16 Best Satirical Novels That Are Still Funny and Still Right

Yossarian is stationed on a Mediterranean island in the last stretch of the Second World War and has arrived at one conclusion: strangers are trying to kill him, and the people who keep raising the number of missions he must fly are on his own side. Around him Heller builds an entire economy of absurdity, including an officer who turns the war into a trading syndicate and sells the same goods to both armies. The book loops, repeats and doubles back, and the repetition is the joke, because that is exactly how bureaucracy feels from the inside.

Ranganath arrives in Shivpalganj expecting rest and country air. What he gets is an education in how a village is actually governed: an uncle who controls the local college through the managing committee, a cooperative union that exists to move money sideways, court cases that never end because ending them would waste them, and a police station that everyone understands perfectly. Shukla wrote it in Hindi in 1968 after years in the administrative service, and Gillian Wright's English carries the deadpan without flattening it.

Agastya Sen is twenty-four, English-speaking, Delhi-raised, and now the assistant collector of Madna, where the heat is unreasonable and the work is a series of meetings about nothing. He smokes, he lies to everyone including himself, he invents alternative biographies for strangers, and he does very little administering. Chatterjee wrote the definitive book about a specific Indian type: the young man with an expensive education, a state job, and no idea what he is for.

The narrator grows up in a Los Angeles neighbourhood that gets quietly erased from the maps, raised by a father who used him for psychological experiments. To bring the place back into existence he does the most offensive thing available: he resegregates the local school and acquires a man who insists on being his slave. Beatty writes at a speed that is genuinely difficult to keep up with, stacking jokes about race, class, education and civic pride until the reader is laughing at something they will have trouble explaining later.

Orwell wrote a hundred-page fable about farm animals staging a revolution and then watching the pigs consolidate power one small reasonable step at a time. Nothing about it is subtle and that is the design: he wanted a book a fifteen year old could finish in an evening and never fully shake off. The genius is in the pacing of the betrayal, because no single change is outrageous enough to fight about, and by the end every original rule has been quietly amended.

Ignatius J. Reilly is enormous, unemployed, and certain that the collapse of civilisation began somewhere around the Renaissance. He lives with his mother, writes furious notes on lined paper, attends the cinema in order to be outraged, and is finally pushed out to earn a living. Toole runs him through a hot dog cart, a trouser factory and a nightclub, and around him assembles a cast of New Orleans characters who all have their own delusions running at full volume.

Ayyan Mani is personal assistant to a Brahmin astronomer at a research institute, which means he watches serious men take themselves seriously all day and then goes home to a chawl. So he starts a small, escalating fiction: that his son is a prodigy. Joseph runs this alongside the astronomer's own affair and his obsession with alien microbes, and the two plots keep exposing each other. Very few Indian novels are this direct about how caste decides who gets believed.

Balram Halwai narrates his own life in a series of night-time letters: village childhood, tea shop, a job driving for a rich family in Delhi, and the arrangement by which a servant in India is trusted absolutely because he has been made incapable of leaving. Adiga's image for this is a coop of chickens who watch the bird in front of them being slaughtered and do not run. The voice is chatty, flattering and quietly menacing, which is what makes the book work.

Jim Dixon has a temporary post at a provincial English university and a professor whose good opinion he needs and whose company he cannot bear. He is expected to be enthusiastic about madrigals, medieval economics and a weekend of amateur recorder playing. Amis builds the whole book out of the gap between what Jim says and the faces he makes when nobody is looking, and it culminates in a lecture that goes wrong so gradually and so completely that people still quote it seventy years later.

Ravan and Eddie live in the same block of the same Bombay chawl and are connected by a death neither of them was old enough to witness. Nagarkar follows them from childhood into adolescence through Hindi film worship, church, gangs, sex education by rumour, and the specific geography of a building where every family knows every other family's business. Between chapters he inserts short digressions on things like the chawl as a social invention, and those are some of the funniest pages in Indian fiction.

William Boot writes a gentle countryside column about badgers. Through a mix-up of names a national newspaper dispatches him to the African republic of Ishmaelia to cover a war that may not be happening. There he joins a pack of veteran correspondents who file vivid dispatches from the hotel bar, invent developments, and follow each other to whichever town the herd has decided is the story. Waugh had been a correspondent himself and the contempt is first-hand.

Billy Pilgrim experiences his life out of order: optometry practice, marriage, prisoner of war camp, a zoo on another planet, and always Dresden. Vonnegut was in that city as a prisoner when it was firebombed, and the novel is his admission that he could not write about it directly, so he wrote around it for twenty years and then wrote this. Every death gets the same three words, which starts as a tic and ends as the whole argument.

Tharoor takes the Mahabharata and maps modern Indian history onto it, so that a blind emperor becomes a certain kind of idealist prime minister and a determined daughter becomes something considerably more frightening. It is dictated by an old man to a reluctant secretary, it is full of puns, and it is genuinely funny about how Indian politics recycles the same family drama for a century. The prose is show-off prose and it knows it.

John Self drinks, eats, spends and watches pornography at a rate designed to be unbearable, while assembling a film with actors who each want the script rewritten in their favour. Amis gives him a voice of tremendous energy, a stream of consumption that is very funny for two hundred pages and then becomes something closer to a diagnosis. There is also a character called Martin Amis, which was a much stranger move in 1984 than it sounds now.

Vernon's friend kills sixteen classmates and then himself, which leaves the town, the news channels and an ambitious local fixer with a problem: there is nobody left to punish. So they settle on Vernon. Pierre writes him in a Texan teenage voice full of invented profanity, and pushes the story through interrogation, flight to Mexico and a televised finale that is grotesque in exactly the way American true crime coverage is grotesque.

Robin Varghese leaves business school for a consulting job and starts a diary, which turns out to be a record of one catastrophic misjudgment after another delivered in the voice of a man who thinks he is winning. Vadukut nails the specific dialect of Indian corporate life, the slide deck as a moral position, the pointless offsite, the client who wants a number changed. It is a small book with modest ambitions and it hits all of them.