The 14 Funniest British Novels, Ranked by How Well They Travel

Bertie is dispatched by his aunt to sneer at a cow shaped silver jug so that its owner will sell it cheaply, which is the sort of errand that makes sense only in this world. From there he collects a stolen policeman's helmet, an unwanted engagement, a friend who cannot propose without a stiff drink, and a would be dictator called Roderick Spode who leads a movement of men in black shorts. Jeeves solves everything with one piece of information he has been sitting on for a hundred pages. The plot is engineered like a Swiss watch and the sentences are better than the plot.

Jim Dixon teaches medieval history at a provincial university and is terrified of losing a post he does not want. His professor forces him into a weekend of madrigal singing and amateur culture. He burns a guest bed with a cigarette and spends a whole chapter hiding the evidence. He is in a relationship maintained entirely by guilt, and interested in a woman attached to somebody else. Almost every laugh comes from the distance between what Jim says politely and what he is thinking, and Amis lets you hear both.

Adams began this as a radio series and the timing shows on every page, since the jokes are built to land out loud. Arthur is dragged off Earth seconds before it is destroyed, and the rest is a tour of a universe run on bureaucracy, bad poetry and worse management. There is a depressed robot, a two headed president, a computer that spends millions of years producing an answer nobody can use, and a paragraph about towels that has outlived most of the science fiction written since. The comedy comes from cosmic events treated as minor administrative inconveniences.

Jerome set out to write a travel guide to the Thames and produced a comic novel instead, mostly by being unable to stop telling stories about his friends. The narrator opens by diagnosing himself with every disease in a medical dictionary except housemaid's knee. There is a tin of pineapple and no opener, a maze that traps everybody in it, and an uncle whose attempt to hang a picture destroys an afternoon. The Victorian sentences are longer than ours, but the comedy of three useless men insisting they are competent has not aged one day.

Moist von Lipwig is a professional fraud who gets caught, hanged almost to death, and then handed a job by the ruler of Ankh-Morpork: revive a post office buried under decades of undelivered letters. His competition is the clacks, a semaphore network taken over by an asset stripper who has cut maintenance until the men on the towers are dying. Moist fights him with showmanship, since a swindler's skills turn out to work beautifully in public service. Pratchett is writing about looted infrastructure and the men who loot it, and he makes it consistently funny.

Flora Poste is nineteen, newly orphaned, penniless and utterly certain that everything can be organised. She invites herself to her cousins at Cold Comfort Farm in Sussex, where the family specialises in gloom, thwarted passion and an aunt who once saw something nasty in the woodshed and has been dining out on it for fifty years. Flora sets about fixing them with the calm of a woman rearranging furniture. Gibbons is parodying the earthy rural novels of her day, and the joke works even if you have never read one, because the type still exists in every family.

Adrian is thirteen, lives in Leicester, and believes he is an intellectual because he has started using the library. He measures his spots, sends unreadable poems to the BBC, worships a girl called Pandora, and looks after an elderly neighbour with more competence than he shows anywhere else. Around him, unnoticed, his parents' marriage falls apart, money runs short and Britain in the early eighties gets colder. The comedy is entirely in the gap between what Adrian records and what an adult reader can see happening behind him.

William Boot writes a gentle nature column for a London paper and is dispatched to an African country in a case of mistaken identity, because somebody confused him with a fashionable novelist of the same surname. He arrives with absurd luggage, no idea what a war correspondent does, and a talent for being in the right place while understanding nothing. Waugh had reported from Abyssinia himself and clearly loathed most of his colleagues, so the press corps here invent facts, chase each other's mistakes and file rubbish with total confidence.

Charles Pooter is a clerk in the City with a modest house, a patient wife, a son who is embarrassed by him, and complete confidence that his daily life deserves recording. He paints the bath red. He makes puns nobody laughs at and writes them down anyway. He is snubbed by tradesmen and social climbers and files each humiliation carefully. It ran first as a series in Punch, which is why the entries are short and each lands its own joke. Every office and every family still contains a Pooter, and some of us are him.

Aziraphale and Crowley have been stationed on Earth since the beginning and have quietly come to prefer it to either head office. When the end of the world is scheduled, they decide to sabotage it, only to discover that the Antichrist was swapped at birth and is now an ordinary boy running around an English village with his friends. Witchfinders, a book of prophecies that is always right and never useful, and four bikers of the apocalypse follow. Written by Pratchett and Neil Gaiman together, and their two styles never quite stop wrestling.

Fielding started this as a newspaper column and kept the form, so the novel arrives as diary entries that open with a tally of weight, alcohol units and cigarettes. Bridget works in publishing, then television, drinks too much with her friends, is interrogated by relatives at every family gathering about why she is still single, and moves between a charming boss and a stiff barrister named Darcy. The plot borrows openly from Pride and Prejudice. The comedy is in her private voice, which is much sharper and much ruder than the face she shows anyone.

Rob runs a failing record shop in north London with two employees who treat music taste as a moral test. His girlfriend leaves, and rather than examine himself he draws up a list of his all time top five breakups and goes to interview the women involved. Around this sit arguments about what your favourite records say about you, and a slow admission that he has been coasting for a decade. Hornby writes male self deception better than anyone, which means the book is often funniest when Rob is at his least likeable.

Karim is seventeen, bored, ambitious and stuck in the London suburbs when his father starts teaching meditation to white neighbours who are hungry for an Eastern teacher and not fussy about credentials. The family splits, Karim drifts into theatre and then into London itself, and the novel becomes a tour of the seventies through the eyes of a boy nobody can place. It is very funny about the English hunger for spiritual India and equally funny about Karim's own hustling. Underneath the comedy sits real bitterness about the racism of that decade.

Philip Swallow, timid and English, exchanges jobs with Morris Zapp, loud and American, in the year campuses everywhere were catching fire. Lodge alternates their two worlds, then starts mixing them, until each man is living the life the other left behind. He plays with form throughout, including a stretch told in letters and a section written as a film script, which sounds like a lecture and reads like a game. The comedy comes from watching two academics be pompous in exactly opposite ways.