Best Humor & Comedy Books

When a local antiques dealer is murdered and a consignment of heroin goes missing, the Thursday Murder Club has a new case. But this investigation is personal — one of their own is directly connected to the dead man — and the answers they find will test the friendship at the heart of the group.

William de Worde accidentally invents the newspaper in Ankh-Morpork when a chance encounter with dwarfish printers gives him the idea of distributing his letter of city news more widely. Within days he has a press, a staff, and enemies. Someone is trying to frame the Patrician Vetinari, and the Ankh-Morpork Times is the only institution positioned to find out the truth.

It's 1999 and Lincoln works the night shift reading flagged emails at a newspaper — intercepting private conversations between two friends, Beth and Jennifer, who have no idea anyone is reading. As Lincoln falls in love with Beth through her emails without ever meeting her, Rowell's debut raises uncomfortable questions about connection, voyeurism, and what it means to know someone.

The science of the human digestive tract from mouth to the other end — saliva, stomach acid, intestinal bacteria, fermentation, gas, and the specific history of what researchers have learned by investigating each component of the alimentary canal.

NPR foreign correspondent Eric Weiner travels to ten countries ranked at the extremes of happiness surveys — Netherlands, Bhutan, Qatar, Iceland, Switzerland, Thailand, India, Moldova, Britain, and the USA — to investigate what makes some places measurably happier than others.

Arthur Dent and his improbable companions dine at Milliways — the restaurant at the literal end of the universe — while continuing to flee Vogons, encounter the man who rules the universe, and discover the deeply unsatisfying truth about the planet Earth.

Meddy Chan accidentally kills her blind date with a stun gun, and now she has to hide the body — at the luxurious Californian wedding she's just been hired to photograph, with her mother and three aunties all in attendance.

Dirk Gently, self-styled holistic detective, investigates a case involving a ghost, an electric monk, a time machine, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge — all of which, he insists, are fundamentally connected.

Muriel Spark's mordant, brilliant comedy of old age. A group of elderly Londoners begins receiving anonymous phone calls from a voice that says only, 'Remember you must die.' Spark turns this eerie premise into a sharp, witty meditation on mortality, vanity, and the secrets of a lifetime.

Alexander Portnoy, a Jewish-American man from Newark, unburdens himself to his psychoanalyst about his overbearing mother, his Jewish guilt, his masturbation, his complicated relationships with Gentile women, and his inability to reconcile the person his community wants him to be with the person he is.

The first Discworld novel follows the hapless failed wizard Rincewind and the naive tourist Twoflower across a flat world balanced on the backs of four elephants standing on a giant star turtle — a comic masterpiece that parodies epic fantasy.

In Victorian England where pirates sail the sky in flying houses, a young lady thief named Cecilia Bassingwaite is targeted for recruitment — and finds herself entangled with the infuriating agent sent to either recruit or arrest her.

Tom Jones, a foundling of unknown parentage raised by the good-natured Squire Allworthy, is in love with the beautiful Sophia Western. Expelled from the estate, he travels toward London through a comic series of adventures, misidentifications, and encounters with English society at every level. Fielding's masterpiece and the most important comic novel in English before Dickens.

Danny and his friends—the paisanos of Monterey's Tortilla Flat district—live outside the conventional economy, drinking wine, pursuing women, and avoiding work. Steinbeck's first commercial success structures their adventures as a mock-Arthurian legend, with Danny's house as Camelot and the paisanos as his errant knights.

Greta transcribes sex therapy sessions in Hudson, New York, and becomes obsessed with a patient she has never met — a Swiss woman she calls Big Swiss — until they meet through a dog, and things become extremely complicated.

A group of intellectuals and eccentrics gather at Crome, a country house, for a summer of endless conversation about art, philosophy, sex, and the nature of reality — while accomplishing nothing whatsoever.

Mary Roach investigates the science behind military research — the labs, researchers, and experimental programs working on problems of survival in combat. Chapters cover uniforms that resist bacteria, the acoustics of IED blasts, the psychology of diarrhea in the field, and the science of keeping soldiers alive in increasingly hostile conditions.

Eugene Henderson — a huge, rich, impossible Connecticut pig farmer with a voice in his head that insists 'I want, I want' — abandons everything and travels to Africa, where he becomes entangled with two tribes and discovers something about what he wants.

Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect discover that the people of Krikkit — a planet that had never known there were other stars — have declared war on the entire universe, and it falls to an extremely unlikely group of heroes to stop them.

In a mobile army surgical hospital near the front lines of the Korean War, a team of brilliant surgeons maintain their sanity through elaborate pranks, outrageous insubordination, and black humor in the face of relentless carnage.

Brian Jackson, the first in his family to go to university, arrives at Bristol in 1985 determined to join the University Challenge quiz team and fall in love with the right girl. A funny and tender novel about class anxiety, intellectual aspiration, and the specific humiliations of being young.

John Steinbeck's warm, comic sequel to Cannery Row. The bums, dreamers, and good-hearted misfits of Monterey return after the war, and the whole community schemes to find love for Doc, the lonely marine biologist at the heart of their ramshackle world.

An alien assumes the identity of a Cambridge mathematician who has just solved the Riemann hypothesis. As it learns what it means to be human — through peanut butter, Emily Dickinson, and a dog named Newton — the novel becomes an unexpected meditation on why life is worth living.

Don Tillman, a brilliant but socially rigid genetics professor, designs the Wife Project — a rigorous questionnaire to identify the perfect partner — only to find himself derailed by Rosie, who fails every criterion.