Ten of the funniest novels from the Booker Library

You might have concluded from some recent Booker Prize winners that great novels aren’t funny any more. It’s true that 2023’s winner, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, is a story of fear and oppression – therein lies its power – and that recent shortlists have sometimes been light on laughs. (In 2020, choose between the ‘post-colonial nightmare’ of This Mournable Body, the climate change-ravaged The New Wilderness, and the alcoholism and domestic abuse of winner Shuggie Bain – though, like life, that book contains some very funny moments, too.)  

But if you’re looking for a book to cheer you up, the good news is that the Booker Prize has always had an ear for comedy as well as tragedy. Recent winners that are properly funny include Paul Beatty’s The Sellout – a blazing satire of racism in America – and George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo. And you don’t have to dive far back into the Booker Prize library to find further comic riches. 

Well-established comic writers have always featured in the Booker Prize, from winners like Iris Murdoch, J.G. Farrell, Kingsley Amis and Howard Jacobson, to shortlisted authors such as Beryl Bainbridge, David Lodge, Edward St Aubyn, Muriel Spark and Malcolm Bradbury. But for this list we’ve avoided some of the more well-known names and delved a little deeper into the Booker archives.  

Sour Sweet by Timothy Mo (shortlisted 1982)

Hong Kong-born Mo’s second novel (his third and fourth were also shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Sour Sweet is a Dickensian romp through London’s Chinatown in the 1960s. It shows us in vibrant colour the lives of the Chen family, who come to the city from Hong Kong (making the book an early example of the ‘reverse colonial’ novel, where citizens of colonised countries come to live in the home of the British Empire). The comedy comes partly through culture clash and confusion: one character, Lily, is afraid to leave her home because she thinks Coronation Street is representative of the British people; later, unable to find rhinoceros horn in the shops, she substitutes it in her recipes with carrot (‘something she considered similar’). When the family sets up a Chinese takeaway, the kitchen is so tense that Lily’s sister Mui wants to put up a sign saying ‘MANAGEMENT NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR COOK’S COOKING’. The presence of Triad gangs in the community adds tension to the merry-go-round. 

The Van by Roddy Doyle (shortlisted 1991) 

As in Sour Sweet, a food business is born in the last and best part of Doyle’s Barrytown trilogy (following The Commitments and The Snapper). Its territory – working class Dublin life, told largely in caustic and funny dialogue – is one that we now take for granted, but that Doyle made his own. The Rabbitte family are at it again: at everything and nothing, from despairing over daughter Linda’s school report (‘Persistent in talking. Homework not done. Stabbed student with compass’) to glumly watching the local football team get beaten by a better one: ‘The last time this lot had seen the net shake was when their keeper farted.’ Even when dad Jimmy sets up a chip van with redundancy money, it’s not plain sailing. (Does the ketchup on the sign look too much like blood? he wonders.) It’s no spoiler to say that things don’t work out – but what a great time we have on the way there. Don’t feel bad for Doyle that he didn’t win either: he went on to take the Booker Prize home for his next novel, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, two years later. 

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka (longlisted 2005) 

One of the most purely entertaining, silly and joyous novels nominated for the Booker Prize, this debut deservedly became a popular hit. A story about illegal immigration and the history of Ukraine sounds like heavy going, but here everything is played for laughs (to the dismay of Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov, who, missing the point, lamented that ‘this novel will not leave the reader any the wiser about the Ukrainian community in England’). In it, an 84-year-old man falls for an immigrant woman half his age with ‘superior Botticellian breasts’, much to the horror of his children, who spot the gold-digging tendencies of this ‘pink hand grenade’. ‘Please try to act like an adult for once in your life,’ says his daughter, who suddenly finds her liberal impulses reversed as she becomes ‘Mrs Flog-’em-and-send-’em-home’. On reflection, perhaps the book does have something to tell us about people after all. 

The Yips by Nicola Barker (longlisted 2015) 

To say that The Yips is like no other Booker nominee is accurate but inadequate: it’s like no other novel at all – except perhaps another Nicola Barker one. The title refers to ‘nervousness or tension that causes an athlete to fail to perform effectively,’ and the central character of the book, the ‘repugnantly charismatic’ golfer Stuart Ransom, has it: he has the yips. It’s a book about how what you love can destroy you, about transformations, about women and their relationship to the home. And it’s populated with comic grotesques: an agoraphobic tattooist, a woman whose personality changed after being hit on the head by a golf ball, a man who’s had cancer eight times (‘once terminal’). The Yips is hilarious, bizarre, foul-mouthed and inexplicable, all the funnier for being set against the dullness of the generic hotels and multi-storey car parks of Luton, England. It opens its story mid-conversation and rewires the reader’s brain over its 550 excitable, absurd, surprisingly profound pages. 

The Trees by Percival Everett (shortlisted 2022) 

Funny books can lower the reader’s defences and let serious stuff in, and if black comedy means making us laugh at things we shouldn’t be laughing at, then The Trees is one of the blackest and most serious of all. It takes the form of a police procedural in Mississippi, where two detectives investigate a string of killings that seem to be related to the (real life) racist murder of Emmett Till in 1955. But there’s something unusual about the victims (‘His balls ain’t on him!’), and the story is driven by jokes as much as by its plot, with characters named Cad Fondle, Hickory Spit and Helvetica Quip. Amid the darkness and anger at racism in America, Everett has energy to burn and never passes up an opportunity for a joke – however silly – often delivered in exquisite comic dialogue. ‘What’s your dog’s name?’ ‘Oh, he ain’t got no name.’ ‘Why’s that?’ ‘I don’t like names.’ ‘How do you call it?’ ‘Call it?’