Tristram Shandy

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

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