The 14 Best Humor Essay Collections, and Which Essay to Read First

Sedaris built this in two halves. The first covers his North Carolina childhood and his New York years, including the therapist assigned to fix his lisp and a stretch of art school that mostly involved chemicals. The second half follows him to France, where he tries to learn the language as an adult and fails in ways that are painful and very funny. The title essay is a French class run by a woman who mocks her students in a language they cannot yet argue back in. Every piece stands alone, which is why this is the door into the whole form.

Ephron wrote this in her sixties about what time does to a woman's body and life, and it is far funnier than that sentence suggests. She covers the maintenance economy of hair dye and manicures, her love affair with a rent controlled apartment, her handbag, her cookbooks, and what she wishes she had understood at twenty five. The last two pieces turn towards death and land hard without a single tear jerking line. She writes the way a very smart woman talks late at a dinner table, once she has stopped caring who is impressed.

The setup is domestic. He buys a house on the Carolina coast, gathers his siblings and his partner Hugh in it, and writes about the holidays that follow. Underneath, the book is about his sister Tiffany, who died by suicide, and about a mother whose drinking he can finally name out loud. He is also gripped by his Fitbit and walks himself into ridiculous distances. The jokes are as good as anything he has written and they sit next to grief without cancelling it. Read in order the book builds. Read shuffled it becomes a bag of funny anecdotes.

Crosley was in her twenties in New York when she wrote these, working in publishing, moving between apartments, agreeing to things she should have refused. The opening piece is about a drawer of plastic toy ponies she cannot explain to anyone who stays the night. Another is about being drafted as a bridesmaid by a school friend she is not sure she ever liked. The comedy comes from her noticing how much of adult life is performance, and from her willingness to be the fool in her own stories rather than the hero.

Irby came up as a blogger and it shows in the best way, because she writes as though no editor is watching. She covers a childhood spent caring for sick parents, a body with Crohn's disease that refuses to cooperate, a cat named Helen Keller who hates everybody, and falling in love with a woman and moving to a quiet town in Michigan. She is filthy and precise about money, illness and desire, then drops one flat sentence about her mother that kills the laughing instantly.

Khanna wrote a newspaper column for years and this is the book it turned into. The pieces are short, domestic and daily: school admissions, festivals, a husband she refers to by nickname rather than name, a mother with strong views on everything, a house that runs on women's labour nobody counts. She writes from inside the Indian wife and mother role instead of studying it from outside, which is why the jokes cut deeper than a visitor's would. The register is a friend complaining brilliantly on a bad Tuesday, not a comedian working a room.

Rakoff took the jobs magazine editors invent to fill pages, then wrote them up with the vocabulary of a man who reads far too much. He sits in a department store window at Christmas dressed as Sigmund Freud, handing out analysis to shoppers. He goes looking for elves in Iceland. He climbs a mountain for an outdoor magazine while loathing every minute of it. Running under all of it is his suspicion that he is faking his way through life, which is where the title comes from, and it is sadder and funnier than that sounds.

Lebowitz made her name writing short comic pieces for a New York magazine in the late seventies, and this volume gathers the two small books that came out of that run, Metropolitan Life and Social Studies. The pieces are brief, some barely two pages, and they work on flat declarative opinions about children, sleep, health food, art, money and other people. She is the closest thing English has to a comic aphorist, and her lines get quoted so often that you will recognise sentences you never knew were hers. Almost none of it is confessional, which on this list makes her the odd one out.

Lawson grew up poor in west Texas with a father who brought home live raccoons and dead everything else, and she tells those stories with the timing of someone who has been repeating them at parties for years. The book then moves into her adult life: an anxiety disorder that turns ordinary days into obstacle courses, a marriage held together by arguments that read like sketch comedy, and a large metal chicken bought purely out of spite. She writes about mental illness without asking anyone for sympathy, which is rarer than it should be.

Vowell writes history the way other people pass on gossip. The opening essay is about growing up as an anti gun liberal in a house where her father built cannons, and it is the best short thing I have read about loving people you disagree with. Elsewhere she drives the Trail of Tears with her family, thinks hard about Frank Sinatra, and remembers taking teenage goth extremely seriously. Her voice on the page is deadpan and slightly strangled, which sounds impossible to enjoy until you actually read her.

These began as newspaper columns written after Bryson returned to the United States with an English family in tow. He covers drive through everything, tax forms, the death of walking as a form of transport, the strange generosity of American service staff, and gadgets nobody needs. It is the same joke every week and it works about seven times in ten: a reasonable man quietly astonished by his own country. It came out in America under the title I'm a Stranger Here Myself, so check before you buy the same book twice.

Moran collected her newspaper columns here and the range is the point: television, class, drugs, her father, transport policy, and celebrity interviews that turn into something better than publicity. The Lady Gaga piece ends up in a Berlin nightclub and is the best thing in the book. The columns about growing up on benefits in Wolverhampton carry real anger under the jokes. Some pieces have dated, because a weekly deadline does not produce fifty immortal columns a year, but the hit rate is high and each one costs you four minutes.

Robinson came up through New York stand up and podcasts, and these essays work like a set: hair politics, being the only Black woman in a writers room, the exhausting job of representing everyone at once, and long affectionate riffs on pop culture. She is at her best when she is specific about small daily insults rather than building a general argument. American racial politics is the frame, so parts of it land differently in India, though the comedy of being underestimated travels perfectly well.

Barry wrote a humour column for a Miami newspaper for decades and this collection is that machine at full speed. Each piece runs two or three pages, sets up one small domestic absurdity, and finishes on a punchline. He is very funny about men who cannot see dirt, about home repair, about dogs, and about real news clippings sent in by readers that beat anything he could have made up. Nothing here will change your life. It was built to be picked up, laughed at, and put down again.