The Funniest Books Ever Written
What it says. Cant you read? :)
One word can sum up Problemski Hotel for me: stunning. A novella about the lives of incarcerated asylum seekers before they escape across the channel from Belgium into England, Verhulst exposes the casual prejudices of just about everyone, being politically incorrect to the point of recklessness yet always remaining humane and heartfelt. This is writing that is sharp, unforced, funny and totally true. Brilliant.
A mild comedy of manners set in a Norwegian fishing village at the turn of the 20th Century, centred around the errant escapades of Ove Rolandsen, the local, genial, all-round reprobate. All the characters are to a degree trapped in their situations and hoping for something better, and it takes the unlikely ingenuity and improvisations of Rolandsen, simply by living out his own complex inner nature, for things to turn out right for everyone in the end. Hamsun was gently poking fun at all his characters but was also noticeably sympathetic towards them, a trait which separated his more aggressive earlier books from later novels such as this one. A very likeable story indeed.
Over a period of two years Leo Rosten wrote these fifteen short stories for the New Yorker, depicting the beginners’ grade at New York’s Preparatory Night School for Adults, and prominent among the students is the verbose Polish immigrant Hyman Kaplan, whose singular logic about how English should work is vastly at odds with how it actually does. Rosten added some flamboyance to these stories about the students’ rather unadventurous learning of the language, while at the same time keeping the humour innocent and sticking to the point – there was also a second volume published in 1959, The Return of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N, which the intervening World War did much to make that innocence harder to achieve. I read the hardcover edition with the introduction by Howard Jacobson that unfortunately explains far too much, and goes on to give away Rosten’s best jokes while stating that nothing is funnier than this book, even surpassing Rosten’s famous lexicon The Joys of Yiddish. Maybe this negatively affected my reading of them, but I suspect in a different time these stories may once have been laugh-out-loud, whereas today they read as gentle yet rather erudite humour. But I’ll certainly be looking out for that sequel.
This was described by Anna Haycraft (better known as Alice Thomas Ellis) as “One of the funniest and most significant books of the century”, and it also came highly recommended by my father who once had a complete collection of all Waugh’s first editions (although what really piqued my curiosity was that this book was the inspiration behind the 1985 Doctor Who story ‘Revelation of the Daleks’). The friction that drives it is the awkwardness of British cultural attitudes in post-war Los Angeles, set mostly in the Whispering Glades Memorial Park – a kind of Disneyland for the dead – and involving a young British poet who falls for a young American corpse beautician while he himself works secretly as a mortician at a pet cemetery. Waugh is funniest when he lets his characters’ veneer of civility slip to reveal something far more feral underneath, and I can almost sense how he filled in some laugh-free zones with just that kind of unexpected viciousness to keep the humour levels up. Some mocking characterisation and a few very memorable turns of phrase make this a wickedly funny book.
Thompson and his fat Samoan attorney hit Vegas with a carful of drugs. Actually they do it twice, as both the first and second parts of this book are structurally identical only with different incidental characters, different hotels and a different set of wheels. I kind of wished Thompson had cut the retrospective bullshit about this being “a failed attempt” at gonzo journalism and graciously accepted the acclaim for coming up with this work of near-genius that defined his own genre, however Thompson inevitably wanted everyone to think of him as anything but gracious. While writing it all up for Rolling Stone he shaped these experiences more as comic fiction than anything resembling real paranoid dementia, even though the events he described were often verifiable and real enough. This book was as much a showcase of his own sharp writing as being about two guys getting out of their heads on chemicals; everything – especially the dialogue – reads as exceptionally fluid, and his summary dismissal of the American Dream in the second half is done with an almost sad subtlety. I’m not surprised this appears on many lists of the funniest books – I ended up completely knocked out by it and I’m now chastising myself for not having read it twenty years ago.
An unnamed narrator holds forth to a group of ladies he obviously wants to impress on matters such as marital strife, dream symbolism, personal hygeine, crooks, barmaids, balalaikas, unlikely personal dalliances and anything else that comes to mind, all in one rambling, tumbling, obscenely long and unfinished sentence that’s clearly meant to be taken with a massive pinch of salt. As with both the other books by Hrabal that I’ve read, the bizarrely worthwhile Too Loud a Solitude and Closely Observed Trains, Hrabal’s linear momentum became rather effortless once I got into his awkward rhythm: the oddness of what he’s describing was somehow shaken off and I found myself indulging this vainglorious character all the way. As book-length, comic self-portraits go this is excellent, and Hrabal’s self-imposed task of writing an entire book in a single sentence was clearly a constraint he could also turn into something of a liberation.
The Funniest Books Ever Written 