Best Humor & Comedy Books

The fourth Hitchhiker's Guide novel returns Arthur Dent to an Earth that should have been destroyed, where he finds something he never expected in this series: a love story, with a woman named Fenchurch and the mystery of why the dolphins vanished.

Henry James's light, charming early comedy of manners. Two worldly, Europeanized cousins descend on their staid Puritan relatives in rural New England, and the collision of Old World sophistication and New World earnestness produces one of James's sunniest and most accessible novels.

George Brush is a travelling textbook salesman in Depression-era America who is also a fundamentalist Christian — sincere, principled, and a constant source of comic chaos wherever he goes.

Alex-Li Tandem is a Jewish-Chinese autograph dealer in North London, obsessed with celebrity signatures and with the Hollywood actress Kitty Alexander. His quest for her autograph takes him to New York, but the novel is really about grief, celebrity culture, Jewish identity, and the surfaces we mistake for reality.

The fifth and final book Douglas Adams wrote in the Hitchhiker's Guide series — which he subtitled 'the fifth book in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker's Trilogy.' Arthur Dent searches for a home across parallel Earths while a darker, more fatalistic comedy takes hold.