Tristram Shandy is as experimental as anything that's been written, and laugh-out-loud funny.
"It is not half an hour ago, when (in the great hurry and precipitation of a poor devil's writing for daily bread) I threw a fair sheet, which I had just finished, and carefully wrote out, slap into the fire, instead of the foul one.
Instantly I snatch'd off my wig, and threw it perpendicularly, with all imaginable violence, up to the top of the room—indeed I caught it as it fell—but there was an end of the matter; nor do I think any think else in Nature would have given such immediate ease: She, dear Goddess, by an instantaneous impulse, in all provoking cases, determines us to a sally of this or that member—or else she thrusts us into this or that place, or posture of body, we know not why—But mark, madam, we live amongst riddles and mysteries—the most obvious things, which come in our way, have dark sides, which the quickest sight cannot penetrate into; and even the clearest and most exalted understandings amongst us find ourselves puzzled and at a loss in almost every cranny of nature's works: so that this, like a thousand other things, falls out for us in a way, which tho' we cannot reason upon it—yet we find the good of it, may it please your reverences and your worships—and that's enough for us."
This passage is about
1.) Senseless actions providing satisfaction
2.) The futility of human understanding
3.) Sexy-times and the female anatomy
Just a random tidbit. The whole book is like that. Jokes on multiple levels, a devilishly complex but natural and coherent time-line, a solid morality (Shandeism, i.e. Pantagruelism, i.e. benevolent tolerance, i.e. "This world is surely wide enough to hold both thee and me"), extreme erudition (which is mostly lifted from Burton), etc.
It's an indescribable book but if you're into weird and experimental stuff, it is the book for you.
