Historical Humor

Mit präzisem Blick für die tragische Komik des Lebens stolpert Herr Lehmann durchs Leben. Durch jahrelange, ausgefuchste Ausweichmanöver und heroische Trägheit hat der arglistfreie, bis ins Mark ambitionslose Bierzapfer erfolgreich Ansprüche von Eltern, Vermietern, Nachbarn und Frauen ausgesessen. Nun, wir schreiben das Jahr 1989, lebt er weitgehend störungsfrei in seiner Eineinhalbzimmerwohnung in Kreuzberg, wenn er nicht in die nächste Kneipe geht. Doch plötzlich bricht eine unvorhergesehene Störung nach der anderen in seinen heißgeliebten Alltagstrott...

In this groundbreaking book, Fortune 500 innovation guru and creativity instructor Bryan Mattimore takes listeners on a journey through time to explore the unique personality quirks and crazy ideas of history's greats.

Oliver Vice, 41, prominent philosopher, scholar, and art collector, is missing and presumed dead, over the side of Queen Mary 2. Troubled by his friend’s possible suicide, the unnamed narrator of Lawrence Douglas’ new novel launches an all-consuming investigation into Vice’s life history. Douglas, moving backward through time, tells a mordantly humorous story of fascination turned obsession, as his narrator peels back the layers of the Vice family’s rich and bizarre history.

On his first night in his new home, Warren spies two figures in the grass outside; when he screws up the nerve to confront them, they disappear. The next day he encounters ghosts of a different kind: In the face of the teenage girl he meets at a comics convention, he sees the mingled features of his white father and his black mother, both now dead. The girl is his daughter, and she thinks she's white.

South Carolina secedes from the Union in 1861, but the sleepy city of San Francisco cares more about its war on rats. Bummer, a stray dog, has earned fame for his many rat kills. When one night he jumps in to save another stray (Lazarus) from the attack of a vicious dog, the new pair catch the attention of two rival reporters: Albert Evans with the Alta California, and Frank Gross with the Bulletin. This historical comedy traces the personal and professional competition that drove these two newsmen to serve as the personal biographers of two stray dogs, and how these animals captured the hearts of a city with their loyalty and kindness.

Has something gone amiss at the home of the Clam sisters? In the early years of the 20th century, one sister purchases a rare blue spong from a songbird dealer without realizing its strange provenance. Soon, the aristocratic sisters and their staff find themselves exposed to a flying koan, provoking them to cast off their commonplace mores, their staid lives, for something altogether bold and ribald: criminal activities, same-sex affairs, even political agitation!

Zombies vs. the KKK: The darkest hour in undead civil rights history. Allied Zombies for Peace covers the violent 42-minute time period that took place on November 11th, 1968, known as the Veterans Day Parade Massacre. This report outlines, according to eyewitnesses, the events that mark that day as a black stain on undead civil rights history. Violence explodes when a shot is fired during the 1968 Veterans Day Parade in Columbus, Ohio.

Courting Death finds Melanie Wilkerson (from Cotton, book two of the Clarkeston Chronicles) and Arthur Hughes working uncomfortably together in the chambers of a famous federal judge. While Melanie neglects her duties as a law clerk to investigate the mysterious death of a young woman in the courthouse five years earlier, Arthur wades through the horrific habeas corpus appeals of two prisoners: an infamous serial killer and a pathetic child murderer.

The author of The End of the Road and Small Comforts returns to his fictional Alaska town, The End of the Road, to present more unforgettable stories about its colorful inhabitants and their doings.

Due to financial hardships at Tawcester Towers, the Dowager Duchess has decreed that the only way the family fortunes can be restored is to marry Blotto off...to an American! Reluctantly, Blotto, together with Twinks and his trusty chauffeur Corky Froggett set sail.

It was a hot, still Thursday afternoon in 1949 soon after I arrived in California to begin my undergraduate studies at Stanford. Thursday was ice-cream day at the Monterey Home for the Elderly and Indigent in Salinas. As I opened the door, I saw a group of residents encircling a small, wiry man standing on a chair with a hand resting on my Uncle Dans shoulder for support. He held their attention as he animatedly and with a twinkling eye, related a tale which had then all engrossed. Having spotted my uncle Dan in the group, I sidled up to him so I too could hear the story.

Flying into action, daredevil photojournalist Johnny Brice is always looking for trouble...and more often than not, finding it. But he doesn’t know what real trouble is until he rescues the beautiful woman he calls Jinx from a sinking ship. They’re made for each other - even if they are a dangerous mix.

Had J.J. Baskin lived at the same time as Tom Sawyer, they may well have been best friends, or perhaps worst enemies. They would have at least been competitors.

Welcome the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the year of our lord 1983. The affable Bethie means well, but at times, she can find herself in dire need of sage advice from her typically taciturn yet positively perspicacious best friend, Paige. Paige's advice may not always seem sound to Bethie, but as we tend to discover in this series of tales, Bethie would do well to follow it. Not that she always does. Follow along on the misadventures, misunderstandings, and comical catastrophes that form the day-to-day lives of Bethie and Paige.

Set in a small town of the industrial North of England in the late 1950s, this is a feel-good story about the antics of a young man's attempt to make something of himself with a little help from the lads in his yard. Thwarted with bad luck and inexperience, their journey of persistence never to miss an opportunity through the hardships of the time will make you smile.

Bumbling journalist Henry Henderson is on his next assignment. This time to the sleepy skiing town of Creleon, Spain. Dispatched by his paranoid boss, Henderson goes on a quest for weather altering machine that could change the world as we know it. Jolly japes ensue although a storm seems to be brewing that could be his last on the foreign desk.

Set in 1919, The Greatest Living Englishman tells the comedic adventures of "England's Worst Poet" Colin Gilfeather Millaney: an egotistical - though loveable - rhymer who is wholly untouched with even the faintest speck of talent. He is so awful that people throw rotten produce at him on the streets. They buy his books, just to throw at him. But that does not stop him from penning his doggerel, or inflicting it upon what he claims is the "misguided" public.

Victorian England. Christmas Eve. Young Jack, a blind boy of 10 years, sits alone by the hearth, making a Christmas wish: Jack would like a dog to keep him company. Suddenly Jack hears a frantic scrambling in the chimney and something plops into the room. Jack is overjoyed! Santa has brought him a dog! Except it's actually a chicken, but don't tell Jack. He's never seen a dog or a chicken, because he's never seen anything. Jack names his pet King and over the next several days they have some wonderful adventures.

Welcome to ancient Rome, where the steps of the Forum are peopled by nubile slave girls and a range of outrageous characters including Lurcio’s owner, Ludicrus Sextus the senator, his wife, Ammonia, his son, Nausius, and his daughter, Erotica. Lurcio attempts to deliver his prologue and begin proceedings before he’s quickly caught up in the myriad of sexual liaisons in all quarters of his master’s house.

The first ever collection of poems by the acclaimed author of the Aubrey/Maturin series of Napoleonic naval adventures. As we have stood with Jack and Stephen on the deck of the Surprise and other ships, listeners around the world have been transported to a place and time at once familiar and exotic, routine and dramatic. At all times, Patrick O’Brian’s deep knowledge of the period and profound empathy with the landscape of the sea has ensured there is always a firm hand on the tiller.