In another thread there is a mention of Al Franken's "Rush Limbaugh is a Big, Fat Slob." It's very funny and I like to read funny books. My nominee is "Non Campus Mentis," a collection of bizarre answers to history test questions gathered over the years by college history professors. Other funny books to enliven our Christmas gift-giving?
An old funny book is "Ball Four" by Jim Bouton. It mainly describes his season with the Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros in 1969. It was the first major tell-all book about sports.
I love Seinfeld related books. Jerry's books and then the books of the show's scripts, etc... are really funny to me... On a british humour note, The Gobbler by Adrian Edmundson is a great, funny, british humour read. I don't know if you can find it in the states, I found a used British copy at Half Price Books a while back.
Dave Barry's terribly formulaic, but if you haven't ODed on his material, he's pretty funny. The books tossed around so far haven't really been fiction, but I've always been partial to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. If you're interested, find an excerpt online somewhere and see if it's up your alley.
"Round Ireland with a Fridge" and "Playing the Moldovan's at Tennis" by Tony Hawk (not the skater) are both hilarious.
Jean Shepherd's Wanda Hickey's Golden Night of Memories is a collection of really funny stories by the guy who wrote A Christmas Story. His story about the hillbilly neighbors (the Bumpuses) is hysterical. I just read How to Be Good by Nick Hornby (he wrote High Fidelity) and it's pretty funny at parts. The characters in Carl Hiassen's books (Striptease, Sick Puppy, Skin Tight) are more entertainingly stupid or wacko than funny, but there are moments that are pretty funny.
no kidding!! my wife and i, back when we were just dating, read through one of his books together one night...Seinlanguage...absolutely hilarious! we were laughing out loud the whole time.
Woody Allen's books are funny. There's a nice book by Will Cuppy on historical biography. Punch had a good history comedy with 1066 and all that.
Good Omens. It's about a demon and an angel that are friends at the apocolypse, and they lose the anti-christ... may be the funniest book I've ever read. George Carlin books are always great (Brain Droppings and Napalm and Silly Putty). Lastly, if you'd like to get in for a slightly slower read (but it's still brilliant), read The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams (who also wrote the five-book Hitchhiker's Guide series).
I'll second Vonnegut books. I've tried reading Catch 22 a couple of times but just can't get through it.
All of the above, plus "A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole. This is one of the flat out funniest things ever. Great, great book. Another funny book: "The Magic Christian" by Terry Southern, one of the co-writers of "Dr. Strangelove."
The Myth-adventures of Aahz and Skeeve series by Robert Asprin is very funny. A lot of thinly veiled pop-culture references.
RIP, Douglas Adams. That was a total bummer, him dying. For Douglas Adams lite, try Terry Pratchett. I thought both Bridget Jones books were side-achingly laugh-out-loud-on-the-bus funny. Is that a chick thing?
