I recently received a plea from a reader asking me to recommend some “actually funny” books.
The plea was rooted in a desire to escape the despair and uncertainty of the pandemic, combined with a feeling that the vast majority of books they’re reading may be good and compelling, but are also kind of a bummer.
Shirley Jackson is most known for her horror and suspense writing but she also had a career as a light domestic humorist of the Erma Bombeck variety, writing columns for women’s magazines that were ultimately collected inFascinating to see the same mind that conjured the classic short story “The Lottery” dissect the goings-on of raising a family in a small town.by Sam Lipsyte is weird, digressive, profane, and had me laughing so hard on a plane that people were staring at me.
Many people are already familiar with the humor of Jean Shepherd from watching holiday classic “A Christmas Story,” which is drawn from essays collected in Shepherd’s“Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories,” that made me laugh so hard I pulled a muscle in my side and had to put the book down until the tears dried in my eyes.slowly, imaging that they are like the Zen koans they sort of resemble.
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