Humor Classics

George, Harris, and J. decide to take a cycling trip through the Black Forest - to be accomplished on a tandem plus one. Whether it is Harris's harrowing experience with a Hanoverian road-waterer or George's valiant attempt to buy a cushion for his aunt, their experiences are hilarious - - and they may even offer some important lessons to all who may be contemplating a cycling trip in the U.S.

The Cocoanuts is a 1929 pre-Code musical comedy film starring the Marx Brothers (Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo). Produced for Paramount Pictures by Walter Wanger, the film also stars Mary Eaton, Oscar Shaw, Margaret Dumont and Kay Francis. The first sound film to credit more than one director (Robert Florey and Joseph Santley), it was adapted to the screen by Morrie Ryskind from the musical play by George S. Kaufman. Five of the film's tunes were composed by Irving Berlin, including "When My Dreams Come True," sung by Oscar Shaw and Mary Eaton.

What if you went to heaven and no one there believed in Earth? This is the question at the heart of Beforelife, a satirical novel that follows the postmortem adventures of widower Ian Brown, a man who dies in the book’s first moments and finds himself in an afterlife where no one else believes in “pre-incarnation”. The other residents of the afterlife have mysteriously forgotten their premortem lives and think that anyone who remembers a mortal life is suffering from a mental disorder called the “Beforelife Delusion”.

Plucky and romantic Alice tries to rise above the crudities of her hopelessly shabby background in this Pulitzer Prize-winning classic about ambition and self-delusion. The lower-middle class Adams family faces a slow disintegration in a small Midwestern town. Alice, a social climber, is ashamed of her unsuccessful family and determined to distinguish herself.

Meet Psmith, with a silent 'P' as in psychic. A gallant, charming individual, Psmith has a gift for getting into awful scrapes, and when he takes over a gentile journal known as Cosy Moments with the aid of Billy Windsor, its sub-editor, he turns it into a radical publication...with alarming and hilarious results.

From one of the most original voices in fantasy comes a heroic tale of honor, friendship, and battlefield salvage. It’s important to look after your crew when you’re in the battlefield salvage business. It’s stressful work at the best of times, and although your employees are unlikely to...

This 16-episode collection includes the greatest comedy teams of the Golden Age of Radio and includes Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Abbott and Costello, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Fibber McGee and Molly, Baby Snooks and Daddy, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, and Phil Harris and Alice Faye. You’ll laugh till your sides ache at these great comedy duos!

Chuckle along with the best 19th-century humorists, who provide you with tall tales, puns, and witty ripostes. No guarantees of political correctness, but they're sure to tickle your 21st-century funny bone! Beginning with the piece that made Mark Twain famous -- "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" -- and ending with his fanciful "How I Edited an Agricultural Paper," this anthology collects several of Twain's own pieces in addition to tall tales, fables, and satires by 14 of Twain's contemporaries.

This story of raging comedy and despair centers on the tempestuous marriage of an heiress and a Vietnam veteran. From their "carpenter Gothic" rented house, Paul sets himself up as a media consultant for Reverend Ude, an evangelist mounting a grand crusade that conveniently suits a mining combine bidding to take over an ore strike on the site of Ude's African mission.

Herman Melville’s novel The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857) is a comedy of masquerades and a blend of allegory, cultural satire, and metaphysics. The book portrays a confidence man who sneaks on board a Mississippi steamboat on April Fool's Day, and sets out to defraud his fellow passengers. He rapidly assumes various guises and the pleasure of trickery seems more important than the monetary gain. Each person is forced to confront that in which they believe.

When Miss. Eve Halliday is caught in an unexpected rainstorm, Mr. Ronald Psmith comes to her rescue with an umbrella. This starts a chain of events that will take the reader on a chaotic journey of fun and adventure. Mr. Psmith is a gallant gentleman who loves to do good deeds for others but especially for beautiful ladies such as Eve. When he snatches an umbrella from the Drone Club to help a lady in distress, he has no idea what he is getting himself into.

Mark Robarts, a young vicar, is newly arrived in the village of Framley. With ambitions to further his career, he seeks connections in the county's high society. He is soon preyed upon by a local member of parliament to guarantee a substantial loan, which Mark, in a moment of weakness, agrees to, even though he knows the man is a notorious debtor; it brings Mark to the brink of ruin.

The acclaimed author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude returns with a roar with this gorgeous, searing portrayal of Manhattanites wrapped in their own delusions, desires, and lies. Chase Insteadman, a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan's social scene, lives off...

Guy Grand, an eccentric billionaire prankster, is rich enough to do whatever he likes. And what he likes is to carefully execute projects where he can cauterize by ridicule what the rest of the world ignores: Complacency, greed, corruption, and idiocy. Determined to "make it hot for people," Grand spends his billions staging a series of hilarious, sometimes bewildering stunts, lampooning along the way the American holy cows of money, status, power, beauty, media, and stardom.

Ryan Fleming is a young agnostic reeling from his brother’s death. Though he is deeply angry with God, he makes good on a promise he made to his brother in the final moments of his life: to visit a church at least once. But shortly after his arrival, the slick megachurch’s shoddily installed video projector falls on his head—sending Ryan through a wormhole into another world. To make it back to his own universe, he must partner with a woman named Faith to awaken a long-sleeping King—the World-Maker who can make all things new.

Now with a reimagined look! Join a peasant boy who wants to be a knight in the laugh-out-loud funny, highly illustrated first book of the New York Times bestselling Once Upon a Tim chapter book series from Spy School author Stuart Gibbs. Tim is just a peasant, but he dreams big. He wants more...

O. Henry wove several stories together into this highly episodic narrative, taking his title and inspiration from Lewis Carroll's ballad of the walrus and the carpenter in Through the Looking-Glass. The stories are set in the fictional country of Anchuria in Central America, a banana republic where larceny is rampant and revolution lurking in every impoverished back alley. O. Henry offers a cutting satire of contemporary politics and prejudices.

While Blandings Castle sleeps in the summer sun, the Hon. Galahad Threepwood, brother of the Earl of Emsworth, is busily engaged in writing his Reminiscences, and they look set to be as warm as the weather, if not warmer. For Galahad has led a thoroughly misspent life, and his acquaintances can all too easily recall their past follies in his company. Reputations are at stake and even the nobility and gentry are beginning to panic.

A quest, a war, a ring that would be grounds for calling any wedding off, a king without a kingdom, and a furry little "hero" named Frito, ready - or maybe just forced by the wizard Goodgulf - to undertake the one mission that can save Lower Middle Earth from enslavement by the evil Sorhed. Luscious Elf-maidens, a roller-skating dragon, ugly plants that can soul kiss the unwary to death-these are just some of the ingredients in the wildest, wackiest, most irreverent excursion into fantasy realms that anyone has ever dared to undertake.

One of the most beloved novels from the critically acclaimed novelist Laurie Colwin, Goodbye Without Leaving explores a woman’s attempts to reconcile her rock-and-roll past with her significantly more sedate family life as a wife and mother. As a bored graduate student, Geraldine Colshares is...