46 Hilarious Books Guaranteed To Make You Laugh Out Loud

Is Everyone Hanging out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling

"Mindy's relatable and self-deprecating humor makes you want to be her sister or roommate, or anything that will allow you to be in her presence. It speaks to any female with family, friends and basic insecurities. She hilariously chronicles her life before fame while managing to throw in some Harry Potter metaphors. It leaves you feeling like, if you had the opportunity to meet her, you guys would totally be best friends and she would GET YOU." – Jessica Kane, The Huffington Post

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

"The temptation when reviewing a David Sedaris book is simply to quote liberally, and enviously, from his endless stock of pithy one-liners. A humorist par excellence, he can make Woody Allen appear ham-tongued, Oscar Wilde a drag." – The Guardian

The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams

"Humorous science fiction novels have notoriously limited audiences; they tend to be full of 'in' jokes understandable only to those who read everything from Jules Verne to Harlan Ellison. The Hitchhiker's Guide is a delightful exception, being written for anyone who can understand the thrill that might come to a crew of interstellar explorers who discover a mysterious planet, dead for five million years, and then hear on their 'sub etha' radio a ghostly voice, hollow, reedy, insubstantial: 'Greetings to you. ... This is a recorded announcement, as I'm afraid we're all out at the moment.'" – The New York Times

One More Thing by B.J. Novak

"This book is filled with short stories of theweirdest, most random thoughts you would usually entertain and then immediately dismiss while taking a shower or during a boring commute. Except BJ fleshes them out." – Alexandra Ma, HuffPost

Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

"There's a lot to like in Semple's charming novel, including the vivacious humor and the lesson that when creative forces like Bernadette stop creating, they become 'a menace to society.' Even more appealing is the mutually adoring mother-daughter relationship at its warm heart." – National Public Radio

Bossypants by Tina Fey

"If nothing else, Bossypants should make any profile of Fey unnecessary, since it provides, in abundance, everything readers want from a story about a performer and none of the 'clever' observations about food intake/absence of makeup/appearance of child art upon which celebrity profiles are so dependent. In chapter after chapter, in a voice consistently recognizable as her own, Fey simply tells stories of her life: How a nerdy but self-confident half-Greek girl entered theatrical life (a wonderful community theater, lots of gay and lesbian friends), what Second City was like "back in the day" (cultish, hard, unbelievably fun), how 'Saturday Night Live' works (a chemical compound of Harvard grads and Improv people), what it's like to be a woman in comedy (harder than you think but not as hard as coal mining) or to run your own show or to satirize a vice presidential candidate when she's standing right backstage." – The Los Angeles Times

Hyperbole And A Half by Allie Brosh

"You’ve probably seen the book's cover image somewhere around the Internet. And there’s a pretty good chance you know what it’s from: Hyperbole and a Half, an odd personal blog that quickly developed a cult following charmed by writer Allie Brosh’s deliberately childlike Microsoft Paint illustrations and comical narration. Brosh retold and illustrated funny anecdotes from her childhood, or relatable conflicts from her 20-something existence. I loved the blog, and would reread entries when I needed an upper, nearly choking sometimes on my laughter." – Jill Capewell, HuffPost

I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron

"This is what we loved about Ephron -- that she always spoke the truth, tackling the biggest, most challenging parts of life with warmth, sharp wit and a touch of whimsy. Nora Ephron made it a little easier to embrace aging in all its complexities, because she always managed to find the punchline." – Laura Rowley

Lamb by Christopher Moore

"I've read more realistic books, and funnier books, and wiser ones -- but I must say, this is a marvelous blend of those flavors. If you've never read any Moore, and you're looking for a book that will make you both laugh and think, I highly recommend Lamb: the Gospel according to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal." – Daily Kos

Yes Please by Amy Poehler

"Yes Please is a memoir in that it contains some memories, many of which are offered as hard-won — advice seems too preachy, so we'll go with helpful suggestions. (A chapter called 'I'm So Proud of You' should be required reading in high schools.) Also featured are: haiku about plastic surgery, a chapter by Poehler's mother, a satiric birth plan, a chapter by Seth Meyers, an annotated history of 'Parks and Recreation,' a letter from Hillary Rodham Clinton, sex advice, a truly hilarious list of potential books about divorce and a moving account of an apology." – The Los Angeles Times

