Most Read Humor Books

When the mistreated animals of Manor Farm rise up and drive out their drunken human owner, they establish a new order founded on a single, hopeful principle: all animals are equal. Led by the pigs, the most clever of the animals, the farm is renamed and the beasts set about running their world for their own benefit. But power reshapes those who hold it. As the ambitious boar Napoleon consolidates control, the founding ideals are quietly rewritten, dissent is punished, and the promises of the revolution curdle into a tyranny that looks unsettlingly like the one it replaced. The other animals, loyal and hardworking, struggle to remember how things were meant to be. George Orwell's short, savage fable uses a barnyard uprising to trace how revolutions are betrayed, how language is bent to serve power, and how easily the many can be ruled by the few. First published in 1945, it remains one of the most enduring political allegories ever written.

When aliens demolish every human-built structure on Earth and rebuild the planet as an underground dungeon, survival becomes a spectator sport. Carl Anderson and his ex-girlfriend's prize show cat, Princess Donut, are among the survivors forced into the first floor of an 18-level death maze broadcast live to trillions of alien viewers. The dungeon has rules, sponsors, and a timer that will collapse the floor whether or not anyone is done with it. Carl has no plan, a deeply unimpressed cat, and an accidental talent for making monsters look ridiculous on camera. He has days to level up, find allies, and figure out whether escaping the dungeon is even possible — or whether the game's true objective is something the rulebook never mentions.

On an ordinary Thursday morning, Arthur Dent discovers that his house is about to be bulldozed to make way for a bypass. Before he can do much about it, his friend Ford Prefect — who, it turns out, is not from Guildford after all, but from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse — reveals that the entire Earth is about to be demolished to make way for a hyperspace express route. Moments before the planet is vaporized, the two hitch a ride on a passing Vogon spaceship. So begins one of the funniest and most quoted science-fiction adventures ever written. Armed with a towel, a battered copy of the electronic Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (which bears the reassuring words DON'T PANIC on its cover), and a growing sense of bewilderment, Arthur is swept across the cosmos. Along the way he meets Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed ex-President of the Galaxy; Trillian, the only other human survivor; and Marvin, a chronically depressed robot — and edges ever closer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. Wildly inventive, gleefully absurd, and packed with satire, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the first book in Douglas Adams's beloved "trilogy in five parts."

• fish out of water

Born a Crime (2016) is Trevor Noah's sharp, funny, and moving memoir of growing up mixed-race in South Africa during the final years of apartheid and the turbulent decade that followed. The son of a Black Xhosa mother and a white Swiss father, Noah was born when such a union was literally illegal — his very existence was evidence of a crime. He recounts a childhood spent partly in hiding, navigating the absurd and brutal logic of a system built on racial classification, and the poverty, violence, and improvised survival of township life after apartheid's fall. At the center of every story is his mother, Patricia — fearless, devout, stubborn, and endlessly resourceful — whose tough love and refusal to be limited shaped the man Noah became. Told in vivid, self-deprecating vignettes, the book is by turns hilarious and harrowing, a portrait of a singular family and a country remaking itself.

• coming of age

Eleanor Oliphant has her routine down to a science: the same meal-deal lunch, the same crossword, the same bottles of vodka to get her through the weekend, and a Wednesday phone call with Mummy that she dreads. She has no friends, doesn't understand social cues she considers unnecessary, and has convinced herself she's perfectly fine. That carefully maintained isolation starts to give when she and Raymond, the scruffy IT technician from her office, help an elderly man who collapses on the pavement in front of them. Their unlikely friendship — along with a harmless celebrity crush that spirals into something more serious — begins pulling Eleanor toward people for the first time in years. Beneath the deadpan humor of Eleanor's narration is a slower reveal of real trauma: a childhood defined by an abusive, manipulative mother and a fire that changed everything. Gail Honeyman's debut is a comic novel that turns, without much warning, into a serious one — about what loneliness does to a person, and what it takes to let someone in.

• found family

Linus Baker leads a quiet, rule-bound life as a caseworker for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, inspecting government orphanages and filing tidy reports. Then Extremely Upper Management hands him a classified assignment: travel to remote Marsyas Island and evaluate an orphanage housing six of the most dangerous magical children on record, among them a gnome, a wyvern, a green blob of indeterminate origin, a were-Pomeranian, and a boy who happens to be the Antichrist. Expecting menace, Linus instead finds a strange, warm household held together by its enigmatic master, Arthur Parnassus. As grey routine gives way to sunshine, the sea, and a family he never imagined wanting, Linus is forced to weigh the demands of his job against the home taking shape around him. Warm, funny, and quietly pointed about prejudice and the courage of ordinary kindness, TJ Klune's novel is a modern comfort read about found family and the choice to do the decent thing.

