Funny Literature - A List of the Funniest Novels Ever Written

This site is a collection of information on humorous literature. These works are (for the most part) great works of literature that also happen to be funny. The novels here are not written by comedians.

My hope is that visitors to this site will find a work of literature that will make them laugh. It's my sincere belief that reading literature should not just be something that you have to suffer through in school but, an activity that helps you all throughout life.

Heller, Joseph - Catch-22
	There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.

Toole, John Kennedy - A Confederacry of Dunces
A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once.

Gogol, Nikolai - Dead Souls
	Making Money is at the root of all evil: things have been done for its sake which the world had described as not very clean...

Vidal, Gore - Duluth
"I believe, Edna, that a Negro is being lynched." "You'll love Duluth. I can tell." Edna revs up her jalopy's motor. "We have excellent race relations here, as you can see. And numerous nouvelle cuisine restaurants."

Rabelais, Francois - Gargantua and Pantagruel
	I believe that the Goths spoke like that ... and if God wished us to speak through our backsides we should speak like that too.

Donleavy, J. P. - The Ginger Man
When I die I want to decompose in a barrel of porter and have it served in all the pubs in Ireland.

Gide, Andre - Lafcadio's Adventures
	"I would give my life for God to exist. Yes, that makes sense. But giving my life to prove that God exists makes no sense at all. It simply has no meaning."

Sterne, Laurence - Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me...Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,--I am verily persuaded that I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me.

Amis, Marin - Money
	Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil, it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.

Beckett, Samuel - Murphy
"Humanity is a well with two buckets," said Wylie, "one going down to be filled, the other coming up to be emptied."

Greene, Graham - Our Man in Havana
	They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like the pain of an amputated leg no longer there.

O'Brien, Flann - The Third Policeman
'Now take a sheep', the Sergeant said. 'What is a sheep [but] millions of little bits of sheepness whirling around and doing intricate convolutions inside the sheep? What else is it but that?'

Site Updates
Tuesday, October12 - Added 12 books. A good start to the list