The writers I admire are not the clever fellows who can write an entire novel without using the letter “e”, or the geniuses churning out three-volume sagas with a flick of their wrists, like superior pancake chefs. What readers need most is the brilliant, often undersung fiction writers who wring a smile out of us — especially in a decade that features war, pestilence, famine, unstable global leaders and ominously melty glaciers.
It’s so easy to rail at the state of the world, or to write, as I shamefacedly confess I once did, anguished and absolutely dire poetry about the same. (A moment of youthful folly; the poem died a merciful death and no copies survive.) Much harder to be funny about the human tendency to take a perfectly decent planet and turn it into a right mess.
One of my lodestars in this department is Carl Hiaasen, author of more than 20 novels, including collaborations. At 72, he continues to satirise American politics and, specifically, the fecund weirdness of Florida, adding billionaire philanthropists and an incompetent Proud Boy to the mix in Fever Beach, his most recent novel. “The important thing is to never mellow,” he told the Sun Sentinel, a South Florida newspaper, in April. “Nothing will kill a writer faster than a gracious acceptance of the world as it is.”
In a superb 2022 essay, the New York-based novelist Gary Shteyngart made the case for writing to entertain — even about subjects as dire as authoritarianism, plagues or burning forests. “I don’t have the strength to read a boring novel,” he wrote. “A writer is not a think-tank. The collapse of humanity is as deathly funny as it is heart-rending.” His sixth and just published novel, Vera, or Faith, features a 10-year-old protagonist, adopted, over-anxious and compelling, setting out on an American road trip to find her lost mother.
The chapter titles are pure sitcom (“She had to hold the family together”, “She had to survive recess”, “She had to be cool in front of Yumi”) but, instead of laugh-out-loud humour, you get something softer, more poignant. You might even accuse Shteyngart of committing acts of serious literature.
Over the past century, readers could choose from a variety of dazzling entertainers like PG Wodehouse, who wrote more than 90 sublimely hilarious books; Sue Townsend, the creator of the immortal diarist Adrian Mole; Terry Pratchett, the funniest writer ever to be furious at human folly; Saki, the short-story virtuoso; and Helen Fielding, who dreamt up Bridget Jones. Though many of today’s comedy greats have chosen the more lucrative business of writing television or streaming series. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, or Hacks, scripted by Lucia Aniello, Paul W Downs and Jen Statsky, are standouts; romcom fans adore Queen Charlotte, scripted by Bridgerton author Julia Quinn and Shonda Rhimes, and Darren Starr’s Emily in Paris. But some of the best and funniest fiction hides in plain sight, plentiful if scattered across genres.
For readers looking for laughs, targeted prizes are a good start. The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, established in 2000 and open to books published in the UK or Ireland, awards winners a jeroboam of champagne, and the chance to have their name bestowed on a Gloucestershire Old Spots pig.
The recently established Comedy Women In Print prize, which covers the same countries, has an excellent 2025 longlist, featuring 14 titles. From a couple of reformed professionals struggling with American suburbia in Asia Mackay’s A Serial Killer’s Guide to Marriage to novels set in the seedy world of stand-up comedy (Julia Raeside’s Don’t Make Me Laugh, Sara Pascoe’s Weirdo) or Holly Gramazio’s The Husbands — about a glut of them popping up in a young woman’s attic — this list slays.
A few years ago, Vikram Doraiswami, India’s High Commissioner to the UK, addressed the PG Wodehouse Society in London, and attempted to explain why generations of Indians had loved and read the light-hearted romps written by an author born in 1881. Perhaps, he suggested, it was the absence of politics, the lightness of Wodehouse’s touch.
In his lifetime, Wodehouse witnessed two world wars (not without controversy), the bloody end of British empire, tumult and change. But what he created was an enchanted world, a carefree place where the most serious problems concerned the purloining of prize pigs. “[Within] a tight framework of silly asses, doddery peers, absent-minded clergy and comic villains, butlers, bright young things and of course, armadas of aunts, he created endless, magical music that always leaves me thinking that the world is a better place than I thought,” the High Commissioner said to his audience.
Summer Books 2025
The best titles of the year so far. From politics, economics and history to art, food and, of course, fiction — FT writers choose their favourite reads of the year so far
You don’t have to search too far to find humour, which has sneaked into literature ever since the oldest recorded wisecrack. (Since you ask, a Sumerian fart joke from 1900BC that loses something in translation.) Like the ancient Sumerians, today’s novelists are fabulous at finding the funny side of contemporary life. Miranda July’s 2024 novel All Fours turned a menopausal woman’s sexual awakening into the broadest of comedy; Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (due to be published next month) recreates Delhi’s social world in deftly hilarious touches alongside the immigrant experience in America. Perhaps literary writers are wise to include as much low comedy as high seriousness in their fiction these days — we could all use a good laugh.
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