Best Humor & Comedy Books

The first novel in Louis de Bernières's South American trilogy — a magical realist tale of a Colombian village caught between a corrupt landowner, the army, and guerrillas, as a British woman tries to divert the river to water her garden.

Grady Tripp, a creative writing professor at a Pittsburgh university, has been working on his second novel for seven years. It is 2,600 pages and shows no signs of ending. Over one chaotic weekend — during a literary festival — everything in his life comes apart at once: his wife leaves, his editor arrives, his student steals a jacket from the chancellor's house.

Colin Singleton has dated nineteen girls named Katherine and been dumped by all nineteen. A child prodigy now between his last Katherine and his uncertain future, Colin and his best friend Hassan embark on a post-graduation road trip to Gutshot, Tennessee, where Colin tries to derive a mathematical theorem to predict the rise and fall of romantic relationships.

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.

Two friends from a South African township, a Swedish nuclear weapons developer, and the King of Sweden find their fates improbably intertwined across decades of Cold War politics, scientific mishaps, and the kind of absurd coincidences that can only happen in a Jonas Jonasson novel.

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.