Lit With Wit That Might Side-Split

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On March 8, I marked International Women’s Day with a post about memorable women characters in fiction. On March 15, I marked The Ides of March (when Julius Caesar was killed) with a post about memorable murders in fiction. So, what holiday can I mark today? I did an online search, and discovered that March 22 is National Goof Off Day! Meaning I could write a post about some of the funnier novels I’ve read.

But a search showed I wrote a post like that back in this blog’s first year: 2014. Hmm…guess I’ll rerun that piece today (many of you had yet to become readers here 12 years ago). Then, I’ll add some humorous or part-humorous novels I’ve read since 2014 — or read before that but forgot to mention in my previous Obama-era post.

Here’s the 2014 piece, with a new first paragraph and some other editing:

Some novels are quite funny, in a satirical or just plain silly way. They include books that range from mostly comedic to those that are serious and/or dramatic and/or poignant but contain one or more hilarious scenes — such as Ishmael and Queequeg, pre-ship voyage, in the inn bedroom in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.

For instance, there’s Charles Dickens’ laugh-out-loud first novel: The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, which features the fabulously funny Sam Weller. That book launched Dickens into a popularity stratosphere he never left — even as his increasingly ambitious novels were never quite that humorous again. Was Bleak House a jest-fest? Don’t think so.

Colette had a similar career arc, entering the novel-writing realm with the sidesplitting Claudine at School before moving on to weightier (yet still engaging) works. The title character in Colette’s late-career Gigi wouldn’t last a minute in a battle of witticisms with the rambunctious Claudine.

Speaking of first novels, the seriocomic Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone has more laughs per square page than any of the six subsequent novels in J.K. Rowling’s series.

Also hilarious is Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, in which the “thing” that hits an incandescent bulb is not a light-dazzled moth.

Then there’s Jeeves in the Offing, or almost any other P.G. Wodehouse novel or story starring the brilliant British valet and his rather clueless “master” Bertie Wooster. Wodehouse could make a shopping list funny.

In a very different milieu, novels don’t get much more amusing (or ribald) than Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre. Delightful “southern humor” can also be found in Charles Portis’ Norwood and The Dog of the South, Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle novel and Sneaky Pie Brown mysteries, and Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. Mixed with the laughs in those books are serious themes such as poverty, racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Academia can also be a great source of humor and satire, as evidenced by novels such as Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Richard Russo’s Straight Man, and Adam Langer’s Ellington Boulevard.

Returning to older novels, we see Mark Twain mixing strong antiwar satire with goofy humor in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Henry Fielding even naming a character “Lady Booby” (for her personality) in his uproarious Joseph Andrews, and Miguel de Cervantes being much funnier than one expects in Don Quixote.

More hilarity? Valancy Stirling dramatically parts with her oppressively conventional mother and other relations in L.M. Montgomery’s moving/inspiring The Blue Castle, but the conversations the newly confident Valancy has with her family are as funny as the funniest sitcom.

Italo Calvino is very droll in his short-story-collection-as-novella Marcovaldo. John Steinbeck, so earnest in The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, will crack you up in Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, and Sweet Thursday. And you don’t need an explanation from me about how dizzyingly comedic are Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

Now, as I write in 2026, here are some funny or part-funny (in certain cases darkly so) novels I’ve read since the above 2014 post — or read before that but didn’t mention back then. A number of those books of course have many serious moments, too. Alphabetical by author:

Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove, Charles Bukowski’s Hollywood, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Frances Burney’s Evelina, Charles Dickinson’s The Widows’ Adventure, Stanley Elkin’s The Rabbi of Lud, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Svejk, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Elin Hilderbrand’s The Hotel Nantucket, Jonas Jonasson’s The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, Bel Kaufman’s Up the Down Staircase, Steve Martin’s The Pleasure of My Company, Terry McMillan’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette, (Ms.) Lionel Shriver’s So Much for That, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, Voltaire’s Candide, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, to name a few.

And while Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is mostly dead serious, it does have one uproarious scene.

Novels you consider very funny — overall or in part?

Misty the cat says: “Odd that one of those cars looks like a dumpster.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about a close school budget vote, a delayed decision on a huge redevelopment project, a student anti-ICE march, and more; all threaded with a weird Tom Hanks movie theme 🙂 — is here.

46 thoughts on “Lit With Wit That Might Side-Split”

  1. I’ll have to give this some more thought, Dave, but off the top of my head I’ve got ‘Catch 22’, ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – the fishing trip in particular – and ‘Our Man in Havana’.Then there’s Lionel Shriver iwth ‘The New Republic’ and ‘The Mandibles’. Varying levels, but humour for sure there. I’ll get back to you with more, wishing you a good week for now. 🙂

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    • Thank you, Laura! All great examples; I’ve read each one you mentioned. Lionel Shriver definitely has the knack for being both wry and dead-serious in a number of her novels. Wishing you a good week, too!

