Recent Humorous Novels

Lunatics / by Dave Barry

Philip Horkman and Jeffrey A. Peckerman first meet on a soccer field in Fort Lee, N.J. during a girls' 10-and-under league championship game after Horkman calls Peckerman's daughter offside. Though initially only a mild disagreement, the battle between Horkman, a coarse, "forensic plumber," and Peckerman, a pet store owner, soon escalates into an absurd fight leading to several wacky shenanigans. (FIC BARRY)

The Sisters Brothers / by Patrick deWitt

In the heart of the Old West, a man known only as The Commodore orders bumbling assassins Charlie and Eli Sisters to track down and kill a grizzled prospector named Herman Kermit Warm. During their journey from Oregon to the Sierras, the pair confront a strange cast of characters including a witch, Indians, a parlor full of drunken floozies and a gang of murderous fur trappers. (FIC DEWITT)

Ranchero / by Rick Gavin

Nick Reid is an ordinary low-key guy doing odd jobs at a rental store in the backwater Mississippi Delta until his boss sends him out to repossess a television from no-account hick Percy Dwayne Dubois. Refusing to give up his TV, Percy Dwayne hits Nick upside the head with a fireplace shovel and, with TV, wife, and son in tow, makes a hasty getaway in Nick's borrowed 1969 Ford Ranchero. Now Nick, out of a car and soon to be out of a job, has no choice but to track Percy Dwayne down. (FIC GAVIN)

Pym: A Novel / by Mat Johnson

Having been laid off from his job as a teacher of American literature, Chris Jaynes becomes obsessed with the book The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, the only full-length novel Edgar Allen Poe ever wrote. Inspired by a mysterious slave narrative which may confirm the truth about Poe’s novel and its mysterious island, Jayes buys a boat, hires a crew and sets sail after Poe’s mythical island. (FIC JOHNSON)

The Ask / by Sam Lipsyte

Recently laid-off university employee Milo Burke is doing whatever he can in odd jobs to help his family. Then his old boss, the college dean, offers him his job back under one condition: Milo must get a wealthy alumnus, who just happens to be Milo’s old roommate, to donate a large sum of money to the university. (FIC LIPSYTE)

Dollarapalooza, or, The Day Peace Broke Out in Columbus / by Gregg Parr

Disgraced former professor Vonn Carp returns to his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, to take part in his father’s lifelong dream, the startup of a general store called Dollarpalooza. When the store falls on hard times, partly due to a “Wow-mart” moving in across the street, Vonn stumbles upon a new business model to make a difference in people’s lives “one dollar at a time”—he’ll answer any question any customer may have for one dollar. (FIC PARR)

The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady / by Elizabeth Stuckey-French
In 1953 during a faulty nuclear experiment, Marylou Ahearn had her body contaminated by Dr. Wilson Spriggs. The result was the death of Marylou’s daughter, Helen, from cancer 10 years later. Now, in the present, 77-year-old Marylou is determined to get revenge on Dr. Spriggs, going so far as to move to Florida into a house right down the street from where he now lives and plotting his doom in quirky fashion. (FIC STUCKEYF)

The Family Fang: A Novel / by Kevin Wilson

Performance artists Caleb and Camille Fang are slaves to their art, so much so that they’ve incorporated their only children Annie and Buster (popularly known as Child A. and Child B.) into their oddly subversive work. Escaping as soon as they can away from their circus-like childhoods, Annie and Buster ultimately return years later, their lives now in disarray, only to be caught up in one last performance. (FIC WILSON)

Catch-22: A Novel / by Joseph Heller

For readers accustomed to novels possessing a linear structure and straightforward narrative, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 may seem an incoherent, jumbled series of confusing characters and disconnected episodes. Many critics said as much upon its publication in 1961. But to the more enlightened audience, the novel is nothing short of a literary masterpiece. Born in Brooklyn in 1923, Joseph Heller grew up the only child of Russian immigrants. In 1941 at the age of 19, he joined the Army Air Corps as a bomber pilot in training and subsequently flew over 60 combat missions in the European theater. Upon his return stateside, Heller worked as a copy editor while crafting his concept for the story which would become Catch-22. The satirical wartime novel chronicling the individual's place amid an erratic institutional bureaucracy swiftly became a classic and remains so today.

