Hey Veeky Forums, I was always a fan of british caustic humor and critics

Hey Veeky Forums, I was always a fan of british caustic humor and critics.

So, can you recommend me authors, essays, rants, poems, anything like this?

Give me your best.

I could think of a few writers who come to mind, like Wilde or Wodehouse, but I think our best humor is really on our televisions right now. There's this kind of genre of patheticism we've really nailed, and you can see it shows or movies like Withnail and I, Peep Show, Mighty Boosh, Office, Faulty Towres, In Bruges etc, and I think that's the kind of obvious evolution to our sarcastic culture.

Maybe a better user could give you suggestions that are actually, well, books.

Thanks for it.

I was thinking about recent stuff, you know, like those rants that british are so famous for.

I had watched the peep show and it was amazing, but, I have just this strange feeling which come up in my mind.

I have to feeling that, there is lots of cool things going aroung England, like, cool journalist writting cool stuff and not so famous writer doing this caustic humor or critic about things, but, since I don't live there, this things will delay like 10 years to came to me.

As someone who grew up in London around a couple of journalists and mid-level "intelligentsia",
I'm afraid that's quite a romanticized image. We're a really classist society, and are very cliquey. For such a small island, you can totally identify someone's entire background, and that, coupled with our extreme self-consciousness, means we act very cliquey, basically hang out in the same groups and, sadly, become narrow minded. So while there are some excellent rants (every drunk Englishman is a depressant) they're very rarely enlightened ones, and in fact, often contain a strong air of snobishness (and this works on both sides of the class divide). Furthermore, our penchant for pessimism means what we do believe in strongly, is quite limited. Really, we've been riding on the coattails of a dead empire for a hundred years now, and our reputation really does just proceed it. My city is a prime example - London has been husked out by the super-rich who have no interest in our culture or city other than it's sheer fashionability, and because of that, it has no real fashion left.

But, if you want our brand of dark humour and sarcasm, with a lot more openness and a focus on morbidity, go to Ireland or the North. Things are less shit there.

And out of interest - what country are you from?

Hello buddy.

Well, I agree with what you said, I just talked to some random girls once and they didn't know who Alan Moore is. But let's talk about Alan Moore.

When the British authors started to write comics, all the comics became more...deeply and less shit. It's because, no matter how shitty and not so smart England is now, in other places it's worse. What is normal to a British citizen read in school, is 10 x more than other places. So the power level of England is pretty high if you look up around.

And I am from Brazil. That's why my english sucks, sorry about that.

Classic brit-core humorous writing would be:

Jerome K Jerome - Three men in a boat (endlessly stolen from even today).

Grossmith - Diary of a Nobody

EF Benson - various Mapp & Lucia (start with Queen Lucia, its on Gutenberg).

Stella Gibbons - Cold Comfort Farm

I don't really enjoy Wodhouse and I think Benson does the same sort of thing far better and has a lot more depth and skill as a writer of prose.

I've always enjoyed Saki and Jerome K. Jerome.

Never heard about any of the other ones though, so thanks for the recs. I have Wodehouse, Max Beerbohm and John Colliers which were recommended to me on Veeky Forums a while ago as being essential British humour but I can't vouch for any of them.

Thanks a lot, I will be googling all of them and trying to buy some copies.

This is a cool start.

Check out Gutenberg, they are all old enough they might be out of copyright now.

>Jerome K Jerome - Three men in a boat

good choice, this is one of my favourite books. fun fact, all the pubs mentioned in the book are still open today

could add something more recent to the list as well. tom sharpe maybe