• found family

A candid, funny memoir of a woman's twenties as she navigates friendship, heartbreak, and the messy path toward self-acceptance.

Evie Sage's life has never gone according to plan. At twenty-three she is out of options and desperate for work, so when a chance encounter in the woods lands her a job as assistant to the most feared man in the kingdom of Rennedawn, she takes it — bloodstains, severed limbs, and all. The Villain is exactly as terrifying as his reputation promises. He is also, inconveniently, the most attractive employer Evie has ever had. Between filing paperwork, managing an office of magical henchmen, and pretending not to notice the way her heart races whenever her boss is near, Evie throws herself into a job that is equal parts absurd and dangerous. But when it becomes clear that someone inside the manor is feeding secrets to the kingdom's ruler, she finds herself drawn deeper into The Villain's world — and closer to the man behind the menace. Told with sharp humor and a slow-building romance, Assistant to the Villain is a witty fantasy about loyalty, found purpose, and the very bad idea of falling for evil. The first book in Hannah Nicole Maehrer's viral series pairs a relentlessly optimistic heroine with a brooding antihero for a workplace comedy set against a backdrop of dark magic and court intrigue.

• grumpy sunshine
• slow burn
• workplace romance
• morally grey

Jack Worthing and his friend Algernon Moncrieff are two young Victorian gentlemen with a shared talent for invention. Jack has fabricated a wicked younger brother named Ernest as an excuse to escape his country responsibilities and enjoy himself in town; Algernon has invented a permanently ailing friend named Bunbury for much the same purpose. Both deceptions collide when each man decides to court under the borrowed name "Ernest." As Jack pursues the fashionable Gwendolen and Algernon sets his sights on Jack's young ward Cecily — both of whom are convinced they can only love a man named Ernest — the tangle of false identities spirals toward exposure, presided over by the magnificently formidable Lady Bracknell. Oscar Wilde's most beloved play is a glittering farce and a razor-sharp satire of Victorian earnestness, marriage, and class. Fast, quotable, and endlessly witty, The Importance of Being Earnest skewers the hypocrisies of polite society while delivering some of the finest comic dialogue in the English language.

An unnamed narrator drifts through corporate life plagued by insomnia and a numbing sense of emptiness, medicating his despair with support-group meetings for illnesses he doesn't have and a catalogue-perfect apartment full of things he doesn't need. Then he meets Tyler Durden — a charismatic, anarchic soap-maker who offers a different kind of release. Together they start a fight club: men meeting in basements to beat one another bloody, chasing the raw aliveness that consumer comfort has bled out of their lives. But the club grows beyond bare-knuckle catharsis into Project Mayhem, an underground movement bent on tearing down the world that made them. Chuck Palahniuk's debut novel is a savage, blackly funny assault on consumerism, masculinity, and the anaesthetised modern self. Told in terse, hypnotic prose with an unreliable narrator and one of fiction's most infamous twists, Fight Club became a cult classic and the basis for David Fincher's film.

• unreliable narrator
• anti hero
• morally grey

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. An unremarkable optometrist from Ilium, New York, Billy ricochets without warning through the moments of his own life: his boyhood, his brutal experience as a bewildered young soldier in World War II, his capture by the Germans, and his survival of the Allied firebombing of Dresden that incinerated a city and tens of thousands of people. In between, he is kidnapped by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore and displayed in a zoo, where he learns their serene, fatalistic view of time in which every moment simply is, always has been, and always will be. Drawing on Kurt Vonnegut's own experience as a POW who lived through the Dresden bombing sheltering in a meat locker, Slaughterhouse-Five refracts unspeakable trauma through science fiction, black comedy, and a fractured, time-hopping structure. Its famous refrain — "so it goes" — punctuates every death with weary, defiant resignation. A landmark of postwar American literature, Vonnegut's anti-war masterpiece is by turns absurd, mournful, and quietly furious: a book about the impossibility of making sense of atrocity, and the human need to try anyway.

An angel and a demon who have lived on Earth since the Beginning have grown rather fond of the place and do not want to see it ended. When the Antichrist is accidentally misplaced at birth and ends up with an ordinary English family in a small town, the two unlikely allies must team up to avert Armageddon while navigating prophecies, witchfinders, the Four Horsemen, and a small boy with an unusual dog. A warm, witty, and surprisingly moving celebration of humanity, written in equal collaboration between Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.

