Keeping it light in a dark world

Do your spirits need a lift? Do you want to forget the fact you’ve been sitting around in your sweats, taking deep breaths and wondering how you never noticed that very annoying noise your spouse/siblings/children makes repeatedly? Or just need something to do while you drink yourself silly to escape the tedium of social distancing? Here’s a list of some of the most hilarious books I’ve ever read. Just my opinion, but if at least one of them doesn’t make you snort out loud, you may not have a pulse.

How to Build a Girl by Caitlin Moran

I love this book about a young British girl’s coming-of-everything so much I try to get everyone I know to read it. To really get the full effect, however, you should listen to the audio version, as the narrator adds another level of brilliance to Caitlin Moran’s writing. Then rush out and binge the TV series “Raised by Wolves” which is like a prequel to this book and just as funny.

How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran

Despite the title, this book of essays is only related to How to Build a Girl by the fact it’s by the same author. If you read this and can’t find something that makes you laugh out loud in recognition, you are probably a squeamish man, although I think there are probably plenty of men who’d find this just as outrageously funny as I did.

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

Terry Pratchett + Neil Gaiman equals wildly, wickedly funny. While the recent Amazon show was fun, it didn’t come close to doing the book justice. Read it and then read Pratchett’s Discworld series, which manages to be amazingly clever, satirical and just so much damn fun.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

This one is on just about everybody’s lists of comic novels, for good reason. The main character, Ignacias J. Reilly, is a modern day Don Quixote, if Quixote was an overweight slob allergic to work surrounded by a cast of Monty Pythonesque cast of characters set in pre-Katrina New Orleans in all its original decadent gloriousness.

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

All of David Sedaris’s work is brilliantly, uncompromisingly honest, which is what makes it so funny. You will want him to be your best friend and wonder why your story about that thing your dog did in front of the Jehovah’s Witnesses doesn’t sound as interesting when you tell it.

Bossypants by Tina Fey

Full disclosure: Tina Fey is my hero. I’m sorry it’s not Harriet Tubman or Marie Curie, but I’d rather have her talents and brilliance. Bossypants gets you inside Fey’s magnificent mind and lets you roam around for a while. It’s worth it.

Angus, Thongs and Full Frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison

This book introduces Georgia Nicholson, a British teenager who is utterly endearing, a girl with her own personal vocabulary, a combination of cluelessness and misguided confidence, and a slew of boyfriends with names like Sex God and Dave the Laugh. There’s a whole series of her adventures, all with equally great titles. Don’t be afraid to read YA, there’s a vast world of great books there.

The Jeeves & Wooster stories by PG Wodehouse

These books seem to be on everyone who’s anyone’s list of funniest books and for good reason. Silly British humor at its best, despite being exclusively about the white, rich and overly privileged class.

This is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper

This is one of these books where if you’re reading it in a public place, people look at you quizzically the first time you laugh out loud, but pretty soon their amusement turns to annoyance at your constant bursts of laughter. So you not only get to read a hysterical book, but you get to let everyone else know you’re having a better time than they are.

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody by Will Cuppy

When the NY Times Book review interviews authors, they always ask what book do you love that no one else has heard of. My answer (should they ever ask) would be this book. I found it tucked away on a dusty bookshelf in a cabin on Martha’s Vineyard. Published in 1949 after Cuppy’s death, this book is like if Mel Brooks and Terry Pratchett had a baby and it was a history book completely skewing major historical figures from Napoleon to Lucretia Borgia to Lady Godiva. Chock full of fascinating facts presented with dry, eccentric humor by a very witty and sadly forgotten writer.