Let's Talk Books: Humor/Comedy

by Beth

Books considered Humor / Comedy are books in which the writer seeks to amuse the reader. The humor can be subtle, as part of a carefully woven narrative, or sometimes it is the main point of the book. Comedy assumes many forms - including farce, parody or satire, and it often depends upon the reader's sense of humor and point of view. If it makes you laugh repeatedly it's a good bet you can call it humor.

Thanks to everyone who took part in the Let's Talk Books: Humor/Comedy discussion. If you missed it, not a problem! Here's the list of the books we recommended to each other.

To find the upcoming Let's Talk Books events check out https://www.icpl.org/events/ages/adults

The house in the Cerulean Sea

TJ Klune

SCIENCE FICTION Klune Tj
Graphic Novels, Humor

"A magical island. A dangerous task. A burning secret. Linus Baker leads a quiet, solitary life. At forty, he lives in a tiny house with a devious cat and his old records. As a Case Worker at the Department in Charge Of Magical Youth, he spends his days overseeing the well-being of children in government-sanctioned orphanages. When Linus is unexpectedly summoned by Extremely Upper Management he's given a curious and highly classified assignment: travel to Marsyas Island Orphanage, where six dangerous children reside: a gnome, a sprite, a wyvern, an unidentifiable green blob, a were-Pomeranian, and the Antichrist. Linus must set aside his fears and determine whether or not they're likely to bring about the end of days. But the children aren't the only secret the island keeps. Their caretaker is the charming and enigmatic Arthur Parnassus, who will do anything to keep his wards safe. As Arthur and Linus grow closer, long-held secrets are exposed, and Linus must make a choice: destroy a home or watch the world burn. An enchanting story, masterfully told, The House in the Cerulean Sea is about the profound experience of discovering an unlikely family in an unexpected place-and realizing that family is yours."--

Four to score

Janet Evanovich

MYSTERY Evanovich, Janet
Mystery, Humor

Stephanie Plum, Trenton, New Jersey's favorite pistol-packing, condom-carrying bounty hunter, is back---and on the trail of a revenge-seeking waitress who's skipped bail. With the help of seventy-three-year-old Grandma Mazur, ex-hooker Lula, a transvestite musician named Sally Sweet, and the all-too-sexy Joe Morelli, Stephanie might just catch her woman. Then again, with more mishaps than there are exits on the Jersey Turnpike---including murders, firebombs, and Stephanie's arch-rival bounty hunter chasing after the same fugitive---Stephanie better watch her back big-time if she wants to live to crack this case.

Fool

Christopher Moore

FICTION Moore, Christopher
Humor

Pocket, King Lear's fool, sets out to straighten out the mess the mad king has made of the kingdom and the royal family, only to discover the truth about his own heritage.

The Wee Free Men

Terry Pratchett

YOUNG ADULT FICTION Pratchett, Terry
Young Adult, Humor

A young witch-to-be named Tiffany teams up with the Wee Free Men, a clan of six-inch-high blue men, to rescue her baby brother and ward off a sinister invasion from Fairyland.

Equal rites

Terry Pratchett

SCIENCE FICTION Pratchett, Terry
Science Fiction

A dying wizard tries to pass on his power to an eighth son of an eighth son, who is just at that moment being born. The fact that the son is actually a daughter is discovered just a little too late.

The Eyre affair

Jasper Fforde

SCIENCE FICTION Fforde, Jasper
Science Fiction, Humor

Jasper Fforde's Great Britain, circa 1985, when time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously: it’s a bibliophile’s dream. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, a detective with SO-27, the LiteraTec division, who's job is to solve crimes related to literature. When the original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens disappears under impossible circumstances, Thursday finds herself drawn into an investigation that is more deadly than anything she has experienced thus far in her career.

The princess bride : S. Morgenstern's classic tale of true love and high adventure : The "good parts" version, abridged

William Goldman

FICTION Goldman, William
Fiction, Humor

In a Renaissance-era world, a young woman named Buttercup lives on a farm in the country of Florin. She abuses the farm hand Westley, calling him "farm boy" and demands that he perform chores for her. Westley's response to her demands is always "As you wish." She eventually realizes that what he is saying is, "I love you." After Buttercup realizes that she loves him and confesses her feelings, Westley goes to seek his fortune so they can marry. Buttercup later receives a letter that the Dread Pirate Roberts attacked his ship at sea. Believing Westley dead, Buttercup sinks into despair. Later she reluctantly agrees to marry Prince Humperdinck, heir to the throne of Florin.

