The Canterbury Tales

The first modern novel is also one of the funniest ever written. A Spanish gentleman reads too many chivalric romances, sets out to revive knight errantry, and drags his peasant neighbor Sancho Panza through a comic masterpiece that reshaped fiction forever.

Miguel de Cervantes

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

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