The best fantasy books that aren’t afraid to be funny

Robert Sheckley stands out from his contemporaries of the golden age of science fiction by being not just great but also often very funny. 

Sheckley has a wry, insightful wit, which puts him in a class of his own among the giants of the post-WW2 era. Start with his eight stories of the AAA Ace Interplanetary Decontamination Service. Great idea, great characters, great settings (two shysters running a fly-by-night planetary fixer-upper service, on the cheap): they are light, effortless, unpretentious, insightful, and brilliant. 

It’s basically Ghostbusters in space. What more could you want?

Hitchhiker began life as a BBC Radio series. And a lot of credit should go to Douglas’s writing partner, John Lloyd. After ten months on the scripts, Douglas knew that he needed help. He and John got the last two scripts done in two weeks.

John went on to become our generation’s leading comedy producer (Not the Nine O’clock News; Blackadder; Spitting Image; QI; The Museum of Curiosity). So, if you love the Hitchhiker books — who doesn’t? — give yourself the treat of listening to the original radio series. As the old saying goes, the pictures are better on radio.

Another fantasy great who loves a laugh is Terry Pratchett. He is such a breath of fresh air, blowing the cobwebs out of the genre. His early Discworld books (the Rincewind volumes) are fun, but somehow more laboured than his later works, when he really hit his stride. 

Out of many that I could pick, I have chosen Feet of Clay as a representative of his mature oeuvre. There are many Discworld stories as enjoyable at this, but this one has not only a very cute solution to a locked-room murder mystery, but also—golems!

Mervyn Peake was a writer, artist, and poet. His masterpiece is the Gormenghast trilogy (Titus Groan; Gormenghast; Titus Alone). Talk about world-building! Good lord, it’s wonderful. 

A friend of mine read them over a summer holiday in blazing hot Greece, and all he could remember about it was the rain and cold and floods and clouds of Gormenghast. Peake was very ill when writing the third book, which is less satisfactory than the earlier volumes. He was too weak to give it the work that he knew it needed. Perhaps not laugh-out-loud humour, but plenty of sly, dark, often grotesque comedy.

I was ten when my parents gave me The Phantom Tollbooth. I loved it instantly, and read it again and again and again. 

It has a magical balance of wit and adventure. The world through which it takes its young hero on his quest for Rhyme and Reason is filled with strange places and stranger inhabitants, all of whom are delightful—even the preposterous Humbug, one of literature’s greatest comic nincompoops.

Honorable mention also to another favorite of my childhood, equally loved: Norman Lindsay’s brilliant The Magic Pudding. If you ever get the chance to read either of these classics to a child, or children, you are guaranteed a lot of happy giggles.