As you wish : inconceivable tales from the making of The princess bride

Cary Elwes

791.4372 /Princess
Nonfiction, Humor

From actor Cary Elwes, who played the iconic role of Westley in The Princess Bride, comes a first-person account and behind-the-scenes look at the making of the cult classic film filled with never-before-told stories, exclusive photographs, and interviews with costars Robin Wright, Wallace Shawn, Billy Crystal, Christopher Guest, and Mandy Patinkin, as well as author and screenwriter William Goldman, producer Norman Lear, and director Rob Reiner.

Hyperbole and a half : unfortunate situations, flawed coping mechanisms, mayhem, and other things that happened

Allie Brosh

817.6 /Brosh
Nonfiction, Humor

Collects autobiographical, illustrated essays and cartoons from the author's popular blog and related new material that humorously and candidly deals with her own idiosyncrasies and battles with depression.

Eligible : a novel

Curtis Sittenfeld

FICTION Sittenfe Curtis
Fiction, Humor

In this modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice, takes place in Cincinnati. Despite now being in their twenties, the three youngest Bennet sisters, Mary, Kitty, and Lydia still live at home with their parents. The eldest two, Liz and Jane, 38 and 39 respectively, returned home from New York for the summer when their father, Mr. Bennet, suffers a heart attack. Chip Bingley, a doctor and a former contestant on a Bachelor style TV show called Eligible recently had moved to Cincinnati. Mrs. Bennet, keen for her daughters to get married, arranged for her daughters to meet him at a barbecue.

Three men in a boat : to say nothing of the dog!

Jerome K. (Jerome Klapka) Jerome

827.91 /Jerome
Humor, Nonfiction

A humorous account by English writer Jerome K. Jerome of a two-week boating holiday on the Thames from Kingston upon Thames to Oxford and back to Kingston. The book was initially intended to be a serious travel guide,[2] with accounts of local history along the route, but the humorous elements took over to the point where the serious and somewhat sentimental passages seem a distraction to the comic novel.

The diary of a bookseller

Shaun Bythell

BIOGRAPHY Bythell, Shaun
Humor, Biographies

When Bythell first thought of taking over the bookstore in the remote Scottish village of Wigtown, it seemed like a book-lover's paradise. Here he details his experiences at the helm of The Book Shop, Scotland's largest second hand bookstore: the delightfully unusual staff members, eccentric customers, odd townsfolk and surreal buying trips to old estates and auctions. As he struggled to build his business-- and be polite-- he is seduced by the charm of small-town life, and the peculiar characters he meets. -- adapted from jacket

Born a Crime - stories from a South African childhood

Trevor Noah

791.45028092/Noah
Nonfiction, Biographies

The book details Trevor Noah growing up in his native South Africa during the apartheid era. As the mixed-race son of a white father and a black mother, Noah himself was classified as a "coloured" in accordance to the apartheid system of racial classification. According to Noah, he stated that even under apartheid, he felt trouble fitting in because it was a crime "for [him] to be born as a mixed-race baby", hence the title of his book.[

To say nothing of the dog, or, How we found the bishop's bird stump at last

Connie Willis

SCIENCE FICTION Willis, Connie
Science Fiction, Horror

Ned Henry is badly in need of a rest. He's been shuttling between the 21st century and the 1940's searching for a Victorian atrocity called the bishop's bird stump. It's part of a project to restore the famed Coventry Cathedral, destroyed by the Nazi air raid over a hundred years earlier. But then Verity Kindle , a fellow time traveler , inadvertently brings back something from the past. Now Ned must jump back to the Victorian era to help Verity put things right- not only to save the project but prevent altering history itself.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.

Tom Stoppard

822.914 /Stoppard
Nonfiction, Humor

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is one of the most enduring and frequently performed plays of contemporary theater and has firmly established itself in the dramatic canon. Acclaimed as a modern masterpiece, it is the fabulously inventive tale of Hamlet as told from the worm’s-eye view of the bewildered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two minor characters in Shakespeare’s play. In Tom Stoppard’s best-known work, this Shakespearean Laurel and Hardy finally get a chance to take the lead role, but do so in a world where echoes of Waiting for Godot resound, where reality and illusion intermix, and where fate leads our two heroes to a tragic but inevitable end. Revised and reissued to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the play’s first performance, this definitive edition includes a new introduction and previously unpublished ancillary material.

Catch-22

Joseph Heller

FICTION Heller, Joseph
Humor, Fiction

Set in Italy during World War II, this is the story of the incomparable, malingering bombardier Yossarian, a hero who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. But his real problem is not the enemy - it is his own army, which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempt to excuse himself from the perilous missions he's assigned, he'll be in violation of Catch-22, a hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule: A man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes a formal request to be removed from duty, he is proven sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved.

I feel bad about my neck : and other thoughts on being a woman

Nora Ephron

814.54 /Ephron
Humor, Nonfiction

With her disarming, intimate, completely accessible voice, and dry sense of humor, Nora Ephron shares with us her ups and downs in a candid, hilarious look at women who are getting older and dealing with the tribulations of maintenance, menopause, empty nests, and life itself. From how much she hates her purse to how much time she spends attempting to stop the clock: the hair dye, the treadmill, the lotions and creams that promise to slow the aging process but never do. Oh, and she can’t stand the way her neck looks. But her dermatologist tells her there’s no quick fix for that.

Waiting for Tom Hanks

Kerry Winfrey

FICTION Winfrey Kerry
Fiction, Humor

"Romantic-comedy-obsessed Annie Cassidy dreams of being the next Nora Ephron. She spends her days writing internet content, rewatching Sleepless in Seattle, and waiting for her movie-perfect meet cute. If she could just find her own Tom Hanks--a man who's sweet, sensitive, and possibly owns a houseboat--her problems would disappear and her life would be perfect. But Tom Hanks is nowhere in sight. When a movie starts filming in her neighborhood and Annie gets a job on set, it seems like a sign. Then Annie meets the lead actor, Drew Danforth, a cocky prankster who couldn't be less like Tom Hanks if he tried. Their meet-cute is more of a meet annoying, but soon Annie finds herself sharing some classic rom-com moments with Drew. Her Tom Hanks can't be an actor who's leaving town in a matter of days...can he? Drew may not be what she imagined, but Annie soon learns that real life doesn't always go according to script"--

Can't we talk about something more pleasant?

Roz Chast

BIOGRAPHY Chast, Roz
Nonfiction, Biographies

A graphic memoir by a long-time New Yorker cartoonist celebrates the final years of her aging parents' lives through four-color cartoons, family photos and documents that reflect the artist's struggles with caregiver challenges.

Dear Committee Members

Julie Schumacher

FICTION Schumacher, Julie
Fiction, Humor

Jason Fitger is a beleaguered professor of creative writing and literature at Payne University, a small and not very distinguished liberal arts college in the midwest. His department is facing draconian cuts and squalid quarters, while one floor above them the Economics Department is getting lavishly remodeled offices. His once-promising writing career is in the doldrums, as is his romantic life, in part as the result of his unwise use of his private affairs for his novels. His star (he thinks) student can't catch a break with his brilliant (he thinks) work Accountant in a Bordello, based on Melville's Bartleby. In short, his life is a tale of woe, and the vehicle this droll and inventive novel uses to tell that tale is a series of hilarious letters of recommendation that Fitger is endlessly called upon by his students and colleagues to produce, each one of which is a small masterpiece of high dudgeon, low spirits, and passive-aggressive strategies

The guncle : a novel

Steven Rowley

FICTION Rowley Steven
Humor, Fiction

Gay Uncle Patrick (GUP, for short), has always loved his niece, Maisie, and nephew, Grant. He loves spending time with them when they come out to Palm Springs for weeklong visits, When Maisie and Grant lose their mother and Patrick's brother has a health crisis of his own, Patrick finds himself suddenly taking on the role of primary guardian. Despite having a set of "Guncle Rules" Patrick has no idea what to expect. After years barely holding on after the loss of his great love, a somewhat-stalled acting career, and a lifestyle not-so-suited to a six- and a nine-year-old, Patrick's eyes are opened to a new sense of responsibility. Even being larger than life means you're unfailingly human. -- adapted from jacket