Paddle Your Own Canoe by Nick Offerman

"In his new book, Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living, Nick Offerman — the former Chicago theater actor, comedian and native of Minooka, now best known for his hilarious performances as the red-meat-eating, Scotch-drinking libertarian Ron Swanson on NBC's 'Parks and Recreation' — is alternately facetious and stone-cold dead serious about food. The facetious part comes in the guise of Offerman's obsession with red meat — which he professes to prefer over poultry and fish, not to mention vegetables — and the paramount role it plays (along with mustaches and woodworking, to which he is also partial) in establishing the virile masculinity of the men who eat it." – The Chicago Tribune

Bitter Is The New Black by Jen Lancaster

"This is the smart-mouthed, soul-searching story of a woman trying to figure out what happens next when she’s gone from six figures to unemployment checks and she stops to reconsider some of the less-than-rosy attitudes and values she thought she’d never have to answer for when times were good." – Penguin

Youth In Revolt by C.D. Payne

"I read Youth in Revolt in high school. It was hilarious because Nick Twisp, the narrator and protagonist, was saying all of the perverted, hyper-sexual things I was thinking at the time, but knew I could not say publicly. Still, I think Youth in Revolt has lasting power. A lot of really bizarre, awful things happened to Nick, but he kind of describes it all nonchalantly, which is reallyfunny. It is a fun read and refreshing perspective at any time of life. The movie adaptation with Michael Cera is not half bad, but the book reigns supreme." – Daniel Marans, HuffPost

How Not To Date by Judy McGuire

"This book isn't a collection of columns, but rather a dating manual arranged by errors, screw-ups, and abominations, including some 'romantic' incidents that may never be washed clean from McGuire's sheets or membranes. Dating veterans will appreciate McGuire's classification system, as she arranges dating disasters according to the reactions they provoke: 'Worried Grimace,' 'One Eyebrow Raised,' 'Both Eyebrows Furrowed in Horror,' and 'Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.' Though the book takes a refreshingly negative stance, there is a little room for optimism: 'What we're talking about won't be pleasant, but it will be less painful than, say, a meteor slamming into your head.'" – Mark Peters

Anchorboy by Jay Onrait

"Anchorboy is quintessentially Onrait, at times funny, surprisingly earnest and so very Canadian, or ‘CANADIAN!’ as he used to so often yell on TSN. It is also a good modern look at what it takes to be a successful sportscaster, even one who will admit he has lived a pretty charmed life." – The Star

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

"The Sellout is a hilarious, pop-culture-packed satire about race in America. Beatty writes energetically, providing insight as often as he elicits laughs." – Madeleine Crum, HuffPost

Little Victories by Jason Gay

"The book simply is LOL on every page. Jason has a great way of taking life's small moments, with kids, work, extended family and friends, and calling out the obviously silly and ludicrous things that just happen to all of us. He forces you to take a step back and just smile at it all." – MaryGail Pezzimenti, HuffPost

Is It Just Me? by Miranda Hart

"Miranda Hart needs little introduction. Her eponymous TV series has won her a bundle of awards and millions of fans. But things haven't always gone smoothly for Britain's Comedy Queen. On the contrary: her life has been one long, awkward and rather embarrassing journey.Now Miranda has selflessly chosen to share her wealth of uncomfortable experiences in her new book, Is It Just Me?" – The Telegraph

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

"Reading a truly good book, the page opens like a trapdoor and you simply fall through. The Eyre Affair takes that feeling, the moment you lose the sense of yourself and become engrossed in the story, and creates high adventure and wild drama around the porous boundaries between fiction and real life." – The Guardian

I Am America (And So Can You!) by Stephen Colbert

"Among the funnier sections is the 'Higher Education' chapter. It includes what purports to be Mr. Colbert’s college application essay, featuring ripe malapropisms, overuse of a thesaurus ('the apex, pinnacle, acme, vertex, and zenith of my life’s experience') and the lying claim that his great-great-uncle’s name is on a building at Dartmouth. " – The New York Times

The Martian by Andy Weir

"The Martian must be the purest example of real-science sci-fi for many years. Just one character most of the time, no dialogue. It's utterly compelling." – The Wall Street Journal

Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs

"Running With Scissors is a bawdy, outrageous, often hilarious account of what in fact sounds like a seriously unhappy story. During the course of his memoir, Mr. Burroughs writes of being sent to a mental hospital (but only as a way of getting out of school) and of being sexually initiated by the 33-year-old man who lived in the Finches' barn." – The New York Times

