100 BOOKS Books that make you laugh

You won’t find the usual ‘classic’ suspects here, but the reads Friday recommends to make

This satire of red-brick university life is driven by anger against idiocies and pretension. Medieval historian Jim Dixon is the hapless victim of Amis’s cruelly funny set pieces, but his luck finally changes for the better. A tangle of engagements, aunts and a stolen cow creamer. With a lightness of wit, Wodehouse serves up Bertie Wooster’s silliness kept in check by Jeeves’ cool intelligence. The young, Oxford-educated emperor of Azania attempts to modernise his African kingdom with the help of a chum. Cruel, misanthropic, disdainful and stuffed with sublime jokes. Two academics swap universities so Lodge can show us an American’s take on England, and how a selfdeprecating Englishman struggles to be understood in the US. It’s the old fish-out-of-water routine – but brilliantly done. A romcom that captures the lives of the aristocracy in England between the world wars. A rebellious daughter is disinherited, but eventually finds happiness in her own way. The goings-on at St Custard’s school, as told by a tiny pupil. As ‘Any fule kno’, the imaginings of young boys about their ‘skoolmasters’ are pretty funny. In Molesworth’s misspelling hands, they become high farce. Reading this is like sitting down to a hot cup of coffee with your cleverest best friend, setting the world to rights. Funny, emotional and galvanising. No one pays attention to two roommates at Seabrook College for Boys. That is until Skippy falls for Siren from the girls’ school next door. A comedy that scours the corners of the human heart. Here, time is the goon, coming to take your youth away. But this isn’t a dark narrative. Egan is richly, ironically humorous, and has a smart, intricate style. Cookery writer Rachel Samstat’s world falls apart when, seven months pregnant, she discovers her husband has been deceiving her. This shockingly honest autobiographical novel has huge comic mileage. The adventures of loan-shark-introuble Chili Palmer, from Miami to Las Vegas to Hollywood. Leonard keeps to his promise of leaving out the bits readers might skip. This is the story of Milo Burke, a hopeless university employee caught up in the horrors of 21st-century life. Lipsyte’s breakout novel is a showcase for his gloriously dyspeptic prose. Mortimer’s exasperated but kindly letters to his feckless son are deft miniatures of real life in the trenches of the English middle class. Sedaris’s tales of growing up in North Carolina and moving to Normandy will leave you shaking with laughter. This riotous satirical story about gluttonous, obese young oligarch Misha Vainberg sends the protagonist into the internecine wars of an oil-rich former Soviet state.

Lucky Jim, The Code of the Woosters, Black Mischief, Changing Places, Love in a Cold Climate, The Compleet Molesworth, Dear Lupin, The Ask, Get Shorty, Heartburn, A Visit from the Goon Squad, Skippy Dies, How to Be aWoman,

Me Talk Pretty One Day, Absurdistan,