In a peaceful retirement village in the Kent countryside, four unlikely friends meet every Thursday to pore over cold cases that were never solved. Elizabeth, a steely former spy; Joyce, a warm and deceptively sharp ex-nurse; Ron, a firebrand old union man; and Ibrahim, a meticulous retired psychiatrist, call themselves the Thursday Murder Club — and they are very good at what they do. When a brutish local developer is found dead with a mysterious photograph left beside the body, the club finds itself with a real murder to solve. Racing the police (and occasionally helping them), the four pensioners draw on a lifetime of accumulated cunning, charm, and hard-won wisdom to chase a killer through a web of old secrets. Richard Osman's runaway bestselling debut is a warm, witty cozy mystery that treats its elderly heroes with affection and respect, balancing genuine puzzle-plotting with sharp comedy and unexpected poignancy about aging, friendship, and mortality.

• found family

Still reeling from the destruction of Earth, Arthur Dent and his companions set out for Milliways — the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, where guests dine in luxury while watching all of creation end. Getting there means a stolen ship, a search for whoever truly rules the galaxy, and one absurd catastrophe after another. The second book in Douglas Adams's beloved comic science-fiction saga.

• fish out of water

Matilda Wormwood is a tiny girl with a colossal brain. By four she has taught herself to read, devoured the local library, and developed a keen sense of justice—none of which impresses her crooked, television-addled parents, who treat her as a nuisance. When Matilda is finally sent to school, she meets Miss Honey, a kind young teacher who recognizes her genius, and Miss Trunchbull, a monstrous headmistress who treats children as vermin to be flung, locked away, and terrorized. Armed with her wits, a taste for mischief, and a strange new power she is only beginning to understand, Matilda decides to fight back—on her own behalf and on Miss Honey's. What follows is a gleeful campaign against grown-up cruelty, waged by a small girl who refuses to be underestimated. One of Roald Dahl's best-loved novels, Matilda is a funny, big-hearted story about the power of books, cleverness, and standing up to bullies—no matter how enormous they are.

A collected edition of Lewis Carroll's two Alice novels: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Alice falls down a rabbit hole into a world of shrinking potions, a grinning cat, and a tyrannical Queen of Hearts, then later climbs through a mirror into a chessboard world of talking twins and a knight who keeps falling off his horse.

• portal fantasy
• fish out of water

Patrick Bateman is twenty-six, works on Wall Street, dines at the city's most exclusive restaurants, and is obsessed with status: the right business card, the right skincare regimen, the right reservation. He is also, in the novel's telling, a murderer. Narrated in Bateman's flat, brand-obsessed first person, American Psycho moves between exhaustive catalogues of designer labels and stereo equipment and increasingly graphic descriptions of torture and killing. Bret Easton Ellis's 1991 novel is a savage satire of 1980s consumer capitalism and the hollowness beneath its polished surface. Bateman's colleagues are interchangeable; no one truly sees him, and his confessions are met with indifference or misheard entirely. The book leaves it deliberately unclear how much of the violence is real and how much is the fantasy of a man dissolving into the culture that made him. Notorious for its brutality and long a lightning rod for controversy, it remains a defining work of transgressive fiction — a cold, funny, and genuinely disturbing portrait of emptiness dressed as success.

• unreliable narrator

Emma Corrigan has plenty of little secrets — the kind everyone has and no one admits to. She doesn't really like her boyfriend's dog. She's never actually read the management book her company reveres. She has no idea what her job's key performance indicators even mean. And when a terrifyingly turbulent flight convinces her that the plane is about to go down, she blurts every last one of these secrets to the calm, handsome American stranger sitting beside her. The plane lands safely, of course, and Emma walks away mortified but relieved that she will never see the man again. Then she arrives at work to discover that the stranger is Jack Harper — the enigmatic founder and CEO of her own company — and that he now knows absolutely everything about her. A breezy, laugh-out-loud romantic comedy from the bestselling author of the Shopaholic series, Can You Keep a Secret? is Sophie Kinsella at her most charming: a warm, wince-inducing, feel-good story about honesty, embarrassment, and the messy business of falling for exactly the wrong — or perhaps exactly the right — person.

• workplace romance

On New Year's Eve, a botched bank robbery turns an apartment viewing into an unexpected hostage situation. A diverse group of strangers, each with their own anxieties and secrets, find themselves trapped together. As the police surround the building, they must navigate their shared predicament and discover the surprising connections that bind them.

• heist
• locked room
• forced proximity
• multiple povs

Don Tillman, a genetics professor who finds social life baffling, designs a rigorous questionnaire to scientifically identify the perfect wife. Then he meets Rosie — unsuitable by every metric, but in need of his help to find her biological father. As logic collides with love, Don's ordered world is joyfully upended. A warm, funny romantic comedy.

