I like fantasy and comedy - but I can't bring myself to read a Pratchett book.
Funny books Page 5
Quote: lofthouse @ June 16 2011, 9:59 PM BSTHi,
I read books on my dinner break at work and as im nearly at the end of my current Jeeves & Wooster will soon be needing something new to read.
Suggestions please for FUNNY books.
Can be fiction, non-fiction, biographies anything - as long as its funny
thanks
With the exception of P.G Wodehouse, whom you already seem familiar with, I would recommend G.K Chesterton. In my opinion these two are the giants of 20th century, comic, English literature.
They are quite different though. Wodehouse's humour is a sophisticated titter; a gentle, dry mocking. He has the saving grace of being able to wind enough pathos through his otherwise satirical and knowing narrative. Unfortunately so many imitators, even accidental imitators, lack this saving pathos of Wodehouse. Hence the modern world is full of such dry, sophisticated and yet heartless and purposeless 'humour'.
Chesterton's humour is a belly laugh; his pathos and his humour are almost one and the same. Like Dickens, who he adored, he has this raw, common sense love for mankind. I always thought you'd discover more about the real, democratic spirit in Chesteron, a Catholic and in many ways a traditionalist, than in most of the sophisticated radicalism and radical literature of the last few centuries. He has been called, quite rightly, the 'Apostle of Common Sense' for humourously getting to the heart of matters and seeing through so much of the nonsense we moderns talk, write and think. It is actually his Essays, and then Father Brown which I most advise reading, even for their humour value. His famous collections, like Tremendous Trifles and The Defendant, are avaible online at Project Gutenberg.
Mind you Chesterton may well be confronting for non-Christians or a generally 'progressive' people(what with brilliant salvos like this from a Father Brown story; 'He was one of the great humanitarian French freethinkers; and the only thing wrong with them is that they make mercy even colder than justice'.). I think there is a reason you see the likes of Stephen Fry praising Wodehouse as the greatest of the last century's humourists and even finding time to laud Evelyn Waugh, despite his Catholicism, but they generally leave Chesterton well alone.
"My first and last philosophy ... I learnt in the nursery... The things I believed then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales... They are not fantasies: compared with them other things are fantastic... Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense. It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth ... I knew the magic beanstalk before I tasted beans; I was sure of the Man in the Moon before I was certain of the moon. I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts."
- G.K. Chesterton
sounds interesting
cheers pal
Parkinson's Law by C.N Parkinson is also a very funny book. He was a disciple of Chesterton, though in this work I cannot detect much of the same sort of philosophical, moral and theological preoccupations. However each chapter contains different examples of why the textbooks, and the experts and reformers, on governance and organisations, which suggest these are formed and run largely according to rationality, and by extension the view we should always be trying to bring in ratonalising reforms, are wrong. It quite hilarious at times, and quite persuasive and not without genuine insight.
It contains such gems as Parkinson's Law itself;
'Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.'
His law as triviality is also very witty and interesting.
Quote: Chappers @ August 1 2011, 5:12 PM BSTI like fantasy and comedy - but I can't bring myself to read a Pratchett book.
Is that because they remind you too much of your time in Mordor?
There is an unfashionable whiff of anti-Semitism that clings, perhaps unfairly to Chesterton. I am fond of his poetry, and I recall finding The Napoleon of Notting Hill enjoyable.
If we are celebrating humourists of yesteryear, I will put in a good word for Mary Dunn's Memoirs of Mipsie, W.E. Bowman's Ascent of Rum Doodle, and of course the Grossmiths' Dairy of a Nobody.
Quote: Chappers @ August 1 2011, 5:12 PM BSTI like fantasy and comedy . . .
http://network.libdems.org.uk/manifesto2010/LibDemEasyRead.pdf
Quote: Timbo @ August 12 2011, 12:17 PM BSTThere is an unfashionable whiff of anti-Semitism that clings, perhaps unfairly to Chesterton. I am fond of his poetry, and I recall finding The Napoleon of Notting Hill enjoyable.
