The Comic Novel
Comedy in fiction is not relief from the real subject; it's the technique for approaching it. These seven novels use jokes, digression, and absurdity to say what tragedy can't reach, from a knight tilting at windmills to a narrator who can't finish telling his own life story.
Don QuixoteMiguel de Cervantes · 1605
Lvl 6940ppCervantes invents the comic novel by taking a delusion completely seriously: the joke is structural, not just verbal, and every book on this list is still working the same trick.
The Good Soldier ŠvejkJaroslav Hašek · 1923
Lvl 3752ppHašek's idiot-savant soldier survives the Austro-Hungarian army by obeying every order literally: the easiest read here, and the bluntest satire of institutional stupidity.
Portnoy's ComplaintPhilip Roth · 1969
Lvl 5274ppRoth turns a psychoanalyst's couch into stand-up: one long, guilty, hilarious confession with a punchline saved for the last page.
MoneyMartin Amis · 1984
Lvl 6384ppAmis's hustler narrator is having far too much fun ruining himself: the comic novel's voice sharpened into pure, self-destructive first-person velocity.
The Third PolicemanFlann O'Brien · 1967
Lvl 6200ppO'Brien's dead narrator doesn't know he's dead, and the county he wanders is run by policemen obsessed with bicycles: comedy as pure metaphysical vertigo.
Earthly PowersAnthony Burgess · 1980
Lvl 7662ppBurgess widens the lens to a century: a gay novelist, a fascist pope, and history's atrocities narrated with the same wicked wit that made the smaller jokes work.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, GentlemanLaurence Sterne · 1759
Lvl 9560ppSterne's narrator tries to tell his own life story and can't get past his own birth for volumes: the joke that ends the path because it never actually ends at all.