Humor Books

Humor is the most fragile category in literature — most comic novels don't survive their decade, because comedy depends on shared reference, on knowing the exact thing being sent up. And yet the comic writers who do survive tend to survive longest. Aristophanes still lands. Shakespeare's comedies still work. Wilde's epigrams still sting.

What unites the classics of literary humor is that they're not only jokes. *The Importance of Being Earnest* is a perfectly constructed farce, but it's also a critique of Victorian respectability and a defense of style as a moral position. Jerome K. Jerome's *Three Men in a Boat* reads like a throwaway Victorian memoir and is secretly one of the funniest books in English. Mark Twain's *Huckleberry Finn* is a comic novel with the weight of a tragedy — that combination is exactly what kept it in print.

Humor ages badly because topicality ages badly. The comic writers who survive are the ones whose jokes were about something permanent: vanity, self-importance, the gap between what people say and what they mean.