On these long cold dark days, when the sun comes up after you leave home and goes down before you leave work, you need something cheering, and I can’t possibly let you down when you look at me like that, so I decided to make a list of the funniest books I knew. And as I started to list them, I realised that the books which make me laugh, or in some cases smile (but smile a lot) are almost all (with one obvious, though slight, exception) the stories of middle-class suburban men failing slightly. I wonder what that means?
- Three Men in a Boat
- The Wilt stories
- The Wimbledon Poisoner (and the other Wimbledon stories)
- Changing Places (and most other stories by David Lodge, but mainly that one)
- The Jeeves and Wooster stories
- The Blandings stories
- Towards the End of the Morning
I’m sure there must be more which I can’t think of offhand. I’ll post them as I do.