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 . . . Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. "That's some catch that Catch-22," he observed. "It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed. (p. 46)

Capt. John Yossarian is an American bomber pilot in the final months of World War II. Having already flown well over the designated 40 flying sorties, or missions required by the Army, Yossarian is nonetheless kept around on active duty by his seemingly idiotic superior officers who see to it that the quota number of sorties are repeatedly raised. It's not just the number of combat missions. The entire squadron is certifiably crazy, it seems to Yossarian, who finds common sense and logic nominally absent from the base's operational system, the entire chain of command appearing to function with a misplaced agenda.

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It all seems a big muddle from the outside looking in. But is it? Though everyone and everything seems ludicrous to a T, bent on insanity and lunacy, the self-perception within the squadron isn't so drastic. Visibly, the atmosphere is relatively docile with the men seeming to accept the way things are. The absurdity of incidents like a captain promoted to major simply because his last name is "Major" (so he could be called "Major Major"), a discharged private who's continually given the most important duties, a colonel's reason for action based solely on what others think of him, or the company mess officer orchestrating the bombing of his own men are accepted as perfectly permissible activities or otherwise inconsequential dealings. What really matters, it seems, isn't quite what really matters.

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More than anything else, Catch-22 embodies its title phrase--the self-contradictory, circular reasoning evoking a no-win situation. The structure and style of the novel itself are like this, the prose always repetitive and paradoxical, reiterating themes of irrationality and nonsensical logic all purported as sound doctrine and ingenuity. Yet it's this seemingly ridiculous pattern of disjointed incoherency which makes the book so profound. For within the double-speak and literary hodgepodge is a deadly serious diatribe on war, peace, life and death, brilliantly illuminating the ordered chaos of military combat which inevitably subjects individuals to disorientation and futility. The 1970 film version (DVD CATCH) of the book starring Alan Arkin, John Voight and Orson Welles received lukewarm reviews but has garnered an appreciable fanbase and "cult" status in subsequent years. (FIC HELLER)

Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero / by William Makepeace Thackeray

Overshadowed for much of his relatively short writing tenure by others, W.M. Thackeray (1811-1863) was nonetheless a notable scribe, satirist and observer of human nature, particularly well-regarded for his fiction and editorial anecdotes by the reading public as well as the very same members of the British upper-class which he so cleverly caricatured. Born in India, Thackeray was brought to England permanently in 1815 after the death of his father. During the passage, his ship was shortly detained on the island of St. Helena where the then exiled Napoleon Bonaparte was pointed out to him. The emperor's permanent deposition, brought about as a result of the Battle at Waterloo, was an event which indirectly forms the backdrop for his 1848 serially published book Vanity Fair, the author's most celebrated novel and a prized work of Victorian literature.
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"Revenge may be wicked. But it's natural".

