We must face it. Literature is depressing. It’s a statement that we can’t escape from. Take a look at the last three Booker winners: Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, a meditative novel about the human condition; Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, a semi-dystopian take where people who stand up for their rights disappear, and Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, which looks at the Sri Lankan Conflict through the eyes of a corpse (actually that did have funny sections). I’m not saying that humour doesn’t have a place in literature, and satirical works from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to anything by Percival Everett have made their mark, but it’s not that common.
To make matters worse, I find it difficult to laugh and by that I mean howling at every page while reading a humorous novel (I’m the same way with films). There are some exceptions though, a couple of which date back to my teens whilst some are recent.
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾ by Sue Townsend (1982)
The first four Adrian Mole books are pure comedy gold. The first one is the strongest in the ‘laugh department’ though. While reading this at 15 years old, I laughed so much that my family members were irritated and told me to be quiet more than once.
The beauty of the book is that it works on many levels. It is clearly a satire on Thatcher’s government but then there’s slapstick, such as Adrian trying to sniff glue and getting a model airplane stuck to his nose, farce, his whole doomed relationship with Pandora or his false intellectualism – he thinks that Animal Farm’s Boxer went to the vet. Then there’s his parent’s relationship and the off-kilter dog.
Every character provides some form of comedy and it’s channelled through Adrian’s rather skewed version of the world.
As the series continued, Adrian grew along with it, still making the same messes he did as an adolescent, except on a larger scale. I lost interest in the fifth instalment: Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years (I was twenty when that was released) as I found it too similar to the early books.
Naked by David Sedaris (1997)
David Sedaris’ Naked is a recollection of his childhood and college years, with an emphasis on his family’s eccentricities and – I am not exaggerating – transcends funny. David Sedaris has a knack on focusing on little details and making them the focus of the centre, be it a speech inflection of a nervous tic. Sedaris uses dark humour and if I were to summarise these stories I’d get some looks but it never makes the reader uncomfortable. My personal favourite is the essay Something for Everyone, where he has to renovate a house with a scatological co-worker. Sedaris is consistent and really, I can recommend all his essay collections but Naked was my first and had the biggest effect on me.
The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen (2021)
In general, I I do not like Joshua Cohen’s novels. I find him trying too hard to be Thomas Pynchon crossed with Philip Roth but exceptions exist and, for me, that’s his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Netanyahus.
It’s partially based on an anecdote critic Harold Bloom told to Cohen, where Ben Zion Netanyahu came over and stayed at his house in order to give a lecture. Cohen took liberties, invented a family and kept the funny bits.
From the second the family enter the household, the laughs come thick. The humour lies in two attitudes between the families: one being the family’s modern Jewish way of living versus the traditional Netanyahu methods. The second is the Netanyahu’s cheap wats of living, some things verge on the shocking.
As an aside, this is not a pro Zionist book. If anything, it’s the opposite. Netanyahu’s methods are heavily criticised, but it’s done in a subtle way. Strangely, considering the state of the world, this is an eye-opening book. Satire has a knack of doing this.
Heartburn by Nora Ephron (1983)
Nora Ephron is perhaps best known as the person who wrote the screenplay to When Harry met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, two comedies with great dialogue. In her novel Heartburn too, her writing is sharp.
A semi-autobiographical novel about a women going through a divorce, in theory it should be a sordid story – but it’s not. It’s full of laugh out loud moments and farcical situations. It’s called Heartburn because the main protagonist is a food writer. And you’ll get recipes!
There are others too that I’d recommend : Marina Lewycka – A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005), Gerald Durrell – The Garden of the Gods (1978), Irvine Welsh – Filth (1998), Kingsley Amis – Lucky Jim (1954), Drew Gummerson – Saltburn (2025) , Ali Smith – The Accidental (2005), Hannah Rothschild – The Improbability of Love (2015)
