10 funny classics

Jane Austen's «Pride and Prejudice» gets filed under romance, but its real engine is comedy: two clever people who keep getting each other wrong, and a narrator who notices everything. Voltaire's «Candide» is the same pleasure in a different key, a short, fast book that keeps testing its hero's cheerful optimism against the world. What these ten share is a willingness to laugh at ideas people take seriously, including their own.

1.Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen, 1813

A sharp-eyed comedy about money, manners and misjudgment, in which a quick-witted woman and a proud man keep being wrong about each other. Funnier and more cutting than its reputation suggests.
2.The Taming of the Shrew

William Shakespeare, 1623

A broke fortune-hunter marries the town's most notorious scold and sets about taming her — a comedy that doubles as a fight over who gets to speak.
3.Ulysses

James Joyce, 1922

One Dublin day in 1904, followed through two men's minds — an ad-canvasser and a young writer — with every joke, smell and stray thought left in.
4.Candide

Voltaire, 1759

A sweet-natured young man is told this is the best of all possible worlds, then sent across it to test the claim. Short, fast, savagely funny, and still aimed at our comforting ideas.
5.Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World

Jonathan Swift, 1726

A ship's surgeon keeps washing up among miniature courtiers, giants, absent-minded scientists and rational horses, and each country shows human folly from a new angle. It is still the sharpest satire in English.
6.Τρελαντώνης

Πηνελόπη Δέλτα, 1932

A lively summer among siblings, where small rebellions, shifting alliances and huge adventures fill the everyday.
7.Ο Φασουλής φιλόσοφος

Γεώργιος Σουρής, 1888

Athens, 1888: a newspaper poet turns Diogenes, Buddha and his own bad moods into rhyming satire that still lands. Read him for the jokes, stay for the ache underneath.

Μιὰ μέρα ποὺ δὲν εἴξευρα τί διάβολο νὰ κάνωτὰ δάκρυά μου σὲ βαθὺ ἐστράγγισα ποτῆρικαὶ μιὰ καὶ δυὸ στὸν χημικὸ τὰ πῆγα Χρηστομάνοκαὶ κάνε μου, παρακαλῶ, τοῦ εἶπα, τὸ χατῆρινὰ τἀναλύσῃς καὶ νὰ βρῇς πῶς εἶναι καμωμένα,γιὰ νὰ μὴν κλαίω στὸ ἑξῆς κι’ ἐγὼ εἰς τὰ χαμένα.Κι’ ὁ χημικὸς μ’ ἀπάντησε «αὐτά, ξερὸ κεφάλι,δὲν εἶναι ἄλλο τίποτε παρὰ χλωριούχον κάλι».
8.Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll, 1865

A girl falls down a rabbit hole into a world where nothing keeps its size, its manners or its temper, and keeps asking the questions everyone else stopped asking.
9.Εὐέλπιδες

Ανδρέας Καρκαβίτσας, 1899

Twelve stories of young men on the edge of everything — battle, the sea, first love — written by a doctor who watched war at first hand and turned it into taut lyric prose.
10.Πάρεργα (πρόλογος)

Εμμανουήλ Ροΐδης, 1893

Why one writer would rather read Spencer than write a page: a comic, sharp argument against Greece's language split.