veryone knows that writers such as Lorrie Moore, Jonathan Coe and Paul Beatty are funny, so in this list I’m including a few titles that might be expected to crop up in a neighbouring category: “Great War Novels”, say in the case of James Jones’s The Thin Red Line. Jones is not much read today – and it’s easy to see why in the unlikely event that you get through From Here to Eternity – but I was curious about The Thin Red Line because of Terrence Malick’s masterly film. Well, the novel is recognisably the source, in that it takes place during the American assault on Guadalcanal in the second world war, but one slowly realises (almost disbelievingly, given the film’s stately cadences) that the book is actually a very violent comedy: “a sort of nonsensical hysteria of cruel fun”, as one officer sees it, more akin to Tarantino than Malick. “Hysteria of cruel fun” is also an apt description of the bonkers world of Ivy Compton-Burnett. In scope (English upper-class households between the wars) and form (almost entirely dialogue), novels such as A House and Its Head and Manservant and Maidservant get by on the most meagre of narrative rations. Imagine the Wodehouse books, with Jeeves and Wooster stranded at the precise moment, in Gaspar Noé’s Climax, when the cast begin to notice that the punch has been spiked. Since this dread realisation can be expressed only within the clipped register of class and period, a tightly repressed mania holds sway. Relief takes the form of howls of laughter from the reader. One of the funniest books of the past 10 years is by the eminent critic Terry Castle. The Professor and Other Writings includes the scandalous memoir of her friend Susan Sontag, whose unremitting seriousness led Castle to perceive her as a great comic character. The long title piece is a side-splitting account of a tragic affair with a professor when Castle was a student in the 1970s, back in the days when the application process for a fellowship included getting catatonically stoned. Speaking of sex, drugs and California, Slow Days, Fast Company is the best book by Eve Babitz, who seemed to get high – often in bed – with practically everyone in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s. At one point in this collection she ends up in Palm Springs in the company of thinly altered versions of Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner and his wife. The house where they’re staying is such a sleek celebration of modernism that the sliding doors leave one of the guests longing for doorknobs. Having started with film, let’s end there, too, via a poem by Billy Collins. Poets have long taken solace in the belief that their work is so good that nobody in their right mind would ever want to read it. And then along comes Collins, whom everybody adores and whose books sell in chimney-height stacks because, as well as being wise, tender and clever, they’re so funny. The fact that the poems are often about dogs doesn’t do any harm, either. “The Revenant”, in Aimless Love, is a monologue from a dog who, having been put to sleep, returns from the dead to tell his grieving master just one thing: “I never liked you.” It seems that Alejandro Iñárritu took a lot of liberties with the film version. • Geoff Dyer’s books include Out of Sheer Rage (Canongate).