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    • Thank you, Rosaliene! Funny films — including romantic comedies — can definitely be appealing. 🙂 I’m not much of a moviegoer, but I could watch a hilarious Marx Brothers or Monty Python film any day of the week. 🙂 Anything to temporarily take one’s mind off all the fascism going on. 😦

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  3. My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh deserves to be mentioned here. It’s absolutely hilarious for about two thirds of the book (after which it runs out of steam). Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy is a masterpiece of comical (and deeply humanistic) literature and (as I once wrote to a friend) strikingly modern in its unruliness and associative digressions. Céline’s best-known novels Voyage au Bout de la Nuit and Mort à Crédit are interspersed with many humoristic observations and character renderings.

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    • Thank you, Dingenom! “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” sounds two-thirds amazing! Including its premise, which I just read online. And, yes, “Tristram Shandy” is pretty darn funny. I read it in college, and had a bit of trouble wading through it, but definitely got some laughs. 🙂

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  4. What a title for this post, Dave! I love it…such cadence!
    I am humbled by the number of books I’ve not yet read…but your offerings here will be useful! A whole new category/genre for me to explore — with intention. Humor as a buffer these days. Good “medicine”. Thank you! ❤️😉❤️

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    • Thank you, Ada! “Portnoy’s Complaint” is neurotically off-putting in parts, but a lot of it is hysterically funny. 🙂 Yes, it’s welcome — especially these days — to read something that makes us laugh.

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  7. I feel so low-brow when I read your list. Janet Evanovich’s early novels always made me laugh. Richard Osman’s books, too (murder and humor). And David Rosenfelt (from your neck of the woods) always offer lots of chuckles (if for no other reason than his view of lawyers). I keep a list of books I have read, with some comments, and Brad Parks’ The Girl Next Door has a notation that it was easy and made me laugh.

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    • Thank you, Madeline! I agree that Janet Evanovich’s early Stephanie Plum novels (I read the first three) were very funny in parts. And I appreciate the mentions of those other three authors! When you said David Rosenfelt was from my neck of the woods, I looked online and saw that he was born in Paterson, New Jersey — two towns north of me. 🙂

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  10. Dave, you listed one of Terry Pratchett’s books, and I want to tell everyone that I have read all his Discworld Books and laughed out loud in almost all of them. I also laughed over and over reading Nick Hornby’s HIGH FIDELITY. I know Bill Bryson isn’t a novelist, but his travel books and stories of his childhood in America were very funny. And let’s not forget Dave Barry’s COMPLETE GUIDE TO GUYS. I cried with laughter reading that.

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    • Thank you, Kim! I’ve read only two of Terry Pratchett’s books, and they were both often hilarious. If I had read as much of that author’s work as you have, I imagine my post would’ve contained a lot of Pratchett content. 🙂

      And I appreciate the other mentions! Speaking of nonfiction travel books, the funniest I’ve ever read is Mark Twain’s “The Innocents Abroad.” As for Dave Barry, I’ve never read a book by him but have read a ton of his columns because part of my “beat” at a magazine years ago was covering columnists. His writing is hilarious! And I got to meet and interview him a few times.

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        • Hard to read everything, Kim, but “The Innocents Abroad” is fantastic. In the book, Twain writes about visiting a LOT of places — including the Mideast; not an easy destination to get to in the 1860s. And, like you, I want to read “Three Men in a Boat.” 🙂

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    • Thank you, Maggie! I keep a list of all the books I’ve read, which helps with the memory thing. 🙂 Very true that some novels (such as “Moby-Dick” and “The Brothers Karamazov”) are funny for just a small percentage of their pages, but those passages stuck with me. 🙂

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  13. Way back in high school English we spent a week or two learning how to speedread. The teacher gave us a list of acceptable authors, based on length and complexity. One author was John Steinbeck. So little Michael went to the high school library and discovered a humorous little gem called The Short Reign of Pippin IV. Political satire. My teacher was not amused. At all. I reread it about ten years ago and was amused all over again.

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  14. This is a super list of witty books. There are many funny books, but those written with wit are the best! Bridget Jones’s Diary had me in stiches and saved me from getting depressed when I turned 50. The other book I turn to when I need a good chuckle is Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome. I read it when I was a teenager and was just learning to appreciate British humour, and have read it a number of times since. It always hits my funny bone.

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