Mission: What's the funniest sf, fantasy or horror book?Mission: What’s the funniest sf, fantasy or horror book?

This go-round, we asked friends and contributors to name their favorite humorous science fiction, fantasy or horror book. Novels, collections, graphic novels or even single short stories were fair game. Did your choice, we inquired, win its spot on your bookshelf with withering wit, silly slapstick, stinging satire or punishing puns? Here are the answers we got from authors Bill Crider, Scott Cupp, R.L. Ugolini, Joe McKinney and Sanford Allen; illustrator John Picacio; tech geek Paul Vaughn; filmmaker Pete Barnstrom; and fan Gilder McCarroll.

John Picacio — Illustrator

The question isn’t whether Joe R. Lansdale is the author of the funniest book I own; it’s a question of WHICH Lansdale book is the funniest I own. He’s one of the first authors I ever cover-illustrated and that goes way back to the mid ’90s. I’ve known him ever since. I would have to say FREEZER BURN is the funniest Lansdale book I own. Don’t get me wrong — this is a DARK book and not exactly the kind that Joe could’ve kept writing to capture the mainstream audiences he now enjoys. How dark, you ask? Try this out for the book’s first line: “Bill Roberts decided to rob the firecracker stand on account he didn’t have a job and not a nickel’s worth of money and his mother was dead and kind of freeze-dried in her bedroom.” And the book only gets darker from there. Freeze-dried relatives, losers, and circus freaks aren’t necessarily high comedy in the hands of another author, but with Lansdale, I nearly hurt myself laughing so hard. Joe can do that to you.

Honorable mention for funniest sf/f/h book: this one’s not a novel, but it’s MAD Magazine’s 1981 issue that parodies THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. I was 11 when I pulled this off the newsstand and took it home. It’s hard for me to recall when my sister and I laughed harder. We both loved STAR WARS as kids, and the cover art alone is enough to start me up all over again. Ballantine/Del Rey has collected this STAR WARS parody and many more into a book called MAD ABOUT STAR WARS: THIRTY YEARS OF CLASSIC PARODIES, written by Jonathan Bresman and with a foreword by George Lucas himself. I may have to gift this one to myself for Christmas.

R.L. Ugolini — Author

Humor can humanize the fantastical by convincing readers that they share the same conventions of irony, sarcasm and wit as do fairy kings, magicians, undead maidens, and Napoleon.   Using her own brand of dry, sometimes subversive humor, Susanna Clarke draws us into the historical fantasy of JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR. NORRELL. The texture of the narrative has been likened to Austen, Conan Doyle and Dickens, but the humor is uniquely of her own making, often found hiding in the delicious British subtext of the satirized footnotes. I particularly enjoy this work as an example of humor in fantasy because not only do the lighter elements add to the richness of the story, but also because I believe in some subtle way, the author is having her own little fun with us.

Bill Crider — Author

There are really so many great humorous SF books that I hate to name just one, but I’ll go with THE SNARKOUT BOYS AND THE AVOCADO OF DEATH by Daniel Pinkwater. The title alone is reason enough for me to choose it, and the character names are also good for a smile (Osgood Sigerson, Winston Bongo, Uncle Hades Terwilliger, Genghis Khan High School, etc.). There’s no use to try to explain any plot that involves a computer made from and avacado and called the Alligatron (a name I have a great fondness for), so let’s just say that it involves a master detective, a master criminal and his gang of trained orangutans, snarking out, old movies, underground streets, secret warehouses, and space-realtors. It’s hilarious from the first page and proves that Daniel Pinkwater is some kind of mad genius. Read the book and see if you don’t agree.

Scott A. Cupp — Author

My favorite humorous SFF is always a loaded question. As I thought about it, I went down the list – RA Lafferty short stories, De Camp and Pratt’s Harold Shea stories, Philip Jose Farmer, P.K. Dick’s GALACTIC POT HEALER, Harry Harrison’s STAR SMASHRS OF THE GALAXY RANGERS. They were all on the initial short list. But it came down to two works which I think pretty much tied for a variety of reasons. Robert Sheckley’s DIMENSION OF MIRACLES and Poul Anderson and Gordon Dickson’s Hoka stories (most notably the collection EARTHMAN’S BURDEN).

DIMENSION OF MIRACLES blew me away the first time I read it (and the similarly themed MINDSWAP) those many years ago. The story is basic enough: an Earthman, Carmody, wins a prize in the galactic lottery that he did not know he had entered. Which in fact, he had not entered. The computer supervising the lottery was accurate to 1 in 5 billion transactions. The computer explains that Carmody won because it was time to make that error. The real prizewinner wants the prize and Carmody is about to oblige him when the prize itself tells him not to do it. Together, they cross the universe is absurdist fashion while the prize winner pursues them. The book is full of wonderful bureaucratic humor. And I love the cover by Paul Lehr, which will be mine next year when I finish paying it off.

