Books that made you laugh out loud

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Any of the Harry Potter books - just to think that bloody woman made millions by writing the same book SEVEN times.
 
Typical SMB, by the time I find the thread almost all of mine have already been named.

Anything by Mencken, obviously, and P.J. O'Rourke before he got lazy.

Alexei Sayle's "Train to Hell" and "Great Bus Journeys.."made the young me laugh even after repeated reading, although I reckon they'll have dated badly.
 
The books that always make me really laugh are;

Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
and
Three Men in a Boat - by Jerome K. Jerome

Give them a try there is something about understated Victorian humour
 
Lord Potts said:
The books that always make me really laugh are;

Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
and
Three Men in a Boat - by Jerome K. Jerome

Give them a try there is something about understated Victorian humour
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I have both of those. :cool: I re-read them on a regular basis. Brilliant. A few years back the BBC had a pre- Downton Abbey Hugh Bonneville read/acted Diary of a Nobody and it was rather good iirc.
 
Understandably already mentioned, Spike's Puckoon is brilliantly funny, as are his war memoirs. With the latter, one minute you're laughing like a drain at the surrealism and then he stops you in your tracks with a dollop of unexpected pathos. I suppose his writing mirrored his own personality.

“The die was cast. It was a proud day for the Milligan family as I was taken from the house. "I'm too young to go," I screamed as Military Policemen dragged me from my pram, clutching a dummy. At Victoria Station the R.T.O. gave me a travel warrant, a white feather and a picture of Hitler marked "This is your enemy." I searched every compartment, but he wasn't on the train. At 4.30, June 2nd, 1940, on a summer's day all mare's tails and blue sky we arrived at Bexhill-on-Sea, where I got off. It wasn't easy. The train didn't stop there.”

Another shout for David Niven's The Moon's a Balloon. It's years since I read it and I hope it's as good as I remember.

Edit: I've just finished William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade. Not a gag a line but still some very funny writing.
 
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http://www.authorama.com/three-men-in-a-boat-12.html

"It cast a gloom over the boat, there being no mustard. We ate our beef in silence. Existence seemed hollow and uninteresting. We thought of the happy days of childhood, and sighed. We brightened up a bit, however, over the apple-tart, and, when George drew out a tin of pine- apple from the bottom of the hamper, and rolled it into the middle of the boat, we felt that life was worth living after all.

We are very fond of pine-apple, all three of us. We looked at the picture on the tin; we thought of the juice. We smiled at one another, and Harris got a spoon ready.

Then we looked for the knife to open the tin with. We turned out everything in the hamper. We turned out the bags. We pulled up the boards at the bottom of the boat. We took everything out on to the bank and shook it. There was no tin-opener to be found.

Then Harris tried to open the tin with a pocket-knife, and broke the knife and cut himself badly; and George tried a pair of scissors, and the scissors flew up, and nearly put his eye out. While they were dressing their wounds, I tried to make a hole in the thing with the spiky end of the hitcher, and the hitcher slipped and jerked me out between the boat and the bank into two feet of muddy water, and the tin rolled over, uninjured, and broke a teacup.

Then we all got mad. We took that tin out on the bank, and Harris went up into a field and got a big sharp stone, and I went back into the boat and brought out the mast, and George held the tin and Harris held the sharp end of his stone against the top of it, and I took the mast and poised it high up in the air, and gathered up all my strength and brought it down.

It was George’s straw hat that saved his life that day. He keeps that hat now (what is left of it), and, of a winter’s evening, when the pipes are lit and the boys are telling stretchers about the dangers they have passed through, George brings it down and shows it round, and the stirring tale is told anew, with fresh exaggerations every time.

Harris got off with merely a flesh wound.

After that, I took the tin off myself, and hammered at it with the mast till I was worn out and sick at heart, whereupon Harris took it in hand.

We beat it out flat; we beat it back square; we battered it into every form known to geometry – but we could not make a hole in it. Then George went at it, and knocked it into a shape, so strange, so weird, so unearthly in its wild hideousness, that he got frightened and threw away the mast. Then we all three sat round it on the grass and looked at it.

There was one great dent across the top that had the appearance of a mocking grin, and it drove us furious, so that Harris rushed at the thing, and caught it up, and flung it far into the middle of the river, and as it sank we hurled our curses at it, and we got into the boat and rowed away from the spot, and never paused till we reached Maidenhead."
 
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