They’ve been debating, over at the Corner, the funniest book ever. I’m not really a connoisseur of humor in the novel (though the best literary critic of the present moment is interested in the subject, so perhaps I should be too), but I’d probably join John Derbyshire in his assessment of Portnoy’s Complaint, which is, indeed, inutterably hilarious. P.G. Wodehouse, on the other hand, tends to leave me cold — which automatically disqualifies me from membership in the Club of Conservative Aesthetes, I know (as does my disdain for Brideshead Revisited). I tend to prefer my mid-century British humor leaved with a little more seriousness than Wodehouse brings to the table — give me Anthony Powell any day, or some of the non-Brideshead Waugh.
I should add that there are passages of David Copperfield that I recall being as funny as anything I’ve ever read. Nabokov, too, is brilliantly witty, though rarely in a fashion that makes you laugh out loud.
And if you’re looking to laugh at a novelist, well, there’s always James Fenimore Cooper.
— Ross
The Dish 