What do you guys think about comedy in literature? Is there any writer who can actually make you laugh out loud?
Pic related
Well that Don Quijote book seem to be doing alright. Also reading Moby Dick atm, and Melville has made me laugh out loud several times.
>>7921796
It was John Kennedy Toole for me, Confederacy of Dunces was a masterpiece and it saddens me that he offed himself.
Catch 22 was pretty funny. There is some funny shit in Shakespeare's works.
What do you guys think about comedy in your own writing?
>>7921782
There are some pretty funny situations in Dostoevsky's novels.
I found Pushkin Hills by Segei Dovlatov extraordinary funny
I guess one has to be somewhat familiar with the Era of Stagnation to get the nuances but it got published in the New Yorker so I guess it's funny nonetheless
Pynchon, Gaddis, Vonnegut, John Kennedy Toole. There's others but just off the top of my head.
>>7921782
Just finished Journey to the End of the Night. I've had some hearty laughs, anon. Some hysterical laughs actually.
the once and future king consistently made me laugh and I wasn't expecting that. it's the funniest book I've ever read.
howdeedo
the unicorn
Pellinore
merlin
>>7921782
>Is there any writer who can actually make you laugh out loud?
Dostoevsky 2bh
Delillo is funny in americana and white noise
>>7922682
Personally, I don't know if it makes me laugh out loud because it's actually funny or because I keep reading it as if it were a collection of /r9k/ posts and picturing rare pepes all the time.
>What do you guys think about comedy in literature?
I think the world is a funny place and anyone who writes without a sense of humor is doing a great disservice to their representation of the world.
>Is there any writer who can actually make you laugh out loud?
Kafka makes me laugh like a madman without fail. Joyce, Swift, Twain, Vonnegut, Pynchon, RAW, Barth, and Heller do too.
I try always to weave humor into my own writing, but it's no easy task.
Shakespeare
Wilde
>Dolourous Edd in ASOIAF
>Sick Boy and Begbie in Porno and Trainspotting
>Bits of The Princess Bride atm
>used to laugh hard at Discworld
Sure. But not if comedy is the point of the book. Used to like HHGTTG but now it just seems randum.
>>7921808
People sometimes complain about my writing being "unfunny" and they can't understand that I'm not trying to be funny. It gets annoying. I'm just trying to display things realistically.
>>7922875
im interested now, could you post some of your favorite humorous passages
Bill Bryson is pretty funny
>>7922752
holy fucking top kek
Adams and Wodehouse--I like English humor. Mark Leyner and Sam Lipsyte for Americans.
IJ is one of the funniest books I've ever read.
>>7921799
my all time favorite novel, mostly because of how sharp the humor is.
Timing is everything.
i can't read Douglas Adams without thinking about the pedantic, humorless aspie who first mentioned his works to me, obviously pleased with himself for being ahead of the curve, in about 1981. he quoted passages from the book like a robot, and appeared to not find them funny. more like religious scripture.
and i got really tired of people who would giggle and shout "42!" or "Where's your towel?" like they were secret passwords to a cult only they understood.
>>7921808
hardest thing in the world to do, because you're never sure that what you find funny will be amusing to anyone else.
"You must wait 1 second before posting a reply"
*RAGEFACE*
I don't know how to deal with comedy. I recognise humour when I see it and I can certainly appreciate it but it doesn't make me laugh or even smile. I think it just surprises and excites me if it's a really good one.
If I do laugh, it's because there's a masterful scene going on and I'm so smitten I can't contain myself. Do I have autism?
>>7921808
I do it but its rather understated, I'm not sure how I'd fare in a full on comedy novel
What's the general opinion of Hitchhikers?
Let's just pretend the movie never existed
>>7921782
>Is there any writer who can actually make you laugh out loud?
Flann O'Brien, Samuel Beckett, Stanley Elkin, Thomas Bernhard, Nikolai Leskov, Rabelais, Laurence Sterne, Wodehouse, E.F. Benson, Ronald Firbank, John Collier
Jaroslav Hasek's Good Soldier Svejk is always fun.
Pretty much anything by P.G. Wodehouse and Stephen Leacock too.
pic related made me laugh more than any other book
I just finished Wibberley's Mouse that Roared. It was definitely fun.
>>7924529
Yeah, that book is really overrated. It has some points, but it showed what stale memes are way before internet became popular.
![cuckoo-nest[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/Y52DT00.jpg "cuckoo-nest[1].jpg")
>>7921782
Pic related was funny.
>>7921808
The trick is to not make a deal out of it. Don't draw attention to it, just write it down and let the reader decide whether it's funny or not.
Pynchon did a pretty good job in GR and V of making me laugh out loud. Pig Bodine was a great character and Slothrop fighting the octopus got me.
Other authors I've enjoyed include PG Wodehouse and Vonnegut.
>>7925006
>It has some points
1: people do things that Douglas Adams can't explain
...
that's it.
>>7925012
> all i see is cuck
Hunter S. Thompson
John Kennedy Toole
William S. Burroughs
Bukowski
I like Pynchon and but his books make me kinda smirk inwardly, if that makes sense, as does alot of Nietszche & Shakespeare, they don't really push me to the point of actually laughing out loud, but it's a much more deeper and vicious sense of humor.
I've read lots of stuff by Mark Twain that made me laugh. Hardest I've ever laughed while reading something is "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved" by Hunter S. Thompson, but I dunno if that counts as literature.