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Becky Sharp is a sly, artful woman always scheming towards a better deal in life. Orphaned as a girl after the deaths of her artist father and opera singer mother, Becky was kept at a privately run finishing school until she came of age and inherited a moderate income, though not one guaranteeing her financial independence. With her beauty, wit and devilishly clever charms of which few women can match, eligible bachelors and married men alike routinely fall prey to her wiles, exemplified when her hasty marriage to the easily manipulated Rawdon Crawley, done solely for want of financial security, is brought about without the consent or blessing of any of the man's relations. With Rawdon now her willing pawn, Becky feels no less limited to tampering with those in her immediate circle. She routinely intermingles herself into the company of men in high standing such as General Tufto and Lord Steyne, both fashionable aristocrats, while still finding time to aid Rawdon in cheating at cards and fleecing wealthy members of the ruling class out of their money.
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Though her flirtatious cocquetry is always winning her new male friends, Becky's shrewd, self-promoting lifestyle, enacted without conscience, has essentially eliminated the potential for female companionship. Amelia Sedley is the exception to the rule. A benevolent and compassionate though naievely ignorant and, in her own way, vainly fanciful girl brought down in society by her family's financial ruin, Amelia has remained Becky's loyal ally ever since their days at finishing school together, even spurning rumours that her own beloved husband Capt. George Osborne has been lured in by Becky's arts. But when the captain is killed in the war with Napoleon, Amelia's misfortune seems to only increase as her own father's spendthrift ways and misuse of her meager widow's legacy plunge Amelia and her newborn son into further destitution and misery while Becky's amoral behavior, often executed at Amelia's expense, seems to only elevate her financial status and social standing. Yet, tragically, such is the lot of those in 'Vanity Fair', where "the general impression is forever one more melancholy than mirthful".
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The title Vanity Fair is a direct homage to the term's original inception in John Bunyan's seventeenth century Christian allegorical treatise, The Pilgrim's Progress, in which a town called Vanity holds a year-round fair devoted to worldly novelties, tawdry attractions and all kinds of "licentious, fleshly" activities--"moreover at this Fair there is at all times to be seen juggling, cheats, games, plays, fools, knaves, and rogues, and that of all sorts." (Bunyan, 96)*. Thackeray's novel is in parts full-on parody while at other times soliciting solemnly stern lessons. Yet the narrative is always whimsical, the author's personal running commentary on the "upraised curtain" of life routinely conjecturing, as if a casual member of the audience, about the stage on which the world and its actors tread, their lives driven by pretentious yearnings and carnal desires perpetually leading to greivous, lamentable and often absurdly cruel consequences. The character of Becky Sharp, one of the most popular female literary figures ever since, was one of the first prominently featured anti-heroines to appear within an English novel.
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*Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim's Progress. Eastbourne: Kingsway Publications, 1972.

Breakfast of Champions / by Kurt Vonnegut

The late Kurt Vonnegut was one of twentieth century America’s greatest authors. A veteran of World War II and survivor of the allied firebombing of Dresden, his war novel Slaughterhouse Five was—and remains—a widely-read classic. Published in 1973, the brilliantly sarcastic Breakfast of Champions pokes fun at everything.

"This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast. . ." (p. 7)

Author Kilgore Trout doesn’t have doodley-squat. The little money his fledgling Sci-Fi stories earn is so meager that he can't really consider himself a writer. In fact in order to pay the rent on his basement apartment, he installs windows for a construction company. On account of his writings rarely being published, Kilgore Trout doesn't have too many readers. In his entire life, he’s only received one piece of fan mail until the day a letter arrives inviting him to speak at a convention in Midland City. Meanwhile Dwayne Hoover, a resident of Midland City, is “fabulously well-to-do”. He lives in a dream house on four acres of land with his dog Sparky and, despite his steadily creeping insanity, keeps getting richer owning and managing his chain of car dealerships. Dwayne is going crazy because of bad chemicals in his brain; bad chemicals and bad ideas. His bad ideas are notions that the stories he’s read by Kilgore Trout are the truth.

Kilgore Trout is so poor that he has to hitchhike his way to Midland City. On the way he's attacked by some bandits calling themselves the Pluto Gang, after which he has to stay in the hospital a few days. Meanwhile Dwayne stays busy maintaining his routine affairs including a liason he keeps with his secretary Patty Keene who hopes that sleeping with Dwayne will make her troubles disappear. Kilgore and Dwayne are destined to meet at the bar of the Holiday Inn in Midland City where, coincidentally, Dwayne’s son George (a.k.a. “Bunny”) plays the piano. The author Kurt Vonnegut happens to be in attendance and is at the same bar when Dwayne and Kilgore meet, ordering martinis from a cocktail waitress whose toast--"Breakfast of Champions"--is served up with each drink.

So comprises the insidiously wacky world of Kurt Vonnegut and his caustically pessimistic wit in this off-the-wall novel strewn with characteristic anomalies. It's irregularity that makes this book a classic, an irreverent flouting of all literary parameters. Even the title, Breakfast of Champions, is itself a mocking epithet of the copyrighted General Mills logo. It's not a normal--proper--novel, or even dimensionally-correct (Vonnegut as both author and character simultaneously) but that's the whole point. What's going on? It's not terribly important. The mode of expression is the intention; the reflected conscious of the story what the author aims at rather than anything to do with the plot. Stylistically almost mirroring the ramblings of a lunatic, the book's blunt subtleties, interweaving characters and quirky sequence of events all affect its disposition as a satirically dark undermining of societal conventions. (FIC VONNEGUT)