Who's the wittiest/funniest writer you've ever read?

Who's the wittiest/funniest writer you've ever read?

Saki gets my pick, Reginald and Clovis are probably the smuggest characters ever:
>"One of these days," said Reginald, "I shall write a really great drama. No one will understand the drift of it, but every one will go back to their homes with a vague feeling of dissatisfaction with their lives and surroundings. Then they will put up new wall-papers and forget."

>"That woman's art-jargon tires me," said Clovis to his journalist friend. "She's so fond of talking of certain pictures as 'growing on one,' as though they were a sort of fungus."

Not to mention that his descriptions of basically everyone are totally ruthless:
>James Cushat-Prinkly was a young man who had always had a settled conviction that one of these days he would marry; up to the age of thirty-four he had done nothing to justify that conviction.

That sounds great. I'll look more to read about it.

Bump.
>“Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.”
>"It is not enough to win; others must lose"
>" “The American press exists for one purpose only, and that is to convince Americans that they are living in the greatest and most envied country in the history of the world. The Press tells the American people how awful every other country is and how wonderful the United States is and how evil communism is and how happy they should be to have freedom to buy seven different sorts of detergent.”

He's easy to read through. Wrote almost entirely short stories, the majority of which are hardly longer than 6 pages. He's a perfect companion for the bus and subway.

Saki is awesome. What an era for comic writing that 50 years before WW2 was in Britain: Saki, Waugh, Wodehouse, Jerome.

Robert Louis Stevenson:

> "If he be Mr Hyde," he had thought, "I shall be Mr Seek."

Joseph Heller

> Major Major Major Major
> Much of Catch-22.

The Jap that wrote I am a Cat

Last author I remember reading that made me laugh out loud was Hunter S. Thompson. Seriously, if you haven't read anything by him then give "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved" a read, it's a short piece by him that had me laughing til I couldn't breathe. Oh and Mark Twain is always a joy to read, but he's definitely in the "witty" category rather than outright funny.

Catch 22 is the only one that made me laugh out loud but characters from Alice in Wonderland all seem to have strong witt to them 'I've had nothing yet,' Alice replied in an offended tone, 'so I can't take more.'
"'You mean you ca'n't take less,' said the Hatter, 'it's very easy to take more than nothing.

'I said that I could read you like a book, Wooster. I know what your game is.'

'I don't understand you, Lord Sidcup.'

'Then you must be as big an ass as you look, which is saying a good deal. I am referring to your behaviour towards my fiancee. I come into this room and I find you fondling her face.'

I had to correct him here. One likes to get these things straight.

'Only her chin.'

'Pah!' he said, or something that sounded like that.

'And I had to get a grip on it in order to extract the gnat from her eye. I was merely steadying it.'

'You were steadying it gloatingly.'

'I wasn't!'
'Pardon me. I have eyes and can see when a man is steadying a chin gloatingly and when he isn't. You were obviously delighted to have an excuse for soiling her chin with your foul fingers.

Bump

good taste
you too but you might like samuel butler too

Did you read a confederacy of dunces? The British POW camp scene in Slaughterhouse five made me laugh.

When Thoreau isn't ranting with some kind of self-righteous indignation, I find a lot of what he writes to be pretty humorous. He just has this weird prickly honest way of describing people, not in a mean way, just as he sees it.

>'You were steadying it gloatingly.'
One wishes everyday life offered more chances to use that phrase.

Jerome K. Jerome has a pretty dry humour in the same vein. Wilde too, though he tends to overcomplicate it.

John Kennedy Toole.

>He was only 9 years of age, which made him young, but he had only 1 year to live, which made him old.

>British "humor"

Flann O'Brien or Gaddis, followed by Heller.

From The Recognitions:

>Eh? Don't keep up on these things much any more. Modern mphht attitudes, don't you know, modern art and all that sort of thing, eh? They try to say their paintings are the spirit of the times, don't you know, but good heavens aren't the times bad enough without having pictures of it hanging all over the place?

I just downloaded the short stories audiobook.

Fuking hell, they are funny. I am laughing out loud.

Americans don't have humour. They have sitcoms and complaints.

>he had only 1 year to live, which made him old
That's not funny. In fact it's just dumb.

Cervantes is funny, so is Gogol.

>Trees, now-Slothrop's intensely alert to trees, finally. When he comes in among trees he will spend time touching them, studying them, sitting very quietly near them and understanding that each tree is a creature, carrying on its individual life, aware of what's happening around it, not just some hunk of wood to be cut down. Slothrop's family actually made its money killing trees, amputating them from their roots, chopping them up, grinding them to pulp, bleaching that to paper and getting paid for this with more paper. "That's really insane." He shakes his head. "There's insanity in my family." He looks up. The trees are still. They know he's there. They probably also know what he's thinking. "I'm sorry," he tells them. "I can't do anything about those people, they're all out of my reach. What can I do?" A medium-size pine nearby nods its top and suggests, "Next time you come across a logging operation out here, find one of their tractors that isn't being guarded, and take its oil filter with you. That's what you can do.