeds to solve their brooding miseries with the efficiency of a management consultant. Gibbons published this in 1932 as a parody of rural melodrama — Mary Webb, D.H. Lawrence, the entire genre of doomed agricultural passion — and produced something that works independently as a very funny novel about a woman who simply refuses to accept that things cannot be improved. The unexpected-angle entry on this list: the comedy comes from the collision between Gothic atmosphere and practical competence, which turns out to be a reliable formula. Cross-references to the American South list for the rural Gothic tradition being cheerfully dismantled, and to the World Fiction in Translation list.
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The Benchley Roundup
Robert Benchley
Benchley was the drama critic for Life magazine and The New Yorker in the 1920s and 1930s, and the pieces collected here — on the impossibility of getting anything done, on the specific torture of being asked to read something someone has written, on why he could never learn to swim — established the template for American observational humor that every subsequent practitioner has used. Thurber and Perelman both acknowledged the debt. The historical anchor for the American section of this list: the form that David Sedaris, David Rakoff, and a generation of essayists work in was built by Benchley in these pieces. Cross-references to the Essays & Longform Journalism list, where Sedaris appears as a primary entry. The reader who wants Benchley in a different form should seek the short films he made in the 1930s, which are equally funny.
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The Most of S.J. Perelman
S.J. Perelman
Perelman wrote for The New Yorker for forty years and developed a prose style that borrowed equally from Groucho Marx, Yiddish comedy, and the Oxford English Dictionary — dense with allusion, baroque in construction, and capable of producing laughter on rereading that the first reading missed. He is less read now than he should be, which makes this the deepest cut on this list: anyone who takes American comedy writing seriously has read him; the general reader has not been pointed his way. This collection contains the best of the work across four decades. Cross-references to the Essays & Longform Journalism list. The reader who finds the density impenetrable should start with the Hollywood pieces, which are the most accessible; the reader who takes to it immediately should read everything in order.