• fish out of water

The Thursday Murder Club is back, and this time the danger is personal. Elizabeth receives a letter from a man from her past — a former colleague from her intelligence days — who has stolen something extremely valuable from extremely dangerous people, and who now needs her help. Soon the quiet world of Coopers Chase is brushing up against international criminals, missing diamonds, and the very real possibility of getting killed. As Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron, and Ibrahim are pulled into a case with far higher stakes than a cold-case file, one of their own is badly hurt, and the four friends discover just how fierce they can be when someone they love is threatened. Vengeance, it turns out, is a dish best served by pensioners. Richard Osman's second Thursday Murder Club mystery blends twisty, high-stakes plotting with the warmth, humor, and emotional depth that made the series a phenomenon, deepening the friendships at its heart.

• found family

Stephen Fry retells the great Greek myths — from Chaos and the birth of the gods to Prometheus, Pandora, Persephone, and Midas — with wit, warmth, and a storyteller's relish. The first book in his retelling of the classical myths, Mythos is a warm, funny, and richly entertaining gateway into the foundational stories of Western imagination.

Twenty, broke, and newly a single mother after an affair with her married professor, Margo Millet starts an OnlyFans account half as a joke — and it works, especially once her estranged pro-wrestler father moves in and coaches her on building a persona. But online fame brings complications, and a looming custody fight threatens the life she's piecing together. Rufi Thorpe's warm, funny novel about motherhood, money, and reinvention.

• coming of age

Cat, Lyn, and Gemma Kettle are triplets — two identical blondes and one redheaded odd-one-out — whose thirty-fourth year turns out to be their most turbulent yet. Cat is reeling from a revelation that shatters her marriage; Lyn, the family overachiever, hides bouts of panic behind her flawless life; and free-spirited Gemma confronts her fear of commitment when she falls for a charming locksmith. Meanwhile their divorced parents grow stranger by the day. Liane Moriarty's warm, funny debut is an affectionate comedy about sisterhood, marriage, and the fierce love between siblings who have never known life apart.

• multiple povs
• family saga

Bridget Jones is a thirty-something single woman living in London, and this is the year she has resolved to sort herself out. In a diary crammed with running tallies of her weight, cigarettes, alcohol units, and calories, she chronicles her wobbling attempts at self-improvement, her disastrous romantic decisions, and the well-meaning meddling of her friends and mother. Torn between her charming, caddish boss Daniel Cleaver and the buttoned-up barrister Mark Darcy, Bridget stumbles through workplace humiliations, dinner-party interrogations from "Smug Marrieds," and the universal terror of ending up alone. Her voice—self-deprecating, sharp, and endlessly relatable—turned a fictional diary into a defining portrait of modern single life. Loosely inspired by Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary launched a cultural phenomenon and helped define a genre. Warm, very funny, and quietly wise about the gap between who we mean to be and who we are, it remains the beloved first entry in the Bridget Jones series.

• love triangle

Tina Fey turns her comic eye on her own life — an awkward Pennsylvania childhood, improv in Chicago, becoming Saturday Night Live's first female head writer, impersonating Sarah Palin, and running 30 Rock while raising a daughter. Written in her signature deadpan, it mixes memoir with sharp, funny commentary on women in comedy, show business, and working motherhood.

Alice Love falls off her bike at the gym and wakes up on the floor convinced it is 1998. In her mind she is twenty-nine, blissfully in love with her husband Nick, and pregnant with her first child. The truth is far stranger: it is actually ten years later, she is thirty-nine, she has three children she does not remember having, and she and Nick are locked in a bitter divorce. As Alice tries to recover the lost decade, she is baffled by the brittle, over-scheduled woman she has apparently become, and by the warmth she still feels for a husband everyone says she now hates. Retracing her own life like a detective, she begins to wonder whether forgetting might be a second chance to choose differently. Liane Moriarty pairs a clever high-concept premise with her signature blend of humor and emotional insight. What Alice Forgot is a warm, wry, quietly moving novel about marriage, motherhood, and how easily people drift from the lives and the loves they once wanted.

• multiple povs

The Thursday Murder Club finds their quiet year interrupted by a wedding, but festivities quickly turn sinister when a guest fears for their life. Elizabeth's encounter ignites a new investigation as a ruthless villain seeks an uncrackable code. The gang must race against time to solve a complex puzzle and prevent a murder.

• found family

Marooned on prehistoric Earth, Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect are hurled back into the cosmos just in time to face the ancient killers of the planet Krikkit, who mean to destroy all life in the universe. Reunited with Zaphod, Trillian, and Marvin, Arthur races to stop the Krikkit robots — through immortal grudges, impossible flying, and a great deal of cricket. The third book in Douglas Adams's comic science-fiction saga.

• fish out of water

A landmark collection of fifteen short stories by the Tunisian satirist Ali al-Du'aji, gathered from old newspapers and magazines and published in 1969. With a wry, affectionate, and biting eye, al-Du'aji turns everyday Tunisian life into sharp, humorous social observation.