Stop Crying

By the way, I laugh a lot too. After that last post, I thought I should give a brief list of books that make me laugh. Here they are.

1. The Princess Bride by William Goldman – As wonderful as the movie is, the book is better and much funnier.

2. Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore – A book that makes the life of Christ into a comedy would normally be pretty sacrilegious. But somehow, Christopher Moore stayed respectful, with even a few reverent moments. This is basically the story of those lost years of Jesus’s life as told by Jesus’s goofy best friend Biff. There are a lot of inside jokes that Christians will really enjoy, and there are some actual profound moments that Moore is a good enough author to create. Moore was working with some pretty good material, and he didn’t go wrong.

3. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller – This is every bit the classic it’s supposed to be. It’s funny and poignant.

4. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams – I guess this is pretty standard. My favorite of the series is the fourth one, So Long and Thanks for All the Fish. The movie wasn’t bad, but it didn’t do the trilogy justice.

5. Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book by Walker Percy – Walker Percy’s novel The Second Coming contains the single funniest moment I’ve ever read in a book, but that’s not primarily a comedic book. I guess this one isn’t either, but it’s still consistently funny. It’s basically a mock self-help book (that’s also a real self-help book) from one of the most original thinkers we’ve ever had. Percy was a fairly conservative Catholic who just lampoons everybody from this age. He just makes you feel silly sometimes by pointing out little absurdities in our lives that we take for granted, and he always points to a better way to live.

6. The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh – This is easily the darkest book on the list. Evelyn Waugh saw a lot of soulless people in our secular age, and he set out to shock us out of our complacency. This satire on the Hollywood funeral industry is pretty effective. His best book is easily Brideshead Revisited, but to me, this is his funniest.

Other notables:

1. The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G.K. Chesterton (Chesterton’s the Besterton!!!)
2. A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket
3. Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler
4. High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
5. Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm
6. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
7. The Once and Future King by T.H. White
8. Godric by Frederick Buechner