"Hilarious" middlebrow books that are not, in fact, hilarious

[buttgammon]

Amis can be funny though. I haven't read that one but The Information made me laugh a lot.

Yeah, his best stuff is hilarious: Money is a particularly funny book, another one that made me laugh out loud.

[neveragain]

I definitely remember laughing out loud at the sentence "My valve is screaming for appeasement!" from A Confederacy of Dunces but now you mention it....

Certainly the first novel that came to mind as being genuinely laugh-out-loud humorous.

[fucking ponderous]

Pynchon is one of my favorite authors and a lot of the jokes he makes I probably wouldn't normally find funny, but the sheer manic energy of his writing makes them funny to me.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Pynchon is one of my favorite authors and a lot of the jokes he makes I probably wouldn't normally find funny, but the sheer manic energy of his writing makes them funny to me.

tetris joke in against the day made me laugh even though i had already read some annoyingly selfsatisfied descriptions of it

when i read it in context it was pure pynchon and i laffed

[Mister Six]

From the "they're changing Roald Dahl" thread, a Kingsley Amis bit that elicited a great big guffaw from me.

Anyway, I'm not really Team Dahl so here's Kingsley Amis talking about the old sod in his memoirs. The last line still makes me laugh.