A chorus of doomsayers say that comedy is dead, a casualty of the thought police. Others counter that our idea of what’s funny is simply changing with the times, getting a service update. One person’s LOL, after all, is another’s cringe.
If we can’t agree on anything else, surely we can agree that a humorless world, and a literature without laughs, would be a terrible thing. It was from this very basic accord that we staff critics began compiling a list of books that cleared our arbitrary, totally unscientific bar of “funny.”
All such lists need parameters. Ours were novels written in English since Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” (1961), a book that heralded a postwar generational shift and opened up giddy new prospects for satire, irony and comic ridicule.
The bounty of hilarity published in the past 63 years made our task formidable and our criteria painfully limiting; we excluded many worthy nonfiction and short-story specialists. But we settled on a grouping that felt representative of the abundant varieties and evolving tastes of literary humorists, aware that some bits hit different now and others still slay decades later.
We expect disagreements, howls of protest about our list. Let us know what we snubbed, whose good names we’ve insulted with our criminal omissions. We’ll put your picks in a separate roundup — and in our reading queues. We won’t publish any part of your response without following up with you first.