The Hoka stories are absurd in a totally different way. The Hokas are an alien race of sentient teddy bears with big imaginations and an insatiable desire to absorb earthly things. They hear of an earthly idea and the race tries to relive the experience. This may mean they all want to be Sherlock Holmes and Moriarity, or Cowboys and Indians, or Napoleon, or pirates, or something else. The Hokas are aided (or restricted) by Ensign Alexander Jones of the Interstellar Survey Service, who often unwittingly introduces the Hokas to some new concept.  There are several collections of Hoka stories, of which EARTHMAN’S BURDEN is the first, and it sets up the tableau for all future adventures. My copy also includes wonderful illustrations from the delightful Edd Cartier and a cover from Vaughn Bode.

Joe McKinney — Author

For me, the funniest SF story has to be Cyril M. Kornbluth’s THE MARCHING MORONS. At first, I was tempted to say something by William Tenn, because his stuff was consistently funny, but THE MARCHING MORONS takes first place. I guess what does it for me is the layers of frustration built into the narrative. We’ve all felt this. Everybody is frustrated with everybody else, and few people are willing to feel frustrated with themselves. Sometimes the only sufficient response is to laugh, and this story provides that in spades.

Sanford Allen — Author and Musician

Since John Picacio already staked a claim on Joe R. Lansdale’s FREEZER BURN, I decided to take a different approach and select what may be the funniest, darkest, weirdest and all-around greatest graphic novel ever published: Chester Brown’s ED THE HAPPY CLOWN.

Brown’s elaborate absurdist fantasy gets underway with childlike Ed finding a severed hand under his bed. Assuming the Tooth Fairy inadvertently left it behind, he turns it in to the police — and Ed’s world being a dystopian one — the good deed earns him a trip to the pokey. And that’s just where things start getting weird. Before it’s all over, the discovery leads Ed down a rabbit hole of midnight-black comedy, scatological nightmares, bizarre sexual compulsions and enough body horror to fill a China Mieville novel (with some left over for the next David Cronenberg flick).

During the course of the book, Ed learns just how inhumane humanity is capable of being, but he also discovers that, amid life’s cruel absurdities, there is at least one thing that makes it worth living. How strange do his travels get? One key character is a man who, for unexplained reasons, cannot stop shitting — even after he dies. The poor sap’s asshole even turns out to be a portal to another dimension.

If unexplained crapping conditions and trans-dimensional assholes sound offensive, this book obviously isn’t for you. But if you’ve ever been entertained by the absurdist leanings of David Lynch, Monty Python or some of the more extreme writers in the New Weird literary movement, ED THE HAPPY CLOWN may take you on a bizarre journey you won’t soon forget.

Pete Barnstrom — Left Foot Red Video

Twin political satire with science fiction? What???

Well, yeah, that’s probably not all that uncommon, really.  Hell, most space opera is political satire, intentional or not. But surprisingly sophisticated political satire? From an insider’s point of view? With a sly and cutting sense of humor? That’s worth another look.

Author Keith Laumer served in the US Foreign Service in the late ’50s as vice consul in Burma: a diplomat. And he brought that experience with him in his few dozen stories and novels featuring JAME RETIEF, pride of the CDT — which stands for the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne. If like me, you don’t speak French, know that means he’s part of Earth’s diplomatic outreach to other planets. And, more often than not, that puts him in the position of swindling warring alien cultures into becoming grudging allies, and more often than that, pits him against his superiors in the Corps, who resent his unorthodox methods and politely politic insubordination.

My introduction to (and still favorite version of) the Retief stories are the Mad Dog Comics adaptations written by Jan Strnad and elegantly illustrated by Dennis Fujitake.

Gilder McCarroll — Fan

I can answer immediately. It was a self-published novel, a gift from a well-meaning relative.

The author, a third party who shall remain nameless, did not have a good grasp on English mechanics. That was initially annoying, but I eventually decided to treat his errors as ironic comedy and continue reading.

Bottom line: I remember the book not for its deliberately preposterous plot but for the fact that it was apparently neither proofread nor edited.

Poor guy.

Paul Vaughn — Ding.us Design

Having just taken a flashback tour of high school favorite National Lampoon’s BORED OF THE RINGS and their much less successful DOON, I left recalling that other book I read around the same time, one that holds up much better over the years, Douglas Adams’ THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY. My first exposure to this series, and I’m sure I’m not alone here, was through the BBC’s radio play (rebroadcast on NPR) as that was how it was first conceived in 1978. Adams then novelized the adventures of Arthur Dent, the last human to escape the Earth before it was obliterated to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Arthur is accompanied on his adventures by Ford Prefect, a human-looking alien researcher helping to compile entries for the galaxy’s most popular and useful travel guide; rogue galactic president Zaphod Beeblebrox, Marvin the paranoid android with a brain the size of a planet and Trillian, the only other survivor of the destruction of Earth.

These books are a perfect blend of zany British comedy and planet-hopping, time-traveling space opera that has captured the imagination of millions. The story intersperses the narrative with excerpts from the Guide that envelopes the reader in Adams’ smart, crazy galaxy.

While starting life as a radio program, the series has spawned a 1981 BBC TV series, video games, comic books, a 2005 Hollywood movie, additional radio plays and stage productions. Adams expanded the original Hitchhiker’s Guide into a five-book trilogy, all of which are worth reading. Eoin Colfer (author of the Artemis Fowl series) wrote a sixth book to the series in 2009. If your only exposure to this comic masterpiece is through the 2005 movie stop reading right now, grab your towel and head to the bookstore for the funniest book you will read all year.