>>7925024
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=cuckoo
>>7925024
Where do you think the term "cuckold" comes from?
>>7921808
I shamelessly rip Bernard Manning jokes
>>7924973
Lel yeah that's basically Forty Keks: The Book. On the topic of antiquity, Aristophanes is also fucking hilarious. When the dogs get put on trial in Wasps, holy shit my sides were in the stratosphere.
>>7925995
2bh, I believe the entirety of Book 8 is quite possibly the funniest thing ever written.
>>7921782
A lot of humor in literature doesn't translate well to me because I have grown up with movies and TV for so long.
>>7924973
Really? I was going to pick out up. Any particular translation, it is it not that important?
>>7925013
Slothrop being forced to eat those disgusting English sweets was really funny.
Catch 22 (Clevinger's trial) is the only book to have made me laugh nearly to the point of tears.Others that have made me chuckle: Three Men in a Boat, A Month in the Country, Gravity's Rainbow, bits here and there in Shakespeare's plays.
>>7926048
I remember that, that actually really made me laugh especially being English myself and seeing how Americans struggle with our traditional sweets like rhubarb and custards or cola cubes.
>>7926069
Catch-22 had that really great surreal humor that sometimes turned into horror or sadness.
Just read White Noise, had some genuine laughs throughout
The Trial has given me a few giggles here and there, especiallythe wardens who are being whipped within the closet.
>>7921782
Was reading this in my writing class today, started to laugh at [ the part with the planet of sentient ballpoint pens for some reason ]
So far its fantastic.
>>7926048
oh good one...i forgot that. Wanna try my hand at some gin marshmallows...
https://drunkpynchon.com/2016/04/10/gin-marshmallows/
>all this Dostoyevsky
>no Gogol
I thought this was the literature board.
Stirner
>>7921782
On a whim I just started listening to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy BBC Radio show and I'm losing my mind, laughing out loud, you young punks don't know what you are missing.
Laughing quite a bit reading this one.
>>7921782
Parts of Gilbert Sorrentino's 'Mulligan Stew' had me doubled over.
>>7921782
I was actually really surprised with A Farewell To Arms. Had a solid laugh twice.
>>7922942
Reality is and can be as funny as anything else, anon. Realism should make you feel bad about laughing and good about crying
>>7928860
R.A. Lafferty is hilarious.
Achilles' taunts in the Iliad made me kek a lot.
Everyone is stupid and repetitive so listen to me: Paul Murray and Gary Shteyngart. All their work but specifically The Mark and The Void by the former and Absurdistan by the latter.
Flann O'Brien, Brendan Behan.
>>7921808
As a writer, if I try to be serious, I'm funny; if I try to be funny, I'm shit.
Last time I laughed out loud in a book was reading Warriors of the Storm by Cornwell.
In the scene there's a giant 7 foot tall obese nun and Uuthred comments that "She looks like she'd be useful in a shield wall."
>>7926006
Any part with Dmitri is great.
>>7921782
I'm reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and it has made me laugh out loud a few times. It is weird though because I don't even know if there are any jokes at all.
It's way he twists the language that makes me laugh. I don't know if I'm suppose to be laughing though.
Lovecraft's last italicized line in Medusa's Coil made me laugh pretty hard. It hit like a truck. I must have been gasping for breath for at least a minute after that. Hilarious.
It would be too hideous if they knew that the one-time heiress of Riverside—the accursed gorgon or lamia whose hateful crinkly coil of serpent-hair must even now be brooding and twining vampirically around an artist’s skeleton in a lime-packed grave beneath a charred foundation—was faintly, subtly, yet to the eyes of genius unmistakably the scion of Zimbabwe’s most primal grovellers. No wonder she owned a link with that old witch-woman Sophonisba—for, though in deceitfully slight proportion, *Marceline was a negress*.
>>7921782
Steinbeck's Cannery Row got me laughing so often I got weird looks from my roommate.
>>7924947
Švejk is extremely funny, even more so if you are yourself from a central European shithole.
>>7926069
Three Men in a Boat is GOAT, even though it starts to get a little repetitive near the end.
>>7926365
>The Trial has given me a few giggles
I dunno man, personally it kind of made me depressed when I found out my local administration hasn't changed it's modus operandi from the times of Austria-Hungary.
>>7929855
same thing happened to me while i was reading In The Penal Colony by Kafka
>>7921808
I've written a couple unpublished novels. I tried adding comedy to the most recent one and it went over surprisingly well with my readers. Many said that they never laugh out loud from books but were shocked into big laughs at multiple points. The trick is not to force it or try to craft funny situations, just go with the flow of the book and find naturally funny moments to exploit.
I think every good writer except Milton is laugh-out-loud funny at some points, or at the least has a sense of humor. This is because they're all sadomasochists and often humor comes from torturing characters, which the sadomasochists are quite ept at doing, ept being the opposite of inept.
I actually am almost constantly laughing, chuckling, giggling, or otherwise making sounds of amusement when I read books, although that may be more attributable to my general good mood and health.
Dead Souls, though, is probably the funniest book I've ever read.
>>7921808
My comedy writing is the only writing I've ever gotten published, so that's something.
>>7921782
Evelyn Waugh is underrated on /lit/. Try Scoop for starters.
>>7926038
i only read the jack lindsay but I really enjoyed it and have heard good things about it. not sure translation matters _too_ much, the original latin reads as funnily and modern from the pieces ive read. but I wouldn't know if any translations bungled it, i can only speak for the one i read.
