Best Humor & Comedy Books

When two very different women accidentally swap gym bags, beleaguered Sam ends up with a pair of designer red crocodile heels — and a borrowed confidence that begins to change her life, while their tangled fortunes collide in surprising ways.

On his hundredth birthday, Allan Karlsson escapes his nursing home through the window and embarks on an unexpected adventure, while flashbacks reveal a century of history in which he was improbably present at every major event.

Two young men have invented fictional alter egos to escape social obligations — Jack Worthing has invented 'Ernest' in town, and Algernon Moncrieff has invented a sickly friend 'Bunbury' in the country. Wilde's masterpiece of comic drama is the funniest play in the English language, a vehicle for some of the most memorable epigrams ever written, and beneath the surface glitter a perfectly constructed satire of Victorian earnestness, sincerity, and the institution of marriage.

Con man Moist von Lipwig is offered a choice: the gallows or running Ankh-Morpork's collapsed Post Office. He chooses the Post Office, finds it haunted by the ghosts of undelivered letters, and faces the ruthless monopoly of the Clacks communications network. A reformed fraudster versus corporate villainy — Pratchett at his most satirically urgent.

Death takes on an apprentice: Mort, a gangly, earnest boy who proves to be terrible at the job in the worst possible way. When Mort uses his new scythe to save a princess who was scheduled to die, reality begins to fracture. Death, meanwhile, discovers he has always wanted to try being human.

The Hogfather — Discworld's version of Father Christmas — has gone missing, and someone has hired the Assassins' Guild to make sure he stays that way. Death must put on the red suit and fill in, delivering presents on a flying sleigh, while his granddaughter Susan investigates the conspiracy behind the disappearance of belief itself.

The Ankh-Morpork City Watch is being diversified — trolls, dwarfs, a werewolf — and someone has stolen the Gonne, the Disc's first and only firearm. Sam Vimes is about to retire to marry Lady Sybil. Corporal Carrot, possibly the rightful heir to the throne, begins to understand what kind of man he wants to be.

Death is fired by the Auditors of Reality and given a finite lifespan. Taking the name Bill Door, he becomes a farmhand and experiences for the first time what it means to be mortal. Meanwhile, in Ankh-Morpork, the life-force that would have been collected by Death has nowhere to go — and the city starts filling up with something very strange.

Three Discworld witches — the formidable Granny Weatherwax, the cheerfully bawdy Nanny Ogg, and the romantically-inclined Magrat Garlick — find themselves entangled in a political murder. A king has been killed, the heir spirited away, and the witches are drawn into a plot that echoes Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear simultaneously.

Sir Robert Chiltern, an upright politician, is being blackmailed by Mrs Cheveley over an early indiscretion that made his fortune and his career. Wilde's second great society comedy is his most politically serious — an examination of the gap between public virtue and private corruption, and of what an 'ideal husband' actually is when the idealism is tested.

Someone is slowly poisoning the Patrician, and golems are being found smashed in the streets. Sam Vimes investigates both crimes simultaneously while navigating the city's aristocratic politics. At the centre of it all is the question of what a golem is — and whether a creature built to serve can want freedom.

The elves are returning to Lancre — and Pratchett's elves are nothing like Tolkien's. They are beautiful, pitiless, and feed on human misery. Granny Weatherwax faces the most powerful adversary of her career while Magrat Garlick prepares to marry King Verence. The novel that restored elves to their original folkloric terror.

Commander Sam Vimes is sent to Uberwald as Ankh-Morpork's Ambassador during the Low King of the Dwarfs' coronation, a politically fraught moment involving ancient tensions between dwarfs, vampires, and werewolves. Carrie takes charge of the Watch. Vimes navigates foreign politics with his characteristic bluntness — and then has to run for his life.

Kristen is stuck in the friend zone with the man she is falling for — partly because she doesn't want him to know about the medical situation that will define her future choices. Josh has his own reasons for keeping things uncomplicated. Their forced proximity — and the problem of her best friend dating his best friend — makes the distance untenable.

Two years after losing her fiancé, Sloane is still not okay. Then she accidentally adopts a dog named Tucker — whose owner, Jason, is a musician on tour who keeps showing up in her life. A love story about grief, music, and the way connection can arrive when you've stopped looking for it.

A clockmaker is commissioned to build a perfect clock that would stop time, bringing the Auditors of Reality one step closer to a universe without the messy unpredictability of life. The History Monks dispatch Lu-Tze, a sweeper with a formidable past, and his new apprentice Lobsang Ludd to prevent it. Death's granddaughter Susan is also involved.

A failed bank robber takes a group of apartment hunters hostage at an open house. When police arrive, the hostage-taker has vanished and no one in the group is talking. Told across multiple perspectives and timelines, Anxious People is a comedy-mystery about failure, loneliness, and the quiet kindnesses people extend to strangers when no one is watching.

The second volume of Gerald Durrell's Corfu trilogy continues the story of the Durrell family's years on the Greek island. With the same warmth and comic genius as the first, it introduces more extraordinary animals and eccentric characters.

Rincewind is magically transported to the Counterweight Continent — an analogue of imperial China — where revolution is stirring and the Great Wizzard (i.e., him) has been prophesied. Cohen the Barbarian and his Silver Horde of octogenarian warriors are planning to steal the entire empire. Survival is, as always, Rincewind's primary career goal.

Vanessa lives fully and chaotically, making impulsive decisions and oversharing her life online as a social media personality. Adrian is a serious lawyer who has just moved in next door and is unimpressed by either her lifestyle or her volume. A forced-proximity romance about what happens when two philosophies of life collide in a hallway.

The actual science and logistics of sending human beings into space — what zero gravity does to the body, how astronauts eat and use the toilet, the psychology of confinement, the history of space medicine research, and why Mars is significantly harder than the moon.

Timofey Pnin, a Russian émigré professor at a small American college, navigates American life with earnest incomprehension and frequent misfortune — Nabokov's most warm and compassionate novel.

Dave Lister, the laziest man in the universe, wakes up three million years into the future aboard the mining spaceship Red Dwarf, the last human alive, with only a hologram of his dead bunkmate and a creature that evolved from his cat for company.

The third and final volume of Gerald Durrell's Corfu trilogy, completing the story of the family's years on the Greek island before the outbreak of World War II drove them back to England.