20 Best Funny Books: Novels and Non-Fiction That Are Genuinely Comic

Genuine comic writing is harder than it looks. The joke has to work on the page — without timing, without delivery, without the performer’s body — which means the comedy has to be embedded in the structure, the rhythm, the specific word choice. Books that are described as “funny” often aren’t, not really; they are pleasant, or warm, or light, which is a different thing.

The books on this list are actually funny. Most of them are also true about something, which is usually where the comedy comes from. The funniest books tend to be the ones whose humour is not a decoration on top of serious content but the vehicle through which the serious content is delivered.

Quick answer: For the most reliably funny, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or A Man Called Ove. For comic satire, Good Omens. For memoir, look for David Sedaris.

Comic Novels: Prose That Is Funny

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

Ove is a Swedish pensioner — curmudgeonly, rule-bound, deeply set in his ways — who has lost his wife and his reason to continue. His repeated attempts to die are interrupted by the arrival of a chaotic young family next door. Backman’s comedy is character-based: Ove is funny because he is entirely himself, because his rigidity is the same quality as his love, and because the situations he encounters require him to be more of himself rather than less. The novel is also genuinely moving, which is not a contradiction — the best comedy often coexists with genuine feeling.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Arthur Dent’s house is being demolished to make way for a bypass. Moments later, the Earth is demolished to make way for a hyperspace expressway. Adams’s novel is funny because its comedy is philosophically grounded — the joke about Earth being an insignificant planet in an unimportant corner of the galaxy is also a genuine argument about human self-importance. The prose is the joke: Adams writes in a style where the comedy is in the observation, not in the plot. The series that follows (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Life, the Universe and Everything) maintains the quality across five books.

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

An angel and a demon, friends since the beginning of time, conspire to prevent the apocalypse they are both technically supposed to want. Pratchett and Gaiman’s collaboration is the funniest theological comedy since Life of Brian — its comedy is precise (it knows exactly which theological ideas it is mocking and why) and its invention is continuous. The Antichrist is an eleven-year-old boy in the English countryside who has been misplaced by a Satanic nurse. It becomes more plausible as you read.

Satire: Comedy With an Argument

The Complete Works of P.G. Wodehouse (Jeeves and Wooster)

Bertie Wooster, the most amiable and least capable man in England, and Jeeves, his unflappable valet, navigate a series of romantic entanglements and social disasters. Wodehouse’s prose is the most sustained comic achievement in English — every sentence is constructed with a precision that makes the comedy seem effortless and makes any individual line quotable. The Jeeves novels are technically inexhaustible: Right Ho, Jeeves, The Code of the Woosters, and The Inimitable Jeeves are usually recommended as starting points.

Non-Fiction: Comedy as Argument

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson

Manson’s anti-self-help self-help book is genuinely funny — its energy comes from the pleasure of watching someone demolish the genre’s conventions from inside. The argument (that improvement culture’s relentless positivity is itself a form of suffering, and that the productive response to difficulty is to choose what to care about rather than to feel good about everything) is coherent, and the comedy makes it readable in a way that more earnest versions of the same argument are not.

Memoir: Funny People Writing About Their Lives

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

Noah’s memoir of growing up mixed-race in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa is funny and serious in exactly equal measure — the comedy comes from the absurdity of the specific situations he describes, and the seriousness comes from what those situations reveal about the systems that produced them. The chapter on his mother is among the finest pieces of writing about parental love in recent memoir. For the full post, see our books like Born a Crime guide.

What to Read Next

For books that blend comedy with genuine ideas, the Pratchett/Gaiman partnership is the most reliable source — Pratchett’s Discworld series (forty-one novels) maintains quality across its length in a way unusual in any genre. For comic memoir, David Sedaris has six collections that sustain the quality of Me Talk Pretty One Day.

For the Best Fiction Books

For the definitive guide to fiction — the greatest novels across literary fiction, classics, and contemporary writing — see our Best Fiction Books of All Time list.

More Essential Reading Lists

• Best Books to Read on a Plane
• Discworld Books in Order: How to Read Terry Pratchett
• Books Like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

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