Start reading some of these books and you’ll find yourself falling off your chair, you’ll be laughing so hard. Beware!

Right from the dedication of Betty MacDonald’s The Egg and I (“To my sister Mary who has always believed that I can do anything she puts her mind to”), you know you’re in for a lot of fun. This classic memoir, originally published in 1945, tells the story of how the author and her husband (city slickers both) tried (and failed) to make a go of a run-down chicken ranch on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. The book was made into a 1947 movie starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray (imagine being played by Claudette Colbert!), and was the basis for the ever-popular television series Ma and Pa Kettle. (Let me warn you, though, that you may be put off by MacDonald’s unenlightened view of American Indians.)

MacDonald followed The Egg and I with The Plague and I (an account of the year she spent in a tuberculosis sanatorium) and Onions in the Stew. She is also the author of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and other humorous books for children about the eponymous character whose child-rearing techniques are somewhat unusual, to say the least, but always seem to work.

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Even prior to 1946, when Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House by Eric Hodgins was first published, living in New York was crazy-making. The Blandings are two Manhattanites who discover just how far their lifelong dream of living in an old farmhouse in the country is from the reality of it. This story was filmed twice, first with Cary Grant and Myrna Loy, and again (as The Money Pit) with Shelley Long and Tom Hanks.

Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog!) was first published in 1889, so it will give you a lovely dose of nostalgia as well as plenty of laughs. The dog is Montmorency, a fox terrier who accompanies George, Harris, and the author on their trip up the Thames. (If you enjoy this—and I’ve never met anyone who didn’t—don’t miss Three Men on the Bummel. Jerome describes a bummel, in case you’re wondering, as “a journey, long or short, without an end”; in this case, it’s a cycling trip through the Black Forest, with the same companions as in the earlier book.) Incidentally, the subtitle of Jerome’s book—To Say Nothing of the Dog!—is, sans exclamation point, also the title of a wonderfully comic science fiction novel by Connie Willis.

Although you probably won’t laugh out loud, I guarantee that reading Leo Bruce’s Case for Three Detectives, a mystery that seems to be written for the express joy of mystery fans everywhere, will elicit a quiet chuckle or two. Three famous British detectives, Simon Plimsoll, Amer Picon, and Monsignor Smith, try to solve the murder of Mrs. Hurston. These detectives are thinly disguised portraits of the well-known fictional detectives Peter Wimsey, Hercule Poirot, and Father Brown. The fun comes in watching as they each go about solving the crime in their own eccentric way, only to find that their (very different) versions of what happened are demolished when the stolid Sergeant Beef listens to their explanations and then lays out the truth.

One of the funniest writers of the 1940s through the 1960s—at least one whose humor hasn’t become dated and staid—is H. Allen Smith. His work appeared in the major magazines of the time—everywhere from Playboy to Saturday Review. Whether he’s writing about the history of fingers, his boyhood in Indiana, or his neighbor Avery, you’ll find yourself guffawing continually. It hardly matters which of his many collections of humorous essays you first pick up (from the library, if you’re lucky, or through an Internet search, if necessary), but To Hell in a Handbasket is simply spectacularly funny.

Just hearing the names of Stephen Potter’s books can give you a good idea of the pleasure you’re in for when you read him: The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship: Or, the Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating; Lifemanship: Or, the Art of Getting Away with It Without Being an Absolute Plonk; One-Upmanship: Being Some Account of the Activities and Teachings of the Lifemanship Correspondence College of One-Upness and Games Lifemastery; and Anti-Woo, the First Lifemanship Guide: The Lifeman’s Improved Primer for Non-lovers, with Special Chapters on Who Not to Love, Falling Out of Love, Avoidance Gambits, and Coad-Sanderson’s Scale of Progressive Rifts. They’re all subversive little instructions for succeeding in life without actually doing anything. I’ve always felt that Bertie Wooster (of P. G. Wodehouse fame) was familiar with Potter’s theories of how to live best in this world.

When newly widowed Julia Piper pulls the emergency brake on her commuter train to save an upended sheep from certain death, she catches the attention of two men: the mild and divorced Sylvester Wykes and the bird-watching bounder Maurice Benson, in Mary Wesley’s An Imaginative Experience.

Other books that have made me laugh out loud are George and Weedon Grossmith’s The Diary of a Nobody, still humorous after more than one hundred years (it was originally published in 1892); Peter DeVries’s sexy and very funny I Hear America Swinging and Consenting Adults, or The Duchess Will Be Furious; William Goldman’s The Princess Bride (funny and sweet but not cloying); Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals and Birds, Beasts, and Relatives; and Poet’s Pub by Eric Linklater, the plot of which includes a failed poet who was a Rowing Blue at Cambridge, the pub of the title, false names, an abduction, thievery, love, and what must be the greatest car chase in literature.

(Poet’s Pub was one of the first ten books reprinted by Penguin in 1935, then a brand-new English paperback publisher. The other nine—some still well known, others far less so—were André Maurois’s Ariel: The Life of Shelley; Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms; Susan Ertz’s Madame Claire; Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club; Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles; Beverley Nichols’s Twenty-Five; E. H. Young’s William; Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth; and Compton Mackenzie’s Carnival.)