James Morrow, Shambling Towards Hiroshima, 2009

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In 1945 the US Navy developed a top secret biological weapon: giant mutant fire-breathing iguanas bred to stomp Japanese cities. Hollywood monster-suit actor Syms Thorley is drafted to put terror into the hearts of a group of visiting Japanese diplomats with his depiction of what might happen if Emperor Hirohito doesn’t surrender; and if that doesn’t work there’s always the Manhattan Project. Shambling Towards Hiroshima takes the form of a suicide note written at a 1984 horror movie convention in Baltimore, but outside of that frame this is a lovingly crafted satire that is also a tribute to Hollywood’s monster movies, with educated nods in all directions. The first three quarters of this novella feels self-consciously ridiculous because Morrow is depicting military life imitating what is essentially a pretty ridiculous art, but he has serious points to make and there comes a well-crafted moment towards the end at which he wants you stop laughing and consider a few things. Morrow is interviewed on video about the story here, but I’m glad I indulged in this wry, clever book first.

Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One, 1948

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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.

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1971

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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.

Bohumil Hrabal, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, 1964

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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.

Bobby Henderson, The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, 2006

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Humour that’s migrated from a successful website to a book, courtesy of a big fat book deal, doesn’t always adapt to its new format very well – Cleolinda Jones’s Movies in Fifteen Minutes being a case in point: it just resulted in a complete loss of funny. On the other hand some humour can do it more successfully, even admirably so, particularly when it’s packaged to look like the Gideon Bible (complete with a noodly page marker) that you’ll find in the bedside table of just about every hotel room in the western world. Henderson’s satirical deconstruction of Intelligent Design started with an open letter to the Kansas School Board who wanted it taught as a ‘science’ to high school Biology students; everything since has been a major cash-in (and why not?) with a serious point buried beneath. This is actually a better-written book than I was expecting: Henderson didn’t get lazy by including poorly-thought out ideas, and although it’s not quite as laugh-out-loud as I was hoping for that’s probably because I’m not particularly tuned into American college humour. I get the jokes, they’re all clever and witty and suitably mocking in a Douglas Adams kind of way, but I just respond better to written humour that’s a bit more vicious and a little less smart-ass. Nevertheless this Gospel has garnered quite a bit of serious critical praise, Scientific American included, and Simon Singh in The Daily Telegraph said “it might be slightly repetitive but overall it’s a brilliant, provocative, witty and important gem of a book”. Those who are being mocked have been less kind. I enjoyed this and recommend it, although if you’re one of the few who hasn’t yet been Touched By His Noodly Appendage you ought to check out the FSM website first.

Harry Harrison, Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers, 1973

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This choice for my wander through the funniest books ever written was something I reckoned was certainly in that zone when I read it in the early 1980s, and it also predates the ascendancy of Douglas Adams by five years. There are definite parallels too between Star Smashers and Hitchhiker’s, but they also differ largely in accordance with my not-quite-unshakeable belief that while the best American comedies are about self-improvement, the best British comedies are about being trapped; both books are emblematic of spoofing SF in idiosyncratically American and British ways to take readers on improbable galactic adventures specifically designed to poke fun at the genre. I have to say, when Harry Harrison is on form his best jokes are still just as funny as the best of Douglas Adams’s, but he just doesn’t get the same readership.

This adventure has all-round brilliant and handsome American college kids Jerry and Chuck, along with their pointless girlfriend Sally and their black janitor John, head out into the galaxy after discovering that the chemical composition of a piece of home-made cheddar cheese could also double as an interstellar drive when rigged up to their private 747. It inevitably turns into a rather daft galaxy-wide caper of good vs. evil and you sometimes have to read closely for Harrison’s wittiest gags – there are certainly some excellent ones more subtle than his clever and increasingly ridiculous explanations as to why all aliens happen to speak English. Even the serious swipes at racism and sexual stereotyping are sugar-coated, and if it’s ridiculously self-indulgent to the point of making readers abandon their disbelief wholesale this is still a very okay book.

