The 15 best comedy books of all time

[AdamSmith]

Nice choices:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10620356/The-15-best-comedy-books-of-all-time.html

Makes me realize I got my forum posting style, such as it is, in great part from Tristram Shandy, probably my favorite novel along with Nabokov's Pale Fire ("lads and youths"! ).

[lookin]

Two Wodehouses! I feel vindicated!

It's been fifty years since I slipped one of his out of the family bookcase, started reading, and started laughing. To this day, I can take any one of his books off my own bookshelf, open it to any page, and be chuckling within a minute. Two minutes and I'm laughing out loud.

I'd never attempt to try mimicking his style in a post, though I think I once allowed that something gave me the pip. And some of my captions seem to end on a downdraft. Hadn't thought to pin it on Wodehouse, though I may may picked up something after all these years.

One fellow who did pick up something is Joe Keenan. He's not Wodehouse but he comes closer than I'd ever have thought possible. Not English at all, his main characters are two gay guys in New York City and their close female friend. The two books I've read, if anyone's interested, are Blue Heaven and Putting on the Ritz.

Keenan went on to write for, and eventually became the executive producer of, Frasier. Some of the best writing on TV, in my opinion, and occasionally a plot line straight out of Wodehouse.

[AdamSmith]

Thank you! I confess a great lacuna in hardly having read P.G. at all. One more thing to live for!

[lookin]

I confess a great lacuna in hardly having read P.G. at all.

No time like the present:

The Man with Two Left Feet (1917):

At five minutes to eleven on the morning named he was at the station, a false beard and spectacles shielding his identity from the public eye. If you had asked him he would have said that he was a Scotch business man. As a matter of fact, he looked far more like a motor-car coming through a haystack.

The Inimitable Jeeves (1923):

It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought.

I turned to Aunt Agatha, whose demeanour was now rather like that of one who, picking daisies on the railway, has just caught the down express in the small of the back.

Jeeves lugged my purple socks out of the drawer as if he were a vegetarian fishing a caterpillar out of his salad.

I once got engaged to his daughter Honoria, a ghastly dynamic exhibit who read Nietzsche and had a laugh like waves breaking on a stern and rockbound coast.

Very Good Jeeves (1930):

The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say `When!'

My Aunt Dahlia has a carrying voice... If all other sources of income failed, she could make a good living calling the cattle home across the Sands of Dee.

She fitted into my biggest armchair as if it had been built round her by someone who knew they were wearing armchairs tight about the hips that season.

Unseen, in the background, Fate was quietly slipping the lead into the boxing-glove.

Ring for Jeeves (1953):

It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A. B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn't.

A Few Quick Ones (1959):

Attila the Hun might have broken off his engagement to her, but nobody except Attila the Hun, and he only on one of his best mornings.

Oofy, thinking of the tenner he had given Freddie, writhed like an electric fan.

If you're not laughing by now, then by all means don't head down to the library this afternoon.

Otherwise . . .

[RA1]

Was that Scotch businessman a salesman for 3M?

Best regards,

RA1

[MsGuy]

The English habit of referring to all things Scottish as 'Scotch' will probably account for several thousand Yes votes in the coming referendum.