Humourous Satires

Perhaps the most autobiographical (and deliberately least disciplined) of Vonnegut's novels, Slapstick (1976) is in the form of a broken family odyssey and is surely a demonstration of its eponymous title. The story centers on brother and sister twins, children of Wilbur Swain, who are in sympathetic and (possibly) telepathic communication and who represent Vonnegut's relationship with his own sister who died young of cancer almost two decades before the book's publication.

If you can count on one thing from "Madea" Mabel Simmons, star of Diary of a Mad Black Woman and Madea's Family Reunion, it's that she's got something to say. She's the beloved, hilarious, sharp-witted, pistol-packing grandmother who's watching out and speaking her mind. Now Madea is telling her own story, dishing her memoirs and hard-won, hilarious wisdom in her own inimitable voice (with a little help from her friend Tyler Perry).

A missing comedian; a “dead” celebrity; a secret comics’ hideout - Duckie Dunne must find them all. Duckie’s original comedy partner, Chuck Marshall, has the stand-up world in the palm of his hand: big-time gigs, streaming specials and his own network TV show. Then Chuck mysteriously disappears. Deeply worried, Duckie sets out to locate his friend. He enlists the aid of Cheryl, daughter of the late comedy legend Mickey Gross. However, Mickey may not be quite as dead as everyone thinks. Sparks fly between Duckie and Cheryl as their search takes them from the deserts of Arizona to the...

Obituary writer Bud Stanley isn’t really living his best life. He’s fallen into a funk after a divorce. (She left him for another man, who, in fairness, was far more interesting). He’s not doing his job well. He’s given up on dating. And he’s about to be fired for accidentally publishing his own obituary one mildly drunken night (though technically the company can’t legally fire a dead person).

Written over three decades as a series of instalments for magazines and newspapers, The Devil’s Dictionary is a charmingly eccentric satirical dictionary that tackles all aspects of life with caustic humour and cutting observation.

That’s what the tour guide promises Dr. Linda Farmer and her family when they move to Plymouth Valley. Sure, the locals are privileged hot house flowers who observe a weird religion Hollow, but the schools are blue ribbon, the air’s clean, the food’s fantastic, and Linda’s out of options. With the outside world in shambles, this move is her family’s last chance.

Everyone who's anyone wants to be seen at one of Emory Jackman's legendary parties, from royalty to politicians, tech billionaires to Instagram models. But something sinister is happening on Little Pearl. Journalist Sven Olsen has heard rumors about the Jackmans trafficking young girls, and a secret auction joined by the rich and famous. He's been invited under the pretense of writing a profile about Emory and his mysterious wife, Tess, and will do just about anything to get the scoop.

An underpaid, overworked certified flight instructor cheats death while attempting to teach a cast of incompetent student pilots to fly at a skeezy South Florida flight school; all in the quest to build flight time so he can get a “real job” at an airline. The planes break, the regs break, metal gets bent, students are lost at sea, and a Top Gun wannabe student, who has 400 hours of flight instruction, still hasn’t made his first solo flight.

One of the best-loved of Nabokov's novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian emigre precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunderstandings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator.

Penniless and downtrodden at the loss of his wife and one of his daughters, Samuel Clemens turned to writing. The short stories and essays in Letters from the Earth find Clemens—under the pseudonym of Mark Twain—at perhaps his most quizzical and questioning state ever. Written as diary entries, Twain penned a series of letters from the point of view of a dejected angel on Earth who observes the many curious natures of man. These pieces, gathered by Twain's literary executor, feature sharp takes on the inconsistencies of Christianity and farcical criticisms of American life.

A wildly successful first novel made Grady Tripp a young star, and seven years later he still hasn't grown up. He's now a writing professor in Pittsburgh, plummeting through middle age, stuck with an unfinishable manuscript, an estranged wife, a pregnant girlfriend, and a talented but deeply disturbed student named James Leer.

Get ready for a hostile takeover of epic proportions. In BuyMort: Bull Market Mayhem, the end isn't nigh—it's been leveraged, securitized, and is ready to liquidate. Say your prayers and check your credit score because when the celestial ledger closes, you'll want to make sure your cosmic assets are diversified.

The philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, once noted that, "A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes." This book aims to prove him right. Wisdom: A Satirical Dictionary Approach seeks to indirectly reveal wisdom. While it boasts a broad spectrum of words, this is far from a typical dictionary. The definitions provided are satirical. Sarcasm and exaggeration are employed, along with a level of frankness that may prove shocking for some readers. The hope is to both amuse you and to open you to new ways of seeing the world. This book was inspired by ...

Corporate lobotomies. Psychotically amorous semi-sentient bots. Endless corridors. Countless unlabeled doors, all viciously locked. A lethally dysfunctional social infrastructure rife with corruption, inefficiency, and crime. Spiraling homicide rates… Welcome to your corpulent, overpopulated future! Here, everyone loves you, because everyone wants to screw you before they sell your living body to illegal pharmaceutical tumor-farms, which are also a popular method of suicide, because death-by-tumor is not as bad as many (though it is also worse than some). In this world, a much-hated ...

Everyone's favorite houseguest who never left, Leon Black (played by award-winning comedian JB Smoove from HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm), drops his wisdom and good-bad advice for the masses. Learn the secrets Larry David has gleaned from the Falstaff of television. Be forewarned: in opening this audiobook and Leon's mind, you need to be prepared for straight talk. The kind of unfiltered blunt straight talk that pounds on your door, invites itself in, makes itself at home, and helps itself to your food, your security pass code, and your expensive organic beet juice.

Deadeye Dick is Kurt Vonnegut's funny, chillingly satirical look at the death of innocence. Amid a true Vonnegutian host of horrors - a double murder, a fatal dose of radioactivity, a decapitation, an annihilation of a city by a neutron bomb - Rudy Waltz, aka Deadeye Dick, takes us along on a zany search for absolution and happiness. Here is a tale of crime and punishment that makes us rethink what we believe...and who we say we are.

Zero Gravity is the fifth collection of comic pieces by Woody Allen, a hilarious prose stylist whose enduring appeal has been savored since his classics Getting Even, Without Feathers, Side Effects, and Mere Anarchy. This new work combines pieces that have appeared in The New Yorker along with 11 written exclusively for this book, each a comic inspiration.

Follow New York Times best-selling author Mary Roach - but be careful not to trip - as she weaves through personal anecdotes and everyday musings riddled with her uncanny wit and amazingly analytical eye. These essays, which found a well-deserved home within the pages of Reader's Digest as the column "My Planet," detail the inner workings of hypochondriacs, hoarders, and compulsive cheapskates. (Did we mention neurotic interior designers and professional list makers?) For Roach, humor is hidden in the most unlikely places, which means that nothing is off limits.

Meet Charles Emerson Crashoweski the Third—better known as Crash—a green-eyed, red-furred, fur-matted feline with more attitude than manners. Aloof, opinionated, and morally allergic to effort (unless tuna is involved), Crash is a cat with one mission: stay out of trouble… unless trouble deserves it. In a world overrun by smart appliances, nosy humans, and wannabe kittens named Buttons, Crash delivers an epic, hilarious, tail-whipping account of what it means to be a cat who simply cannot be bothered—until the fate of the living room (and the litter box) depends on him. Prepare to ...

Years after the events of The House of God, the Fat Man has been given leadership over a new Future of Medicine Clinic at what is now only Man's 4th Best Hospital, and has persuaded Dr. Roy Basch and some of his intern cohorts to join him to teach a new generation of interns and residents. In a medical landscape dominated by computer screens and corrupted by money, they have one goal: to make medicine humane again.