Humor in Literature

What types of humor adapt well to literature? Are actual jokes and standup-like material bound to look childish in literature?

Idk I don't think a great deal of books have done humor very well outside of being occasionally funny. Most books I've read by stand-up comedians tend to be short stories more or less based on said comedians life and are not as good as their stand-up. Don't get me wrong they are pretty enjoyable light reads but you might expect 2 light laughs from every story at best. They come across as underdeveloped standup bits.

Pic related is unironically the funniest book I've read.

You haven't read much then have you?

Read Candide or L'Ingénu. It's great classic satire.

This one's a good light read.

How much is considered appropriate? I read a book every two at best, sometimes classics sometimes contemporary stuff. Why do you say that?

Satire of french culture from more than 200 years ago? Did the goofs age well?

*two months

The first is the rebuttal of an entire philosophy, while the other is showing how silly european society and religion might look to a native. I thoroughly enjoyed both, so I would say that it aged quite well.

flann o'brien is the only author who has consistently got me to laugh, seemingly out of nowhere. his absurd and physical prose, coupled with his characters' lack of awareness, is what makes him funny.

a close second is joyce, for the same reasons. maybe it's something in the liffey—who knows.

in the least pretentious way possible—it's about quality, not quantity.

is Tristam Shandy actually funny?

joyce is really funny for wordplay. "pennies in the slot machine" becomes "pennis in the slutsmaschine", or something like that; he's just fucking around with cock jokes, fart jokes, etc.

Is there any in Dubliners or Portrait? I didn't spot any. Might just be me though.

I think Kafka is hilarious. Reading The Castle now, and the scene in the bar when K. wakes up, finds his assistants waiting for him, and then starts searching for the whip made me laugh pretty hard.

I've read that. Thought it was hilarious.

Then I turned 12.

Tell me how you feel when you turn 18

He is asking such a question because there is an enormous amount of comedic literature out there, and not just in the sensible chuckle sort but of the riotous wake your neighbors up in the middle of the night. A sizeable amount of the oldest works of western literature are comedies.

i thought the apple store by seinfeld2000 was fucking gold when I read it

Not if i recall correctly. Neither Dubliners or Portrait are at all humorous in their tone.

Something in the japanese style of general buffoonery, or in the American style of slapstick works well. Literature is also well-suited for longer yarns that wouldn't work in a standup routine because the buildup is too long, but in lit you have the liberty to extend the joke for as long as the payoff will allow.

Yes, if you are into shitposting and H O B B Y H O R S E S

Comedy ages like milk. You can't expect the quirks of culture that humor relies on to have any great staying power outside of that culture. Only stuff that has any real lasting power are broad jokes about dicks, farts, etc and they only because they are broad.

Even comedy as recent as a few years ago does not hold up. I've watched bill hicks' entire catalog and a few Carlin specials and laugh 15 times at best. A Confederacy of Dunces and Catch 22 are funny I guess but outside of the greatest works of literature what else is funny?

I never liked stand up but I think Wodehouse is pretty funny. His humor comes more from character interactions and situations.

>Comedy ages like milk
>Molière is still funny
>Shakespeare is still funny
>Aristophanes is still funny
Just because you have an especially dour enjoyment of literature does not mean we all do.

>outside of the greatest works of literature what else is funny?
I would only like to add that what outside of the greatest works of literature what else is actually good? Because this is true of all things. It is every bit as tiresome to read an average tragedy as an average comedy.

I always find a lot of humor in the irony found in Greek tragedies, but I don't think that's normal.

Greeks are funny as hell. Think alone of Socrates. A nigger wandering through Athen wanking on every noble he passes by.

There weren't nobles in Athens at the time of Socrates.

I unironically enjoyed Catch-22

>mr fun at parties shitting in my alley
fuck off fedora

>Just because you have an especially dour enjoyment of literature does not mean we all do.

Maybe I am different. I never found many classic books billed as humorous to be very funny. I can recognize the wit but that doesn't make me laugh very hard. I don't think they were incapable of humor but they arn't going to make you laugh the way a modern comedy writer can because of the cultural gap between you and them.


