Whether you’re sunshine-starved, sober or reading this on a treadmill, in the depths of winter, good cheer can be thin on the ground. Which is why we need funny books, right here, right now. And I don’t mean a gentle, nodding-at-jokes sort of funny. I mean books that elicit explosive laughter, books you can’t trust yourself to read in a public place, and certainly not while consuming the sort of drink that stains.
Whether it’s sharp social commentary, mid-life reckoning or torrid sex, these 14 books are all grappling with the wonderful, ludicrous experience of being human – and we’ve never needed them more.
I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron
Best known for the movies Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, Nora Ephron writes with a brilliance that’s warmly funny and coolly aware, and she makes her stellar jokes seem effortless. This collection of some of her best-known non-fiction ranges between ageing skin, US politics and the contents of her handbag, interspersed with advice like, “Never marry a man you wouldn’t want to be divorced from.” I can’t imagine the reader who won’t adore her.
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾ by Sue Townsend
Diaries are a terrific vehicle for humour, and the definitive example of the genre comes courtesy of agonised teenager Adrian. This book was published in 1982; subsequent volumes follow him all the way through to what Sue Townsend terms “The Prostate years”. But there’s something particularly special about the first of Mole’s diaries, capturing that mix of precariousness, pompousness and naivety so specific to young teens; it’s exquisitely funny. A new BBC adaptation is in the works, written by David Nicholls.
Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiney
“I know almost nothing about her,” says Graham’s wife Audra of the bride at the wedding they are attending together, “except that she gets very wet during sex.” When Audra strikes up a friendship with Graham’s ex-wife, the reserved, acerbic Elspeth, Graham’s life becomes very strange indeed. This dissection of modern marriage is wildly funny, as well as sad and true; you’ll be buying it for everyone you can.
Thank You, Jeeves by PG Wodehouse
Charming dolt Bertie Wooster would be lost without his valet, Jeeves. When Jeeves resigns (driven to distraction by his master’s tuneless banjo playing) poor Bertie is in quite the fix. With 11 novels and many more short stories, if you’ve not yet read Jeeves and Wooster, then truly, you are blessed – smart, stylish, crammed with gags and with plots that chime like clockwork, to read PG Wodehouse is the best escape from real life I know.
Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe
Letters are a fertile source of fun; Nina Stibbe wrote hers to her sister in the 1980s when she was a 20-year-old nanny to the children of Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books. The young Stibbe is delightfully unimpressed by the literati, whether it’s Jonathan Miller, who she mistakes for an opera singer, or the visiting Alan Bennett bearing an unwanted watercress and orange salad. And then there’s her response to the poems of Thomas Hardy: “They make me think of him wallowing and moaning and wishing for the olden days and that he hadn’t been such a cunt to his wife.”
Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan
When economics professor Rachel Chu agrees to go to Singapore for the summer with her debonaire boyfriend Nick Young, she has no idea the levels of wealth, consumption and sheer lunacy that await her. There’s something almost Dickensian about Kevin Kwan’s huge cast of characters, and his keen eye for the absurd makes this comic novel a deeply enjoyable trip into the mad whirl of Asia’s highest society.
The Diary of a Provincial Lady by EM Delafield
The unnamed provincial lady is married to the indomitable Robert, a man of few words, who is mostly hidden behind a newspaper. Brisk, rueful and with a wit that’s as dry as it gets, her unfiltered thoughts bring to mind the sitcom Peep Show, if it was set in the 1930s and concerned with raising children, facing down snobbish neighbours and trying to sprout bulbs.
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
David Sedaris is an observer of other people’s foibles and, just as often, his own. From his large and fascinating family to the trivia of the everyday, he’ll encourage you to stop and see the world anew. All his books are tremendous, but this one is a particular favourite, named after a chapter following Sedaris as he tries to learn French from an embittered teacher who says, “Every day spent with you is like having a caesarean section.”
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome
A boating holiday on the Thames forms the premise of one of the funniest novels in the English language. Our narrator and his friends George, Harris and the dog Montmorency bungle their way up the river, talking about everything and nothing: Waterloo Station, how to navigate Hampton Court Maze and why you should never enter a confined space carrying strong cheese. It’s essentially stand-up comedy, written in 1889.
Riders by Jilly Cooper
Jilly Cooper’s books are so very joyfully funny, filled with fabulous puns, horses and, of course, sex, sex, sex. In Cooper’s world, everything is vivid and glorious and rendered in a kind of linguistic Technicolor – from long, boozy lunches to dogs lapping from toilet bowls to Cooper’s louche hero Rupert Campbell Black, climaxing, “with that splendid driving flourish of staccato thrusts which reminded Helen of the end of a Beethoven Symphony”.
Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
Bernadette was once a revolutionary architect – now she’s mouldering away in suburban Seattle trying not to go mad. A novel told through a patchwork of emails, letters and transcripts assembled by her teenage daughter Bee, this tale of Bernadette’s reemergence into the world is breakneck, infuriating and triumphantly uproarious. And when you turn the final page, rejoice, because there’s a new Maria Semple, Go Gentle, out in April.
Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid
Emira, who is black, is just out of college, working as a babysitter for white lifestyle guru Alix. This novel begins with Emira taking Alix’s toddler, Briar, to a fancy grocery store, where the security guard assumes the child is being kidnapped. Rapturously received when it was published in 2019, it’s a book about race, and privilege, and the gulf between youth and middle age. And it’s dazzlingly, discomfortingly funny.
Terrortome by Garth Marenghi
The creation of writer and comedian Matthew Holness, Garth Marenghi is the worst kind of horror writer – imagine Stephen King but devoid of all talent. Marenghi, however, terms himself, “Cosmic Veil-Render, Twixt-Dimensional Visionary and former Grand Duke of Darkness (now Archduke)”. In this collection of three interlinked short stories, his hero, the horror writer Nick Steen, buys a possessed typewriter. Shortly after, a hellmouth of demons has been unleashed, and Steen and the typewriter are having rapturous – if mechanically unlikely – sex.
The Diary of a Nobody by George & Weedon Grossmith
First published in weekly episodes in Punch magazine in 1888, this book follows the life of Charles Pooter, a suburban office clerk living in Holloway with his wife, the long-suffering Carrie, and his awful son, Lupin. It’s a book about class, about life’s small disasters and tiny triumphs; something of Pooter lives on in characters from George Costanza to David Brent.
