don-quixote

Lit With Wit That Might Side-Split

Posted by

92

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.

Incompetent R Them

Posted by

135

Don Quixote leads the way in this image and the blog post below.

I started sorting through my family’s 2025 tax paperwork yesterday, which reminded me that a tax-preparation company we used for the first time last year was rather incompetent. (Needless to say, we’ll be trying a different company this month.) I was also reminded of characters in novels who are incompetent or bumbling — with some of them sympathetic and some of them less so.

Before I continue with today’s theme, I wanted to mention that a far-from-inept podcaster/blogger — the mega-talented Rebecca Budd, who many of you know via WordPress — interviewed me about how reading books can be helpful and comforting in these very difficult times. Thank you, Rebecca, for the great questions and wonderful conversation! Which can be listened to here:

S8 E2: Dave Astor on Books Keep Us Centered

Anyway, the first inept character who came to mind was the clueless and deluded but kind of charming Don Quixote in Miguel de Cervantes’ early-1600s classic. Quixote IS quite skilled at attacking windmills he mistakes for enemies. 🙂

Not as sympathetic is the buffoonish Professor Gilderoy Lockhart in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Also inept, at the start of the seven-book Potter series, is Hogwarts student Neville Longbottom, but his character arc eventually has him become more self-assured and even heroic.

An inept/adept mix can also be simultaneous — as with the bounty hunter Stephanie Plum who is both bumbling and skilled in Janet Evanovich’s series of novels.

Then there’s Ignatius J. Reilly, who could be categorized as a fool in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. But he has some smarts, too, and is funny as hell.

The combination of ineptness and proficiency manifests itself in a different way in Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon, in which Charlie Gordon goes from being a low-IQ to high-IQ individual via an experimental surgical procedure.

A poignant character with almost no life skills is “The Poor Fool,” a child of Wang Lung and O-Lan in Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth. The girl, who isn’t named in the novel, has a mental handicap probably caused by being a baby the year her family was starving. Yes, some characters sadly have no control over how they turn out.

Back in 2019, I wrote a post about bad bosses in novels, and some of them were pretty incompetent — including Captain Queeg in Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny.

Most of us know some incompetent people in real life, so that type is certainly familiar when encountered in literature. Even welcome in a way, because we’re relieved that these people are fictional rather than real. 🙂

Thoughts about, and examples of, today’s topic?

Misty the cat says: “That car either disappeared into the garage or into the space-time continuum.”

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 literary-trivia book…

…and a 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 Black History Month and a closed fire station — is here.

Paying Deference to Novelistic Self-Reference

Posted by

121

Was W. Somerset Maugham relaxing after appearing in his own book? Maybe. 🙂

Our attention is definitely captured when authors directly or indirectly refer to themselves and their own books in their novels.

This can give readers an additional sense of a writer’s personality, and provide other extra elements to a book — including humor. On the possibly negative side, “self-insertion” can puncture fiction’s illusory world and remind readers that there’s an authorial presence pulling the strings.

The example of “self-insertion” I noticed most recently was when Elin Hilderbrand had one of her fictional characters in The Five-Star Weekend buy a Hilderbrand novel while in a Nantucket bookstore. Some delightful authorial self-mocking was part of the scene as another character tried to ply the Hilderbrand-interested character with more “serious” literature.

In Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote novel, the title character has Cervantes’ debut book in his library. Also, another character in the classic 17th-century work says he’s a friend of Cervantes.

Then there’s John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, which was partly inspired by the author’s own family history. So it’s not a total surprise when Steinbeck himself pops up for a brief cameo in the novel.

W. Somerset Maugham put somewhat more of his actual self in his latter-career novel The Razor’s Edge when his searching-for-meaning-in-life protagonist — the fictional Larry Darnell — has a deep discussion about spirituality and more in a Paris cafe with…Maugham. (Of Human Bondage, the Maugham novel considered that author’s masterpiece, is actually more semi-autobiographical than The Razor’s Edge.)

And Emile Zola put a LOT of himself in his novel The Masterpiece; the book’s fictional author Pierre Sandoz is clearly based on Zola himself, who had a long real-life friendship with painter Paul Cezanne. The Masterpiece‘s protagonist — painter Claude Lantier — is partly based on Cezanne as well as Claude Monet and Edouard Manet.

In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, the narrator character is obviously Vonnegut himself. There are even these lines: “That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.”

Herman Melville did a self-reference variation by having the title character in Pierre write a book that appalled its would-be publisher. This plot twist was a way for Melville to vent about the poor critical and commercial reception for Moby-Dick, released the previous year. Pierre — which, like Moby-Dick, was ahead of its time in various ways — would also sell badly, and cause lots of controversy with its implied-incest element.

Of course, as several early commenters rightly note below, most novelists put something of themselves in the books they write — even if subconsciously. My post mostly focused on when writers do this in a pretty overt way. 🙂

Your thoughts on, and examples of, this topic?

Misty the cat says: “I’m on the windswept moors of ‘Wuthering Heights.'”

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 Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my 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.


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 past-due school district bills, a township manager payout, diminished mass transit, and more — is here.