5 Books That Shaped the Weird Sense of Humor That Gave Us Space Opera

Interstellar Pig, by William Sleator
This isn’t a comedy book per se, but I was madly in love with it as a kid. The sheer zaniness of the plot and characters—it’s something of an SF space opera-ish version of Jumanji and the personalities of the adults/aliens were so over the top and hilarious to me I couldn’t stop reading it. The players of the game insult each other in these delightfully arch ways—you know, the perfect villainous words you’d come up with when your cousin beat you at Monopoly if you had a month to write them. Though it’s lost the popularity it once had, I can’t recommend this enough.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
Ok, it’s an obvious choice, but I read it when I was 13 and it seemed like a bolt of lightning from another universe, each word so perfect that sentences seemed to have their own twist endings and pages and pages of set up could lead to a single pun. I’d never read anything like it, and as a fantasy lover, it opened me up to a kind of not-so-serious science fiction I had never known about. Douglas Adams created something people will never stop reading when they’re any age at all and feeling like it’s a bolt of lightning from another, better universe. His genius and the influence of this book can never truly be overstated.

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abriged), by Adam Long, Jess Winfield, and Daniel Singer
Age 13 was a big year for my little brain. On a trip to Ashland, Oregon, I picked up this slim paperback in the Shakespearian Festival Gift Shop and thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever read in my life. It’s a script for a play, but the paperback version has a lot of footnotes that don’t make it into the staged production, commenting on everything in Shakespeare’s works, all of which are performed in something like 90 minutes. Because I was the kind of popular, well-adjusted, socially capable 13 year old that spent a lot of her personal time reading Shakespeare, I was bowled over by somebody very lovingly ripping him to shreds. I read it dozens of times, and it’s still damn funny.

Brain Droppings, by George Carlin
I remember my mother had this book one summer and I swiped it for something to read. I probably really only knew George Carlin from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure at that point (see above, I never claimed to be cool. I didn’t read a lot of cool stuff until I was older) but I was so charmed and taken in by Carlin’s conversational voice, speaking directly to the reader (I’m not even fully sure I knew this was a compendium of comedy bits, I just thought it was an essay collection), patiently explaining the world, how weird and dumb and wild it is, to someone who was just starting to try to figure it out. Carlin also loves to deconstruct language, only when he does it, it’s so funny that you don’t really notice he’s giving an etymology and folklore workshop. He spends pages skewering the words we use to mean things we don’t even know we mean, and that stuck with me for years and years afterward.

The Skin of Our Teeth, by Thornton Wilder
For the longest time, this was my favorite play in the world. Everyone knows Our Town, but this is Thornton Wilder to me—wild and crazy, taking place throughout recorded human history but centered on one family, involving several apocalypses and infidelities and allegories, and also there are dinosaurs. I think I’ve probably spent my life trying to write something this good, that contains this much, and still manages to be light and funny, while saying something very real in the end, in the dark, with Spinoza and the stars. I wish so terribly hard that more people read and watched this play. I used to read it out loud, quite by myself, dreaming of having other people to read it with one day.