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> “Hoist the mainsail ye accursed swine” shouted the Captain over the roar of the waves as the ship was tossed like a cork dropped from a wine bottle into a jac
by eatonphil 4y ago
> “Hoist the mainsail ye accursed swine” shouted the Captain over the roar of the waves as the ship was tossed like a cork dropped from a wine bottle into a jacuzzi when the faucet is wide open and the jets are running full blast and one has just settled into the water with a glass of red wine to ease the aches and pains after a day of hard labor raking leaves from the front yard.
> Sir Reginald Brimwater, Guardian of the Tome of Remembrance, Herald of the Immortal Word, Voice of the Histories Both Recent and Ancient, Archivist of the Eternal Ledger, and Memory of the Empire had forgotten his quill, but he was pretty sure he got the gist of what what’s-his-face was saying.
(From the actual 2022 page: https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2022 https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2022.)
Pretty good. :) These remind me of Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams in style. I wish I knew more hilarious writers. Vonnegut is great though maybe not quite as hilarious. I've tried to read The Innocents Abroad and Confederacy of Dunces but I found myself only trudging slowly through both. I'd love your suggestions!
- tspike 4y agoCheck out Tom Robbins if you haven't already! Here's the opening to Jitterbug Perfume: > THE BEET IS THE MOST INTENSE of vegetables. > The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious. > Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets. > The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip... > The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies. > The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes. > In Europe there is grown widely a large beet they call the mangel-wurzel. Perhaps it is mangel-wurzel that we see in Rasputin. Certainly there is mangel-wurzel in the music of Wagner, although it is another composer whose name begins, B-e-e-t——. > Of course, there are white beets, beets that ooze sugar water instead of blood, but it is the red beet with which we are concerned; the variety that blushes and swells like a hemorrhoid, a hemorrhoid for which there is no cure. (Actually, there is one remedy: commission a potter to make you a ceramic asshole—and when you aren't sitting on it, you can use it as a bowl for borscht.) > An old Ukrainian proverb warns, "A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil." > That is a risk we have to take.
- codq 4y agoJitterbug Perfurme, like most of Tom Robbins' novels, is just filled with gold nuggets on every page. Reading him is like eating mushrooms and strolling through the garden of eden.
- teh_klev 4y agoRobert Rankin author of The Brentford Trilogy is very much in the style of Pratchett and Adams: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brentford_Trilogy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brentford_Trilogy
- namdnay 4y agoFor anyone who likes steampunk, I strongly recommend the Witches of Chiswick!
- nicopappl 4y agoI recommend Stanisław Lem's Cyberiad. The English translation has amazing prose and it is hilarious. I can't recommend anything else :) I like Charles Stross, good sci-fi with a satirical strike, but he's not as good with words as the authors you mention.
- eatonphil 4y agoJust picked it up. I'm surprised it reads so well as a translation! I'd have thought it pretty hard to translate wordplay well.
- Freak_NL 4y ago> Confederacy of Dunces It's definitely a step up in terms of reader effort, but I found it worth it. It doesn't compare well to Pratchett and Adams who are more like a writer's variant of the stand-up comedian (a lot of the entries in this contest feel stylistically close to their writing). A Confederacy of Dunces instead shines in its portrayal of the comically pitiful characters within it, with John Kennedy Toole succeeding in making the cringe-worthy protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly one of the most loathsome characters I have ever come across in a novel.
- wombatpm 4y agoToile was unable to get it published in his lifetime, he died a broken man. His mother kept sending it to publishers until one took pity on her and actually read it. I believe it is the only debut novel awarded a Pulitzer posthumously
- ttctciyf 4y agoIf you like Adams there's a good chance you'll appreciate some of Robert Sheckley - I recommend Mindswap in particular. FWIW, my own favourite humorous sci-fi short is R.A. Lafferty's Been a Long Long Time which can be read online: https://www.gwern.net/docs/fiction/humor/1970-lafferty.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/fiction/humor/1970-lafferty.pdf
- bombcar 4y agoLafferty’s short stories are an underappreciated treasure. I’ve been collecting the reprints as they become available.
- max-ibel 4y agoI recommend Roald Dahl's "Going Solo". The Audiobook narrated by Andrew Sachs is quite compelling. Also, maybe "The Napoleon of Notting Hill" by G.K. Chesterton. And of course most by P.G. Wodehouse.
- the_common_man 4y agoNothing beats any of the Jeeves books
- joe-collins 4y agoRight? "Worst" nothing, I felt Sir Terry's ghost while reading that.