Prescription #4: something funny

My book group is desperate to find a “funny” book to read. We have really struggled to come up with something. Do you think Louise could write us a prescription?

The perception of humour is so subjective that agreeing on what’s funny can be enormously difficult, made more difficult by the many kinds of humour and their varying appeals to readers, too.

Satire has a long and venerable tradition as a tool for both critique and protest, and is usually very specific to a moment and place in time, requiring a working knowledge of what’s being satirised to work most effectively. Irony – when saying one thing is taken to mean the opposite – and its less subtle cousin, sarcasm, can prompt reactions anywhere between a wry grin to a belly laugh, but is a tone which can be difficult to identify on the page. Absurdity, incongruity, exaggeration and simple slapstick silliness don’t tickle everyone’s fancy. The great skill required to be funny should not be underrated!

I hope there’s something in here that you find funny, too.

Caitlin Moran offers the semi-autobiographical account of growing up in How to Be a Girl, painfully, raucously hilarious in the manner of “it’s funny because it’s true” (and if only it wasn’t).

Another Irish writer, Marian Keyes, peppers her chick-lit with laughs aplenty, telling stories about modern women in the modern world. (Her latest, Grown Ups, is getting excellent reviews)

Adam Johnson satirises the life of a model citizen of North Korea in The Orphan Master’s Son.

George Orwell satirises world leaders and political regimes in the allegorical classic Animal Farm.

For wordplay, riddles, puns and energetic literary gymnastics, try Salman Rushdie’s fantastical Luka and the Fire of Life (the sequel to Haroun and the Sea of Stories), written for his 13-year-old son and taking inspiration from video games.

For the darkly, unexpectedly absurd, try Patrick de Witt’s French Exit, in which a rich society matron is faced with the emptiness of life.

For young readers, the bathroom humour of Jo Nesbo’s Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder series hits the mark.

P G Wodehouse’s Jeeves books, about a hapless gentleman (Bertie Wooster) and his competent valet (Jeeves), are so funny they made a television series out of them, starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie.