for fun
We didn’t meet today, and I missed seeing you. I’ve also been thinking about question I thought y’all could help with: What are some of the funniest books or stories you’ve read?
And if you want, you can also tell me:
- What kind of funny are they? (Is the humor based on laugh-out-loud prose? wicked caricatures? ridiculous or ironic situations? etc?)
- Can you think of any sci-fi/spec-fic/dystopian stories that are funny? If not, why do you think that is?
I was thinking about this because it occurred to me that I really love books (and movies) that are both very funny and very serious/dark. Books like Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility; Nick Hornby’s About a Boy; Fredrick Backman’s A Man Called Ove; Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women. Movies like Little Miss Sunshine and Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility.
But I also really love books and stories more like what we’ve been reading together – by authors like Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, Ted Chiang, Dave Eggers, Elizabeth Strout, Kazuo Ishiguro – which aren’t often funny even though they do contain that blend of pessimism and hope that really appeals to me.
So, what about funny sci-fi/spec-fic/dystopia? Does it exist?
- I thought Nalo Hopkinson’s “Message in a Bottle” was very funny, mostly because the narrator & main character was such a pretentious, oblivious dope.
- I thought The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was funny when I read it, but I was 14.
- Andy Weir’s The Martian and Project Hail Mary both made me laugh out loud.
- George Saunders can be very funny. We’re probably going to read “The Semplica Girl Diaries” later on, which is interesting because I think the narrator/diarist is trying to be funny as he writes, and he often succeeds, even though what he’s writing about is so grim and awful.
- The Barbie movie is hilarious. I think it’s sci-fi. And it’s also arguably dystopian, even though its dystopia is our real world. Which makes me wonder if, say, Jane Austen is also dystopian…
I’ll leave it there for now. Please recommend some funny books for me!