Don Quixote

Rabelais turned Renaissance France upside down with the stories of two giant kings, their appetites, their wars, and their philosophical brawls. Crude, learned, and wildly inventive, it remains the founding text of Western literary satire.

François Rabelais

Voltaire's short masterpiece sends a naive young hero through earthquakes, wars, and philosophical disasters to test the claim that this is the best of all possible worlds. Sharp, brutal, and still the most quotable piece of philosophical comedy in print.

Voltaire

Sterne's eighteenth century novel tries to tell the life of its narrator and keeps getting hopelessly sidetracked. Digressions, blank pages, and typographical jokes make it the most experimental comic novel ever written, centuries ahead of its time.

Laurence Sterne

Thirty pilgrims ride to Canterbury telling each other stories to pass the time. Chaucer's fourteenth century framework produced some of the earliest and funniest comedy in English, from the bawdy Miller's Tale to the moral twists of the Pardoner.

Geoffrey Chaucer

Erdman's banned 1932 play follows an unemployed Soviet everyman whose planned suicide turns him into a reluctant celebrity courted by every faction in Stalin's Russia. A savage farce that Stanislavski called a Russian classic the moment he read it.

Nicolai Erdman