>I would only like to add that what outside of the greatest works of literature what else is actually good? Because this is true of all things. It is every bit as tiresome to read an average tragedy as an average comedy.

My point is that the "averageness" of a comedy seem to grow (if that is possible) with age. Say for instance you in the 1600s wrote a play satirizing the Louis XIII. Would it still be just as funny to the modern Germans as it was to everyday Frenchmen/Europeans back then? Nothing gets lost through cultural changes over hundreds of years? Bullshit, you don't experience Molière the way his audience did. Bill Burr is better at making a modern audience laugh than Shakespeare is not because he is a better writer but because Bill Burr is modern.

Almost no comedic work is as funny as it was when it is first released. Comedy relies on capturing a zeitgeist in a way drama does not.

I agree with the anons in this thread saying that literature cant get more than a chuckle, but that goes with most things for me. I only have side-clutching laughter if I'm with others or whatever I'm looking at is simply unbearably funny. Remember, laughter is a social action. Listening to standup, you'll realize that even the bland jokes are eliciting a response from the audience. If a book can make me grin or blow air from my nose, I'll regard it as comedy.

I'm 36

So 24 years ago you grew out of a book published less than 10 years ago?

Black stuff that's child pornographic. Everyone enjoys a chuckle at the expense of kids engaged in child sex.

Looks like Tony Soprano's Uncle

Might be an absolute pleb, but Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas made me laugh quite a few times. Probably because most of the fucking around in that book comes so unexpected and reads like a /b/-tier greentext that it just baffled me.
So, I'd recommend that if you're down to read some batshit insane, possibly true account of a wisecracking lunatics' journey to get wasted.

> I can recognize the wit but that doesn't make me laugh very hard.
There is so much more to comedy than just wit.

>they arn't going to make you laugh the way a modern comedy writer can because of the cultural gap between you and them.
>Comedy relies on capturing a zeitgeist in a way drama does not.
I don't even really know what to say to this because it seems to bizarre in how wrong I think it to be. Have you read or seen any non-Shakespearean Elizabethan/Jacobean etc? Because those seem very strange due to the cultural gap in a way Shakespeare does not. In the same way I fail to see how Homer is easier to 'get' then say Aristophanes. The vast majority of people I ever see talk about Homer seem to get him completely wrong. I would say the exact same thing about the bible. Really any text that comes from sufficiently different cultural background demands a reasonable amount of contextual knowledge. I just don't understand why you think this is unique to comedy.

>Say for instance you in the 1600s wrote a play satirizing the Louis XIII. Would it still be just as funny to the modern Germans as it was to everyday Frenchmen/Europeans back then?
Yes, contextual knowledge helps but at the same time to properly enjoy the meanings and implications of a play such as Aeschylus's Agamemnon a knowledge of his line and the myths surrounding them is required. It's good without that knowledge but better with. Gogol is funny without knowing the world he satirises, even funnier with.

>Nothing gets lost through cultural changes over hundreds of years? Bullshit, you don't experience Molière the way his audience did.
I don't even know where you are getting this stuff from since I never even implied this. Yes the way I perceive Molière is different. That doesn't mean I find it any less funny. You will perceive Homer differently from the audience to which his works were composed. It just seems truly bizarre to claim therefore you don't really enjoy it because of this.

> Bill Burr is better at making a modern audience laugh than Shakespeare
I wouldn't argue with that but at the exact same time it's impossible to argue that Michael Bay excites modern audiences more than Shakespeare does. That's not saying anything about Shakespeare but about the poor tastes of the majority of people. Also have you ever been to a good modern staging of one of Shakespeare's good comedies? I hear every bit as much laughter as I have ever heard from a stand-up comic or modern comedy movie.

Again I don't mean to sound like an ass but I think you are seriously misguided to tell me and the many other readers of literature like me out there that we really aren't having fun reading comedy just because you can't, and that when we cry from laughter from reading or watching these works that we are being facetious.

>There is so much more to comedy than just wit.

This my point, i can see how clever they are but they are missing something.

