My Big Funny Summer Reading List

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Been dealing with some emotionally rough stuff lately, and need some diversion. I can handle reading about Nazis, torture, toxic waste, and Man's inhumanity to Man during the days, but at night I need some reading matter that won't keep me lying awake in agony until dawn. Only it's damn hard to find books that are both intelligent and genuinely funny. There's plenty of humor in Pynchon, or in books like Catch-22, say, but it's accompanied by stuff that's too dark for me in my present fragile-minded state. I can think of plenty of funny movies and TV shows (Arrested Development, Season 4, being the latest). And years later, I still laugh at the Mad Magazine offerings I loved as a kid - heavy on parody and cranky sarcasm. But it's really hard to think of many laugh-out-loud books. Offhand, I'm thinking David Lodge (Nice Work, Small World, etc.); Alison Lurie (Imaginary Friends. Probably should read more of her); Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim; No Name, by Wilkie Collins. I'm sure we can all recommend lots of great books, but how many at the top of our lists are genuinely funny, with no depressing elements [NOT Pale Fire, for example]. Tangent to the is-or-isn't-literature-morally-edifying conversation, is there something about humor (wordplay, parody, genuinely funny insights about character) that's too lowbrow for high-minded literary types to bother with?

So, any recommendations of really funny books that aren't Shakespearean comedies of error (sorry), and that don't remind one even obliquely of genocide or cruelty to animals or toxic waste? 

Laura