Funny books for troubling times

If you are looking for some fun books to brighten up your day, take a look at these curated by the Vuify review team.

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938)

There’s a side-story in Scoop where a journalist is dispatched by train to cover a Balkan state’s revolution. He falls asleep and wakes in the wrong country and, oblivious to his mistake, heads straight for a hotel where he "[cables] off a thousand-word story about barricades in the streets, flaming churches, machine guns answering the rattle of his typewriter.” Despite it being made up, his story spurs a Fleet Street feeding frenzy for his phantom revolution, sparking a real one in its place. "There," Waugh concludes, "is the power of the press for you."

You won’t read a more astute satire of Her Majesty’s Press than Scoop, in which a newspaper mistakenly dispatches its mild-mannered nature columnist to cover a war (because he shares a surname with the paper’s star-reporter) and accidentally lands the scoop of the year. Full of technicolour characters and pinpoint persiflage, it lampoons the absurdity of the 20th-century journalism of what is widely acknowledged as the unrivalled masterpiece of Fleet Street takedowns.

Carry On, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse (1925)

No writer better conjures a specific period in history than P. G. Wodehouse. His name alone is synonymous with a vanished time of upper-class Edwardian England when wars were won on cups of tea, cricket ruled the waves, and lunch was always soup and fish. And yet, his stories – and humour – are timeless.

Of them, none are funnier than those of bumbling Bertie Wooster and his bacon-saving butler Jeeves. Carry On, Jeeves starts the journey of Bertie, the what-hoing toff who, time and again, falls into the soup, only for Jeeves to fish him out. The Jeeves-Wooster relationship has comic energy like none you’ll read again.

But it is his one-liners, more than his characters, that have stood the test of time. Such as this, the best-ever description of the crepuscular charm of the end of a warm day: "It was one of those still evenings you get in the summer when you can hear a snail clear its throat a mile away."

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