>I just don't understand why you think this is unique to comedy

I don't think it is unique to comedy but is certainly more easily lost. Think about the popularity of anime in the west. Action and drama are gigantic inside and outside japan, but there is no great crossover comedy from Japan (Gintama kinda, but not really). Why? Because 70% of the jokes are puns based on their weird language that are almost impossible to translate or often based on their culture. On the other hand a fight is a fight and a love story is a love story. Romeo and Juliette carries over in almost every culture because you can get the drama whilst ignoring the context. Whereas a movie like Scott Pilgrim vs The World would not even make sense to a modern day person who does not play video-games or follow the indie music scene.

Half the jokes are references and the rest are in a very specific modern comedic voice. A joke can "go over your head", their is no similar term for drama or action, you don't have to "get" a thriller. That is how inside jokes work.

>Yes, contextual knowledge helps but at the same time to properly enjoy the meanings and implications of a play such as Aeschylus's Agamemnon a knowledge of his line and the myths surrounding them is required. It's good without that knowledge but better with. Gogol is funny without knowing the world he satirises, even funnier with.

Agree with this although not familiar the plays, I think comedy suffers from this more than drama, much more.

>Again I don't mean to sound like an ass but I think you are seriously misguided to tell me and the many other readers of literature like me out there that we really aren't having fun reading comedy just because you can't, and that when we cry from laughter from reading or watching these works that we are being facetious.

I think you would enjoy them even more if you understood all the goofs and gaffs intuitively without a wiki.

I'm sorry, I'm not going to respond to this block of a post point by point, but Shakespeare has made me laugh out loud, pretty hard, many times, even while a lot of archaisms and historical references I couldn't possibly know without research flew over my head. Even his corny punts (the ones I could get) have made me laugh.

Also, how about Don Quixote?

In general response to the OP it really depends on how much you laugh. Some people just don't need to laugh as much as others, so to speak, and don't, and may not find a lot of works of literature others find funny that funny, if that makes any sense whatsoever.

Classics I found genuinely funny --- Shakespeare's works (too many to list, even his tragedies have occasional ridiculously funny parts, Cymbeline was probably the funniest b/c of how much of an over-the-top self-parody it is), Don Quixote, Dead Souls, Ulysses, Tristram Shandy, A Confederacy of Dunces, Catch-22. I honestly think humor is a very important and widespread part of literature, not appreciated enough when you think of what literature is supposed to do and be like, but then again I laugh at a lot of things other people don't find funny.

To elaborate, Shakespeare has a lot of situational comedy where, by making certain characters interact in certain ways and certain things happen and a certain character say something really stupid or funny without being dependent on puns or wordplay, it's pretty funny. I'm saying this in such an elaborate and clunky way b/c it's clear this basic stuff will survive time and translation and manage to make people laugh. Such as me.

Physical comedy and irony are probably the two types of humor I see conveyed most effectively in writing. Special mention to laconic understatements, though these can be considered a type of irony I guess.

You just seem rather humorless then. Stuff I read by Mark Twain or Hunter S Thompson had me in convulsions of laughter when I was reading it all by myself. How can you read something like "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved" and not succumb to laughter? You'd have to have all the humor of federal tax attorney.

For that matter I've read posts on Veeky Forums that have made me laugh so hard it hurt to breathe.

This.
Hunter s thompson has such a signature style of humor. He glorifies everything to its most symbolic extent even if it's just getting unreasonably fucked up on drugs. Maybe it's funny because I can relate, and imagine most people who go through a psychedelics phase try to romanticize everything with there under-functioning brains. When you have a literary genius do it though, it stretches the idea to a ridiculous degree.

I also love Alice in wonderland for that matter. Something about seeing the struggle of a pompous character trying to make since of madness is hilarious. In that world there is no sense and everyone is so absorbed in there lunacy that it comes off as them just being assholes or that they all are in on some big joke she just can't possibly understand. From her perspective it would be awful, but it's amazingly humorous from an outside view.

And lastly forest fucking gump. I suggest that book to literally everyone I know who can stand to read. The book is very different from the movie, yet it still has the same feel somehow. It's only a 100 pages or so and I promise you you will absolutely love it. It is by far the most enjoyable easy read I have ever been lucky enough to witness. Please for me, for you, read that goddamn book.

Their. Whoops