Food: A Love Story by Jim Gaffigan

"Comedian Jim Gaffigan is kind of an unofficial food expert. In fact, most of his act is about food. So it only seems natural he would take some of his best food material and put it into a book. Chapter titles like 'Bacon: The Candy of Meat,' 'Nobody Really Likes Fruit' and 'I Need a Hero' offer clues to Gaffigan's relationship with eating, and the whole thing is a hilarious read." – Whitney Meers, HuffPost

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

"Remarkable for its relentless skewering of artifice and pretension, Lucky Jim also contains some of the finest comic set pieces in the language." – The Guardian

How To Be A Woman by Caitlin Moran

"There are lots of things to love about Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman, an invective against backsliding attitudes toward feminism that, this time last year, every woman in Britain seemed to be reading. There is the stand it takes against bikini waxes. There is its protest against the pornography and stripping industries. Above all there is its deployment of sweary British slang to remind us, in this era of manufactured outrage, what a truly great rant should look like: rude, energetic and spinning off now and then into jubilant absurdity." – The New York Times

Insane City by Dave Barry

"Never fear, dear devoted readers, Mr. Barry has not written a deadly dull political novel. In the main, Insane City is a madcap wedding comedy: part 'Hangover,' part 'Bridezillas' part 'Every Which Way But Loose,' with a healthy dose of 'Cheech and Chong' thrown in for good measure." – The Washington Times

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

"[A] book which grapples with the antichrist, a narcissistic angel and demon duo and a prophetic witch." – The Guardian

Me And Earl And The Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews

"This was probably the funniest book I’ve ever read. Greg’s self deprecating narrative was extremely cynical and utterly hilarious and along with Earl’s epic lines of wisdom, it made for a laugh out loud book. Before reading, I was skeptical about this book as I didn’t understand how anyone could make a book involving cancer funny but somehow, Jesse Andrews has done it." – The Guardian

Seriously ... I'm Kidding by Ellen DeGeneres

"With her dogged optimism and goofy dance moves, there is something endlessly likable about DeGeneres, and her personality jumps off every page. Even her brief rants about everyday nuisances, like people multitasking while on the phone or showing up two hours late to a dinner party, carry a cheerful air." – NPR

Not That Kind Of Girl by Lena Dunham

"If you like 'Girls,' you will like Not That Kind of Girl. Indeed, it is impossible to read without picturing Dunham’s character Hannah Horvath and her pals rampaging about the streets of Brooklyn in crop tops and clunky shoes. Like the television show, which captures the millennial hedonism and angst of a quartet of young women living in NewYork, the book is very funny, occasionally painful and frequently inspires snorts of oh-no-she-didn’t disbelief." – The Independent

A Confederacy Of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

"Mr. Toole's most subversive act is his quiet insistence on teaching you while you're laughing yourself silly. His novel is a little crash course in the Western canon -- classical apologetics buoyed by flatulence and French Quarter abandon." – The Wall Street Journal

This Is A Book by Demetri Martin

"Anyone who has ever seen his stand-up routines on the short-lived Comedy Central show 'Important Things With Demetri Martin' knows Mr. Martin is easily able to bring laughs. What fans were wondering was whether this humor could translate to the written word. This Is a Book, Mr. Martin’s first foray into writing, is able to transition quite successfully" – The Washington Times

Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage. by Rob Delaney

"This collection of anecdotes and stories from his life, interspersed with barrages of his most popular tweets, is legitimately laugh-out-loud funny. And while it’s as hilarious and irreverent as you’d expect from one of Twitter’s premiere practitioners of 140-character comedy, there’s more here than wisecracks and wit. Delaney presents himself and his life with unflinching honesty, exploring his issues with alcohol, depression, relationships, and fatherhood with equal doses of sincerity and humor." – San Francisco Book Review

Egghead by Bo Burnham

"Careening from pure absurdism to multi-tiered wordplay (both visual and spoken), Burnham plays with your expectations, manipulating form, meter, and puns with equal deftness. Each is perfectly complemented by Chance Bone's similarly dark, silly, and clever illustrations, some of which are as hilarious and as poignant as the poems they accompany. It's almost too much to take in at once (though you won't want to stop turning pages)." – San Francisco Book Review

I'm Down by Mishna Wolff

"As she tells you at the outset of I'm Down, Mishna Wolff is all white -- nothing remarkable, except that her way cool father, 'Wolfy,' thinks he's black (he's not). What follows is a funny-melancholy coming-of-age memoir about a honky manqué who tries to beat her handicaps (including a 'rhythm problem') to please her father and disarm the kids in her tough south Seattle neighborhood. Self-taught in 'capping,' the social art of insult ('I tried every possible ending for a sentence that starts out: 'Your mama'), Mishna searches for an identity in her broken home, her snobby, mostly white prep school, and—most restrictive of all -- her longing heart." – O Magazine

