The 8 Funniest Books of All Time, Ranked

Published Aug 28, 2026, 12:06 PM EDT Jeremy has more than 2700 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows. His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings). When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account. He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas. People are probably going to turn to sitcoms or comedy movies if they want something to laugh at before considering books to serve the same purpose, but yeah, books are there if you want laughs. Not a lot of books, and probably not as many books as you’ve got genuinely funny movies or TV shows (with the latter medium, some of the best dramas of all time – like The Sopranos and Deadwood – are genuinely funny at points), yet there are still good comedy books. The books below are some of the funniest of all time, and they also qualify as great books in their own right, or by other standards, having merit beyond “just” being funny. Some are dark comedies, so it’s not like they're all easy books or comfort reads, but some are. And it’s also a nice change of pace to read something that goes for laughs, as opposed to just reading books of a more dramatic nature. 8 'Guards! Guards!' (1989) Image via Victor Gollancz Ltd People might riot if there was ever an attempt at talking about funny books that didn’t mention at least something by Terry Pratchett. He’s one of the most noteworthy and prolific authors of his time, or maybe all time, and he’s further notable for injecting comedy into just about everything he wrote, including the books in his famed (and lengthy) Discworld series. The Discworld novels are also fantasy, and the challenge here comes from singling out just one to mention as Pratchett’s potential funniest or most significant. So, here’s Guards! Guards!, which is the eighth novel in the series, but there are 41 Discworld novels, so that puts it near the front of the series. It’s about a police force (the Ankh-Morpork City Watch) within the universe of the series, which lets it function as something of a crime novel (or a parody of one) alongside being a fantasy/comedy book. If you don’t feel you have time to read all 41 novels, and want to get to the best ones in the Discworld series, Guards! Guards! might not be too bad a place to start. 7 'Catch-22' (1961) Image via Simon & Schuster Catch-22 is one of its century’s defining books, comedy or otherwise, and so shouting it out here feels appropriate in more than one way. It’s a satirical novel about World War II, and also the general madness of war and conflict on that scale (or any scale), which makes it undoubtedly dark in places, and not exactly a laugh riot throughout. Well, lots of it is funny. But it’s humor about (and around) a very bleak topic. It’s more than just comedy, to say the least. Catch-22 does very much get its anti-war sentiment across time and again, making it hard to miss the point or not interpret the whole thing correctly. Still, it’s a message worth repeating, and Catch-22 finding some undeniably creative ways to get that sentiment/message across has always been – and continues to be – appreciated. 6 'The Disaster Artist' (2013) Image via Simon & Schuster As it’s about the making of one of the funniest movies of all time (even if it’s the kind of movie that wasn’t funny on purpose), The Disaster Artist also happens to be very funny itself. The movie in question is The Room, which is a tragedy about a man whose life falls apart when his girlfriend cheats on him with his best friend. The making of The Room was also a bit of a tragedy, as The Disaster Artist shows. There are some uncomfortable and sad parts to the story here, which prevent things from being 100% funny, but The Disaster Artist (2013) is basically the book equivalent of a dramedy. Still, The Room found an audience, and Tommy Wiseau is famous because of The Room, for better or worse. The Disaster Artist was also something successful that came out of the disastrous production of a disastrous movie, with Greg Sestero (who played the film’s “best friend”) being right on the front lines, so to speak, and therefore more than qualified to report on all the carnage. There are some uncomfortable and sad parts to the story here, which prevent things from being 100% funny, but The Disaster Artist (2013) is basically the book equivalent of a dramedy (and then the movie adaptation from 2017 itself was a dramedy, too). 5 'Inherent Vice' (2009) Thomas Pynchon has remained active into the 21st century, and he’s also remained mysterious and private into the “new” century, even while staying off the grid feels more difficult than it might've been in the 20th century. The past is where his novels tend to retreat to (with only Bleeding Edge, from 2013, taking place at the very start of the 21st century), and that goes for Inherent Vice, too, which takes place in the early 1970s. By Pynchon’s standards, it’s approachable, but by most other authors’ standards, it’s still dense and kind of incomprehensible at times. Inherent Vice plays the confusion for laughs a good deal of the time, though, which makes it more broadly comedic than most of Pynchon’s other novels, as they tend to be confusing in ways that seem more intended to provoke discomfort and anxiety. It’s an offbeat neo-noir story, and a pretty entertaining one as well, for the most part. 4 'White Noise' (1985) Image via Viking Press Most of Don DeLillo’s books are intense and anxiety-provoking affairs, and that feels especially so if you want to look at his most acclaimed works… with the possible/slight exception of White Noise. Possible/slight because White Noise is still quite anxiety-inducing, yet with a good deal of absurd comedy alongside all the unease. It’s like a psychological disaster story that’s more concerned with worries about the disaster than the disaster itself. So, it’s almost a parody of disaster stories, but that’s also simplifying things a bit (and simplifying things when it comes to White Noise isn't the greatest thing to do, as that slightly underwhelming 2022 film adaptation shows). There’s a mundane first act, a breathless second act, and then an even more mundane third act that very directly mirrors the first, just with extra paranoia alongside the tedium and repetition. Okay, that part of the book’s easier to appreciate than enjoy, but that’s still something, and at least a lot of White Noise before then is very funny in a dry and surreal sort of way. 3 'The Princess Bride' (1973) Image via Harcourt Brace Jovanovich The Princess Bride was a well-liked novel before it was an also well-liked movie, with both being worth seeking out, since they take slightly different approaches to being loving parodies of fairy tale stories. The book exists within the movie as something a grandfather reads to his grandson, while in the novel, William Goldman comments on the book as something he discovered and then abridged. It’s got that meta aspect to it, even if it’s not as aggressively postmodern as previously mentioned books like White Noise and Inherent Vice. The Princess Bride is a little more approachable, and also possibly a little funnier, although it manages to be a great comedy while also being a pretty solid fantasy/adventure/romance novel at the same time (like the movie, it works as something between a parody and a homage, or it does both simultaneously, somehow without ever tripping over or contradicting itself). 2 'A Confederacy of Dunces' (1980) Image via Grove Press It’s being a good sport to summarize the plot of anything you talk about and mention on a ranking like this, but when it comes to something like A Confederacy of Dunces, and there isn't really much of a conventional plot to talk about, it’s like… sorry? This is kind of about a guy who’s searching for a job and can’t really find one, yet it’s a half-hearted quest in the first place, since he doesn’t really seem like he wants to work or contribute to society. The aimlessness is part of what makes it funny and clever, and it’s to the credit of John Kennedy Toole that this isn't 100% frustrating, and is instead kind of endearing. Even more unusual and admirable is that the main character, Ignatius J. Reilly, is not all that endearing at all, but he’s a compelling protagonist to follow (and all the side characters populating Toole’s take on New Orleans are pretty great, too). 1 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' (1979) Image via Pan Books Part of a series, but undeniably the best (not to mention first) book of said series, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy also feels like a contender for the crown of “all time funniest book.” It’s helped in this whole category/competition/ranking by the fact that it’s comedic throughout, with there being something laugh-worthy on almost every page, and because seldom do those attempts at humor ever come close to falling flat. It’s a fairly effortless book to get through in a short amount of time, thanks to not being all that long and also thanks to being extremely funny. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is easy to recommend, even to people who don’t really like science fiction, and maybe even to people who don’t tend to like reading all that much. It is kind of that much of a classic, in the end.