Best Humor & Comedy Books

The eighth Discworld novel and first in the City Watch sub-series: a secret brotherhood summons a dragon to seize power in Ankh-Morpork, and the only thing standing between the city and a new dragon king is the most incompetent police force in fantasy history.

Bill Bryson returns to America after twenty years in England and decides to hike the Appalachian Trail — 2,200 miles from Georgia to Maine — with his out-of-shape friend Stephen Katz. They complete a memorable portion of it.

What happens to human bodies donated to science — surgical training, crash testing, forensic decomposition research, ballistics testing, and the specific history of what cadavers have contributed to human knowledge. Rendered with Roach's characteristic meticulous research and deadpan wit.

Rob Fleming owns Championship Vinyl, a record shop in Holloway, North London. His girlfriend Laura has just left him. He compiles top five lists compulsively — top five break-ups, top five records to play on a Monday morning — and eventually decides to investigate his past relationships to understand what is wrong with him. Hornby's debut novel and the defining book about men who use pop culture to avoid growing up.

Will Freeman is 36, wealthy from his father's royalties, and has constructed a life entirely free of obligation or development. He invents a fictional son, Ned, in order to meet single mothers at SPAT (Single Parents Alone Together). Through this deception he meets Marcus, a twelve-year-old who is relentlessly uncool and whose mother is suicidally depressed. Their unlikely friendship changes both of them.

An angel and a demon who have grown rather fond of the Earth team up to prevent the Apocalypse, while a small boy in Tadfield may or may not be the Antichrist.

Bill Bryson travels across Australia — a country he cheerfully admits he knows almost nothing about — and discovers that it is simultaneously one of the most beautiful, most deadly, most overlooked, and most underrated countries on earth.

Young Gerald Durrell's account of five years living on Corfu with his eccentric family in the 1930s — a childhood paradise of wildlife, sunshine, and complete freedom to roam.

Bertie Wooster decides to handle matters himself for once, without Jeeves. He will sort out Gussie Fink-Nottle's love life and Tuppy Glossop's engagement without the butler's assistance. The resulting catastrophe — culminating in a prize-giving speech at Market Snodsbury Grammar School — is the funniest extended sequence in English comic fiction.

A great god is reduced to living in the body of a small tortoise because no one truly believes in him anymore — only one novice monk does — and together they must reckon with what faith really means in a world dominated by the institution built in his name.

Bertie Wooster is dispatched to Totleigh Towers, home of the terrifying Roderick Spode and the magistrate Sir Watkyn Bassett, to steal a silver cow creamer and assist various friends with their tangled romantic lives. Only Jeeves can navigate the catastrophe that follows.

Before moving back to America after twenty years in Britain, Bill Bryson makes a farewell tour of the country that adopted him — by bus, train, and foot, from Dover to the Highlands — in search of what makes Britain lovably, infuriatingly, irreducibly itself.

P.G. Wodehouse's classic collection of linked Jeeves and Wooster stories. The amiable, dim-witted Bertie Wooster blunders through romantic and social scrapes — chiefly those of his lovelorn friend Bingo Little — only to be rescued, again and again, by the brilliant valet Jeeves.

Peter Mayle and his wife abandon advertising careers in England to restore a farmhouse in the Luberon region of Provence — and spend a year navigating unpredictable tradesmen, extraordinary markets, and a way of life entirely organised around food.

Chichikov travels through provincial Russia purchasing 'dead souls' — serfs who have died since the last census but are still recorded on landowners' rolls, and can therefore be used as collateral for loans. The scheme is comic, opaque, and darkly satirical. Gogol described the novel as the first part of a Russian Divine Comedy.

Birmingham in the 1970s — four boys at a grammar school navigating adolescence against the backdrop of IRA bombings, the first Thatcher election, race relations, punk rock, and the decline of British manufacturing. A warm, funny, and genuinely melancholy novel of a decade and a generation.

Mary Roach investigates the science of sex — from the Victorian researchers who conducted the first systematic studies to modern laboratory work on arousal, anatomy, and dysfunction. She attends research sessions, interviews scientists, and reads the primary literature with the same deadpan curiosity she applies to corpses and astronauts.

Tristram Shandy attempts to write his life story and cannot get past the moment of his conception. The novel is all digression — Uncle Toby's military obsessions, the Shandean theory of noses, blank pages, marbled pages, dedications to the reader — and is widely considered the most metafictional novel ever written, despite being the eighth-century novel.

A grumpy, recently widowed Swedish man who has given up on life encounters a series of intrusive neighbors who accidentally give him reasons to stay.

The Thursday Murder Club investigates a decade-old unsolved murder of a television journalist — while navigating a threat from a dangerous hitman who has targeted the Club itself.

The Thursday Murder Club investigates again when Elizabeth's long-lost ex-husband arrives at Coopers Chase with stolen diamonds and a death threat.