Go The F**k To Sleep by Adam Mansbach

"Go the F**k To Sleep by Adam Mansbach is probably the best children's book since Goodnight Moon, and it only gets better when read by Samuel L. Jackson." – HuffPost

The Book Of Joan by Melissa Rivers

"Like mother, like daughter, but with a sanity and strength all her own from having grown up Joan Rivers’ daughter.I give you, then, one of the most entertaining show business memoirs we’ve seen in quite a long while." – The Buffalo News

The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain

"The Innocents Abroad would give readers a new way of looking at the world -- amused, skeptical and unimpressed, which is to say, like Twain himself." – Roy Morris Jr.

You Deserve A Drink by Mamrie Hart

"Sure, You Deserve a Drink contains a lot of ridiculous stories just for pure enjoyment (after all, the tagline is 'Boozy Misadventures and Tales of Debauchery'), but the book isn’t without a takeaway. Above all, Hart helps her readers feel confident." – The Riveter Magazine

Cruel Shoes by Steve Martin

"Cruel Shoes is a collection of offbeat, mostly humorous essays and short stories by Steve Martin, and his first published book, and is also the title of one of the pieces therein, a satirical short-short story about a woman in a shoe store." – Biblio

Let's Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson

"Let's Pretend This Never Happened, subtitled (A Mostly True Memoir), is the closest that I've ever found to the book form of a stand-up comedy routine. Lawson grew up in rural Texas with a taxidermist father, frequent contact with animals in various forms of distress, an undiagnosed anxiety disorder, and a talent for creatively freaking out about things that never occur to anyone else. But, more importantly, she has a talent for putting down on paper the random thoughts that go through her head so the rest of us can read them. Not to mention excellent comic timing and absolute mastery of the strangely relevant digression." – Eyrie

Sex. Drugs, And Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman

"The American writer Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, in addition to being one of the better essay collections of recent years (it was first published in 2004), is absolutely the best disguised. Klosterman's book subtitles itself 'A Low Culture Manifesto,' yet it's not a manifesto. Its table of contents sequences his chapters like the tracks of a CD, putting minute markings in place of page numbers; but only a part of the book has to do with music. To glue together what would otherwise be a disparate accumulation of introspective and journalistic pieces, Klosterman puts personalised 'interludes' between each essay, in the manner of Hemingway's In Our Time." – The Guardian

The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson

"As a humorist, Bryson falls somewhere between the one-liner genius of Dave Barry and the narrative brilliance of David Sedaris. He’s not above sublime lowbrow fat and feces jokes, but at his best he spools out operatically funny vignettes of sustained absurdity that nevertheless remain grounded in universal experience." – The New York Times

Candide by Voltaire

"This 1759 satire about being thrust from the insular, optimistic world of academic study into the harsh realities of unsheltered life is kind of a perfect metaphor for the post-college struggle. The book's wild, globe-trotting plot is hilarious in a Monty Python sort of way: violence and heartbreak are treated with a deadpan tone, making it impossible not to laugh at uncomfortable scenarios. The book concludes with a moral all young people could stand to hear, but not before wryly critiquing just about every government and organized religion that's ever existed." – Madeleine Crum, HuffPost

Something Fresh P.G. Wodehouse

"If you're looking for antics, absurdity, and lots of heart, Something Fresh is the perfect read. Wodehouse's comic novels operate in a sunny, prewar universe peopled by British minor gentry, where dimwitted earl's nephews occupy themselves by falling in love with cocktail waitresses and enterprising outsiders engage in mad capers to make their fortunes. Something Fresh introduces Blandings Castle (and its lovably buffoonish residents), which is the backdrop for several heartwarming if unlikely romances, a scarab-based adventure, and, most importantly, nonstop hilarity." – Claire Fallon, HuffPost

Why Not Me? by Mindy Kaling

"Yup. Mindy. Again. You know why? Because she is really, truly funny. Mindy's second book, which came out just this fall, is a real treat for fans of her uniquely brilliant sensibility as well as her Hulu show, 'The Mindy Project.' Somewhat more mature than 'Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?', 'Why Not Me?' is not only laugh in bed and look crazy funny, it's smart and relatable and very honest, tackling sexism, diversity and confidence. It would seem as if Mindy now knows she's a role model for so many girls, teens and women, and is using her platform and popularity to make a bit of a difference." – Liat Kornowski, HuffPost