There is laughter therapy, laughter yoga, and laughter meditation. There is a whole branch of science dedicated to the study of the health benefits of laughter (gelotology). Humor books are some of the most popular books out there. And there is nothing better than being on an airplane while the person next to you is reading a laugh-out-loud book while trying to contain his or her giggles—except maybe being the one who’s reading it! This chapter contains some of the funniest books I recommend, from titles by comedians and those who’ve had goofy childhoods to novels that sneak up and smack your funny bone. There is no need for a laugh track, a tickle from a feather, or an Internet cat meme; these books contain pages upon pages of good old-fashioned belly laughs. Go ahead and reach for one of these hilarious books, guaranteed to make you almost wet your pants. It’s good for you.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007) by Sherman Alexie
“I grabbed my book and opened it up. I wanted to smell it. Heck, I wanted to kiss it. Yes, kiss it. That’s right, I am a book kisser. Maybe that’s kind of perverted or maybe it’s just romantic and highly intelligent.”
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Disclaimer: this book is easily one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, but it also qualifies as a tearjerker. That’s because everything that makes you laugh about Junior’s life is also completely depressing. Junior knows how limiting life can be on the Spokane Indian Reservation—he was born sickly, he’s attended more funerals than most people attend in a lifetime, and he’s been bullied for most of his fourteen years. Now he’s being called an “apple” (red on the outside, white on the inside), among other things, for deciding to attend an all-white school off the rez. Through his diary and drawings, we learn that his biggest coping mechanism is his talent as a budding cartoonist and his desire to be better than poor.
Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life (2007) by Steve Martin
“At first I was not famous enough, then I was too famous, now I am famous just right. Oh yes, I have heard the argument that celebrities want fame when it’s useful and don’t when it’s not. That argument is absolutely true.”
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Steve Martin was a television staple in my childhood home. Little did I know that he was also a stand-up comedian, author, magician, screenwriter, producer, and playwright—and, at age ten, a peddler of guidebooks at the newly opened Disneyland. This memoir hilariously touches on different parts of his expansive career and then tenderly discusses the downside of fame and the grief he experienced over his strained familial relationships and the eventual deaths of his parents. Steve Martin is a multifaceted wonder.
Bossypants (2011) by Tina Fey
“My ability to turn good news into anxiety is rivaled only by my ability to turn anxiety into chin acne.”
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Tina Fey is one of my favorite comedians. In Bossypants, Fey take a hilarious look back at her time with an improv group at Second City, her tenure with Saturday Night Live, and the creation of her popular show 30 Rock with self-reflection and self-deprecation. And I love that it’s not all humor: Fey brilliantly includes social commentary on the blatant sexism that goes on in the world of comedy, and there is a rich chapter in there about her relationship with her father and how he impacted her life. Be warned: Fey reads the audio version of the book, and I almost got into an accident while listening to it because I was laughing so hard, no joke.
A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana (2001) by Haven Kimmel
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Haven Kimmel, nicknamed Zippy by her father, was born bald and didn’t utter a word until age two years and eight months when her dad told her it was time to give up the bottle. At that moment, she turned to him, pulled the bottle out of her mouth and offered her first words: “I’ll make a deal with you . . . if you let me keep it, I’ll hide it when company comes and I won’t tell no-body.” Behold the stories of Zippy and her family! The vignettes are the perfect length and style for reading out loud or on the toilet, or maybe out loud from the toilet. Tremendously funny and tender, Zippy is one of my favorite books.
Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress: Tales of Growing Up Groovy and Clueless (2005) by Susan Jane Gilman
“When I was little, I was so girlie and ambitious, I was practically a drag queen. I wanted to be everything at once: a prima ballerina, an actress, a model, a famous artist, a nurse, an Ice Capades dancer, and Batgirl. I spent inordinate amounts of time waltzing around our living room with a doily on my head, imagining in great detail my promenade down the runway as the new Miss America, during which time I would also happen to receive a Nobel Prize for coloring.”
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For the feminist who loves to wear tutus, this memoir of growing up as a Manhattanite and daughter of hippie parents is sure to please. I remember reading a portion of this book in my break room when I worked in retail. I got the stink eye from my coworkers as they watched soap operas because of my raucous laughter and snorting. Susan Jane Gilman breaks her book into three parts: childhood, teenager/young adult, and adulthood. My favorite is the first of the three.
The Idiot Girls’ Action-Adventure Club: True Tales from a Magnificent and Clumsy Life (2002) by Laurie Notaro
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Laurie Notaro regales us with her hilarious misadventures in the form of autobiographical vignettes in the style of David Sedaris. The stories feature tons of drinking, cussing, self-deprecating humor (my favorite), and lessons about creepster boyfriends and menstruation. My very favorite story involves Laurie taking her grandfather, Pop Pop, to the grocery store. He insists that she drive around back to look for day-old bread in the dumpster and they hit the jackpot: a solitary shopping cart filled with expired baked goods. Suddenly, her grandfather is fit as a fiddle as he leaps out to fill his arms, and Laurie’s backseat, with the bounty. When a huge delivery truck begins backing up too close to Laurie’s car, she has no choice but to hit the gas in order to move a few feet away. “But I guess a couple of feet was all it took to drag my grandfather—who despite the mortal severity of the situation could not interrupt his heist for two to three seconds—almost to the ground. I gasped when I saw him get knocked over by the car, but he got right back up and tossed another cheesecake into the backseat.” I can just picture this entire scenario, and every time I read it I nearly fall to the ground myself. This is Notaro’s finest collection of stories.