The unhoneymooners

Christina Lauren

FICTION Lauren, Christina
Fiction, Humor

For two sworn enemies, anything can happen during the Hawaiian trip of a lifetime--maybe even love--in this romantic comedy from the New York Times bestselling authors of Roomies . Olive Torres is used to being the unlucky twin: from inexplicable mishaps to a recent layoff, her life seems to be almost comically jinxed. By contrast, her sister Ami is an eternal champion . . . she even managed to finance her entire wedding by winning a slew of contests. Unfortunately for Olive, the only thing worse than constant bad luck is having to spend the wedding day with the best man (and her nemesis), Ethan Thomas. Olive braces herself for wedding hell, determined to put on a brave face, but when the entire wedding party gets food poisoning, the only people who aren't affected are Olive and Ethan. Suddenly there's a free honeymoon up for grabs, and Olive will be damned if Ethan gets to enjoy paradise solo. Agreeing to a temporary truce, the pair head for Maui. After all, ten days of bliss is worth having to assume the role of loving newlyweds, right? But the weird thing is . . . Olive doesn't mind playing pretend. In fact, the more she pretends to be the luckiest woman alive, the more it feels like she might be.

Grown ups

Marian Keyes

FICTION Keyes Marian
Humor, Fiction

"Johnny Casey, his two brothers Ed and Liam, their beautiful, talented wives and all their kids spend a lot of time together--birthday parties, anniversary celebrations, weekends away. And they're a happy family. Johnny's wife, Jessie--who has the most money--insists on it. Under the surface, though, conditions are murkier. While some people clash, other people like each other far too much . . . Still, everything manages to stay under control--that is, until Ed's wife, Cara, gets a concussion and can't keep her thoughts or opinions to herself. One careless remark at Johnny's birthday party, with the entire family present, and Cara starts spilling all their secrets. As everything unravels, each of the adults finds themselves wondering if it's--finally--the time to grow up."--Dust jacket flap.

At home : a short history of private life

Bill Bryson

643.1 /Bryson
Humor, Home

Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything) takes readers on a tour of his house, a rural English parsonage, showing how each room has figured in the evolution of private life.

The code of the Woosters

P. G. (Pelham Grenville) Wodehouse

FICTION Wodehouse, P. G.
Fiction, Humor

A classic piece of Wodehouse silliness, involving Bertie Wooster, his formidable Aunt Dahlia and (of course) Jeeves in a scheme to steal an 18th century cow-creamer during a weekend party at an English country house.

Cold Comfort Farm

Stella Gibbons

FICTION Gibbons, Stella
Fiction, Humor

A wickedly funny portrait of British rural life in the 1930s. Flora Poste, a recently orphaned socialite, moves in with her country relatives, the gloomy Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm, and becomes enmeshed in a web of violent emotions, despair, and scheming, until Flora manages to set things right.

The humans

Matt Haig

FICTION Haig Matt
Fiction, Humor

Body-snatching has never been so heartwarming . . . The Humans is a funny, compulsively readable novel about alien abduction, mathematics, and that most interesting subject of all: ourselves. Combine Douglas Adams’s irreverent take on life, the universe, and everything with a genuinely moving love story, and you have some idea of the humor, originality, and poignancy of Matt Haig’s latest novel. Our hero, Professor Andrew Martin, is dead before the book even begins. As it turns out, though, he wasn’t a very nice man--as the alien imposter who now occupies his body discovers. Sent to Earth to destroy evidence that Andrew had solved a major mathematical problem, the alien soon finds himself learning more about the professor, his family, and “the humans” than he ever expected. When he begins to fall for his own wife and son--who have no idea he’s not the real Andrew--the alien must choose between completing his mission and returning home or finding a new home right here on Earth

Cannery Row

John Steinbeck

FICTION Steinbeck, John
Fiction, Humor

Cannery Row is set during the Great Depression in Monterey, California, on a street lined with sardine canneries that is known as Cannery Row. The story revolves around the people living there: Lee Chong, the local grocer; Doc, a marine biologist; and Mack, the leader of a group of derelict people. Mack and his friends want to do something nice for their friend Doc, who has been good to them without asking for reward. Mack hits on the idea that they should throw a thank-you party, and the entire community quickly becomes involved. Unfortunately, the party rages out of control, and Doc's lab and home are ruined—and so is Doc's mood. In an effort to return to Doc's good graces, Mack and the boys decide to throw another party—but make it work this time.