In the spirit of Fat Tuesday, in which we go through our cupboards to use up any treats and frivolities before the solemnities of Lent, I would like to draw your attention to Anthony Sacramone’s list of The 12 Funniest Books Ever Written. You need to go to the link to read his paragraphs about each work on his list, but I will list the titles after the jump, along with my own additions and corrections.
From Anthony Sacramone, The 12 Funniest Books Ever Written, in Intercollegiate Review (for which Mr. Sacramone is the editor):
1. Don Quixote
(Miguel de Cervantes)
2. Dead Souls
(Nikolai Gogol)
3. 1066 & All That
(W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman)
4. The Trial
(Franz Kafka)
5. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
(Tobias Smollett)
6. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
(Douglas Adams)
7. Decline and Fall
(Evelyn Waugh)
8. The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody
(Will Cuppy)
9. Catch-22
(Joseph Heller)
10. The Great Pursuit
(Tom Sharpe)
11. A Confederacy of Dunces
(John Kennedy Toole)
12. Your pick
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? The Devil’s Dictionary? Gulliver’s Travels? Tom Jones? Candide? Tristram Shandy? The Diary of a Nobody
? A volume of Wodehouse
? And we haven’t even touched on plays: The Clouds
, Tartuffe
, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Inspector General, The Man Who Came to Dinner, The Sunshine Boys, A Thousand Clowns, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Wrong Turn at Lungfish
. . .
Now I have actually participated in the compiling of this kind of list–the 100 greatest books of the first two millennia or something like that–and I can testify as to how subjective and random the process is, limited as it is to the books the compilers have actually read, as well as to the tastes and opinions of the compilers.
This list, with all due respect to Mr. Sacramone (and a lot of respect is due to him), seems weighted to the 20th century and to the sardonic, satirical, and surrealist kind of humor that gave us Luther at the Movies (one of the top 10 websites in the history of the internet–see, there I go again).
Don Quixote is way up there, but surely the funniest book in history has to be Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Hardly anyone reads it anymore, for some reason, but try it. I know you will agree.
Also, Mark Twain needs to be included. Huckleberry Finn is the great American novel, but it is not his funniest. The great man got serious in his later works, a seriousness combined with humor that is a great artistic achievement, though in his very latest works he just got depressing. But his very earliest works and in general his travel books are nothing but humor at the highest level. I would nominate as his funniest book his very first major publication, The Innocents Abroad, his account of how he and some other comrades from the American frontier visited Europe. The cultural collision of European grand culture and Nevada silver miners will make you laugh until you hurt. Or it did me. (You can get it free on Kindle!)
Finally, for pure laugh inducement, the list really needs to include P. G. Wodehouse. Just about anything or everything by him, but I would recommend one of his many tales of Bertie Wooster and his butler Jeeves. (Many of his books are also free on Kindle, but these tend to be his, shall we say, lesser works. But his Jeeves books are worth any price).
Do you have any nominations for a list of funny books?
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