The Internet Is a Playground: Irreverent Correspondences of an Evil Online Genius (2011) by David Thorne
“I find that loud music helps me relax while I clean, because the music distracts me so much that I stop cleaning. Which is relaxing.”
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David Thorne uses the Internet for all the right reasons: humor and humor. This book is a quick and fun way to spend an afternoon—it’s chock-full of comical online encounters, lists of goofy things his son has said, types of monkeys it’d be nice to have, and a step-by-step guide to buying a sofa from IKEA. Find all of his trollish antics at www.27bslash6.com and be glad if you do not live near, work with, or have any connection at all to Thorne!
Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls (2013) by David Sedaris
“I don’t know how these couples do it, spend hours each night tucking their kids in, reading them books about misguided kittens or seals who wear uniforms, and then rereading them if the child so orders. In my house, our parents put us to bed with two simple words: ‘Shut up.’”
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Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls is another fabulous book of observations, interpretations, and musings by America’s quirkiest fellow. If and when you meet David Sedaris at a book signing, let me know what he says to you and how he inscribes the book. He has a reputation for saying strange things at signings to keep himself from being bored! I can’t tell you what he said to my friend Britta at a library conference in 2014—it’s way too weird—but a Twitter friend snapped a picture of the inscription he got from Sedaris. It reads, “To Chip, Why did you let them kill me?” next to a drawing of Jesus (maybe).
Letters from a Nut (1997) by Ted L. Nancy
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Ted L. Nancy is a highly original prankster. His shtick is writing different companies, celebrities, politicians, and organizations with completely ridiculous messages of complaint, praise, or inquiry and then sharing both the letter and its response. The responses are just as funny because usually they are written in earnest. One such response from the famous bus line was: “On behalf of Greyhound Lines, I would like to advise you there should be no problem traveling while in your butter costume.” Ted L. Nancy is the pseudonym of comedian Barry Marder. There are several sequels to this book as well as a children’s book spinoff, Letters from a Nut’s Family Tree (2013), which contain letters purportedly written by the author’s ancestors. A comedic genius!
Little Failure: A Memoir (2014) by Gary Shteyngart
“Let’s start with my surname: Shteyngart. A German name whose insane Sovietized spelling, eye-watering bunching of consonants (just one i between the h and t and you got some pretty nice ‘Shit’ there), and overall unattractiveness has cost me a lot of human warmth. ‘Mr., uh, I can’t pronounce this . . . Shit . . .Shit . . . Shitfart?’”
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From the author of Super Sad True Love Story (2010) comes this delectably entertaining memoir about a Jewish Russian who immigrates to America when he is seven years old. The book contains adorable photos of Shteyngart and family, including photos of his mother, who coined the English-Russian fusion word “Failurchka” (little failure) to lovingly describe her son. At times tender, this book packs a wallop of laugh-out-loud moments.
Sh*t My Dad Says (2010) by Justin Halpern
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Justin Halpern’s dad on packing a school lunch: “You have to pack a sandwich. It can’t just be cookies and bullshit . . . No, I said if you packed it yourself, you could pack it how you want, not pack it like a moron.” I heart Justin Halpern’s dad! This book (rather, a Twitter feed turned bestselling book turned failed TV show) is the true story of a twenty-something who is again living with his parents after just being dumped by his girlfriend. Justin started a Twitter profile to record all of the hilarious and philosophical musings made by his dad, a man who is unapologetically gruff, direct, crude, and ultimately loving, honest, and genuine.
Then We Came to the End (2007) by Joshua Ferris
“We loved killing time and had perfected several ways of doing so. We wandered the hallways carrying papers that indicated some mission of business when in reality we were in search of free candy.”
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The office is falling apart. Coworkers are being laid off one by one, the only meaningful work left is an unusual pro-bono ad campaign, an office chair goes hilariously missing, paranoia and gossip and office pranks are rampant, and Tom Mota is wearing three polo shirts at the same time. Ferris is a master at witty, casual, utterly believable dialogue. True story, I did a stint in an office one time. One day, bored out of my mind, I decided to conduct a sociological experiment involving a new bowl of candy that I placed on a filing cabinet just outside my office door. Depending on what sort of candy was in the bowl, people would take a piece and quickly make themselves scarce, or they would spend time rooting around a bit. It turned out a Tootsie Roll mix was the perfect way to get people to congregate outside your office so you can eavesdrop on them as they spilled the not-so-juicy but better-than-nothing office gossip. It helped to pass the time for a few days.
Yes Man (2005) by Danny Wallace
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Danny Wallace likes to do weird things, such as finding enough people who share his roommate’s name to fill a deck of cards (see the 2002 book Are You Dave Gorman?), starting a random-act-of-kindness cult (see the 2003 book Join Me!), and, as documented in this book, taking a stranger’s advice to say yes more often and turning it into a rule he follows for six months. And what funny adventures he has! Unexpected trips, correspondence with spammers, drugs in Amsterdam, connections with strangers. Of course some of the yeses are silly, and he doesn’t advise readers to follow his lead, but he points out the transformative power of the word and how it truly impacted his frame of mind and bestowed upon him opportunities he never thought possible. For other delightfully gimmicky reads, also check out A.J. Jacobs’s series of “One Man’s Humble Quest” books, including Drop Dead Healthy: One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection (2012) and The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible (2007).