Jeff Burk, Shatnerquake!, 2009

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William Shatner checks in as Guest of Honour for the first ever ShatnerCon, but after a reality bomb goes off all the characters ever played by Shatner are suddenly sucked into our world to seek out and destroy the real Shat. I loved this rather libellous idea particularly as the book itself was not sanctioned by Shatner, and it’s actually prefaced with a plea that Shatner doesn’t sue. I hope he doesn’t and doubt he would, because this novella just adds handsomely to the Shatner mythos even though he’s portrayed as thinking his fans are a bunch of “sniveling little sycophantic shits” in the opening sentence. Wonderfully bizarre, and 10/10 for concept.

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Heart of a Dog, 1925

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~ aka. A Dog’s Heart. ~

The Heart of a Dog has ingredients that make it a satirical classic, yet it would surely have been funnier still to its intended Russian audience. Bulgakov had constant problems with censors and he never saw publication of The Heart of a Dog in the Soviet Union in his lifetime: he died in 1940 and it was suppressed there until as late as 1987, appearing only a few years before the fall of Soviet Communism.

Philip Philipovich, a rich and respected Moscow doctor who specialises in rejuvenation, decides to experiment with some transplant surgery on a stray mongrel known as Sharik with a few body parts from a recently deceased prole, and unwittingly transforms the dog into a poor resemblance of a cultured man. What gives this book its spark is the downtrodden dog’s character, which kicks off and then punctuates the rest of the story very nicely indeed. Bulgakov displayed a splendid sense of fun in this satire on the Russian Revolution, in which the uneducated and common proletariat expected to simply be handed a share of the wealth, and when encapsulated in the character of Sharik they’re also satirised as aspiring – and of course failing – to take on the airs and graces of the bourgeois elite. The doctor’s frequent counter-revolutionary rants are what help this novel endure as a modern and edgy one: right or wrong, Bulgakov gave the reader room to still wish the world was a fairer and more evenly divided place, despite the entrenched imbalance between rich and poor that became the source of his best jokes. A book that can’t be missed by those with a taste for sharp satire.

Donald Antrim, The Hundred Brothers, 1997

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This bizarre novel has a superb opening sentence that takes up two pages, in which the highly unreliable and self-deceiving narrator Doug introduces his 99 brothers (aged from 30 to 93) and explains what they plan to do over the course of a single night in the collapsing library of their late philandering father’s decrepit mansion. Of course, it doesn’t go exactly according to plan, instead it ends up the way these gatherings always do, in a squall of fights, exhibitions of puerile insecurities and generally asinine behaviour. It’s a black comedy of manners in which little gets resolved, a skillfully crafted and often surreal work that’s set in the present day, although at times it’s given a historical feel largely through the Rabelaisian extravagance of the brothers’ caricatures, done in a way that makes it feel as if one’s viewing an animated Hogarth sketch. But The Hundred Brothers is also as conceptual as it is comedic as the brothers’ childish antics are played out in sections of the library that allude to the loftiest aspirations of Western thought, and it will inevitably appeal to fans of Robertson Davies largely because of the comic intelligence with which it’s written. The cover notes go in for things like “the Marx Brothers – times twenty-five – performing a Harold Pinter play”, but the most succinct is the pull-quote “A mad wrestling match of a book”, because that feels exactly right. I could certainly do with reading a few more erudite comedies like this largely because they set a very high watermark indeed.

Woody Allen, Mere Anarchy, 2007

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Picked up on a whim, I was rather impressed with this collection of shorts, mostly because it was a discovery that the Woody Allen you read in print bears little if any resemblance to the Woody Allen you see on the big screen, or even the Woody Allen who used to do stand-up. It’s still absurd neurotic comedy, intellectually engaging and (often very) linguistically dense, and throughout he adopts the style of his feuilletoniste literary hero S.J. Perelman who preceded him as a humourous writer for The New Yorker, where most of these pieces first appeared. He has his moments: some stories are well thought out if too briefly explored to do them justice and might even benefit from being longer; some are even science fictional, the cleverest by far being ‘Strung Out’, if you can overcome Allen’s tendencies towards female objectification. As this is his first collection of short fiction for more than a quarter of a century it would be interesting to see how it compares with one of his previous collections, but as Allen seems so immersed in the feuilleton style I suspect this must be something of a continuation.