There is a whiff of anti-semitism that clings to most of English culture before 1945. Shakespeare has been accused of it. The same goes for racism, sexism, 'homophobia'(I hate this term, it has a sinister pseudo-psychoanalystic tone to it.) and so on, particularly if you use the most expansive politically correct definitions. If you used a standard that could please even the most inquisitorial New Labour quangos in these fields then there'd be little of English literature or culture left.
That said Chesterton hardly wrote tirades against Jews or anything like that. What people are referring to in this respect, at most, is a few comments in a few essays or stories that are quite minor and incidental to the overall works. The Merchant of Venice is far more suspect from this point of view, but any teacher, professor or bureaucrat who leaves it off the curriculum for that reasons deserves to be fired(unless he is a Euro bureaucrat, who probably deserves to be fired anyway.).
Chesterton is still extremely popular amongst Roman Catholics(somewhere in heaven the Angelic Doctor may well be wishing he wrote a few Detective Stories alongside his invincible dialetics.)and was an unashamed defender of Christian Orthodoxy, and what is worse a mocker and satiriser of its opponents. So it is natural he would win the ire of those most ready to attack past authors for not living up to the exacting standards of the anti-'dead-white-male' brigade. I'm sure he'd have been annoyed if it were any other way. The ironic thing is this brigade pretend to be radicals and democrats and yet in Chesterton, along with his hero Dickens and that carpenter from Galilee who he so revered, you will find some of the most gregarious, wholehearted love of humanity you are ever likely to encounter. But then what genuinely 'progressive' intellectual could approve of a man who writes passages like this;
'This should be our great comfort. The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared. There are a large number of cultivated persons who doubt these maxims of daily life, just as there are a large number of persons who believe they are the Prince of Wales; and I am told that both classes of people are entertaining conversationalists. But the average man or boy writes daily in these great gaudy diaries of his soul, which we call Penny Dreadfuls, a plainer and better gospel than any of those iridescent ethical paradoxes that the fashionable change as often as their bonnets. It may be a very limited aim in morality to shoot a 'many-faced and fickle traitor,' but at least it is a better aim than to be a many-faced and fickle traitor, which is a simple summary of a good many modern systems from Mr. d'Annunzio's downwards. So long as the coarse and thin texture of mere current popular romance is not touched by a paltry culture it will never be vitally immoral. It is always on the side of life. The poor--the slaves who really stoop under the burden of life--have often been mad, scatter-brained and cruel, but never hopeless. That is a class privilege, like cigars. '
(Anyway, that's my tiresome ranting done. I apologise in advance, but I'm quite a fan of Chesterton and it is an interesting topic.)
Henry Cecil's book on the funny side of law.
Cold Comfort Farm a spoof on country novels such as Lark Rise.
Jasper Fforde's wander through literature...
John Sutherland ditto... (Non-fictional)
The Art of Coarse Acting.
Spike Milligan's According to... series.
How about thes to be going on with?
Not all winners by any means but I have started randomly snapping some of my comedy books.
Tim Brooke-Taylor's Cricket Box:
Ronnie Corbett's Armchair Golf:
Jim Davidson - Too Frisky!:
Timothy Lea - Confessions of a Pop Performer:
John Burke - Johnny Speight's Till Death Us Do Part:
Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais - Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?:
The Liver Birds:
Eric Morecambe - Mr Lonely:
David Nobbs - The Better World of Reginald Perrin:
Quote: Chappers @ 16th June 2011, 10:03 PM BSTHow many funny book threads are we having?
I'm sounding like a real grumpy old git aren't I!
What's your favourite funny book Chappers?
Well to answer you - around 20 months later I bought my son-in-law a couple of those Ladybird books. One entitled the Hangover and one the Wife.
They are traditional looking Ladybird books with similar types of illustrations and wide-spaced lettering but the text is brilliant.
I see that some of the writers have Sitcom pedigree.
Quote: Agnes Guano @ 4th September 2013, 2:34 PM BSTEric Morecambe - Mr Lonely:
Been given that for Christmas - fictional comedian he wrote about based loosely on his life I believe.