Books Make Great Gifts: For The Humorist

Books Make Great Gifts: For The Humorist

Attractive, smart, thoughtful, unique, and easy to wrap—books are definitely the perfect gifts. In honor of the holiday season, we’ve put together a series of thematic gift guides that will help you pick a great book for everyone on your list.

Here’s what we’ve got for the funniest person you know: big laughs, knowing chuckles, fits of giggles, and true guffaws. Perhaps your Humorist would be interested in some awfully bad advice? Or a truly hilarious vampire parody (really!)? A collection of darkly funny essays by this year’s Thurber Prize winner? Or a novel about a very peculiar menagerie? Search no more for the book that will keep ’em in stitches.

Don’t forget to check out our lists for The Literary Lover, The Mystery Maven, The History Buff, and The Nonfiction Aficionado. Still to come, books for The Nonconformist. For more suggestions in the meantime, check out Random House’s holiday gift guides.

Half EmptyHalf Empty
By David Rakoff
Winner of the 2011 Thurber Prize for American Humor! In this deeply smart and sneakily poignant collection of essays, the bestselling author of Fraud and Don’t Get Too Comfortable makes an inspired case for always assuming the worst—because then you’ll never be disappointed. Whether he’s taking on pop culture phenomena with Oscar Wilde-worthy wit or dealing with personal tragedy, Rakoff’s sharp observations and humorist’s flair for the absurd will have you positively reveling in the untapped power of negativity.
Read an Excerpt | Buy the Book

I Remember NothingI Remember Nothing
By Nora Ephron
Nora Ephron returns with her first book since the astounding success of I Feel Bad About My Neck, taking a hilarious look at the past, the present, and the future, bemoaning the vicissitudes of modern life, and recalling with her signature clarity and wisdom everything she hasn’t (yet) forgotten. Filled with insights and observations that instantly ring true—and could have come only from Nora Ephron—I Remember Nothing is pure joy.
Read an Excerpt | Throw A Nora Ephron Party! | Buy the Book

The Tower, The Zoo, and the TortoiseThe Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise
By Julia Stuart
Set in the popular tourist attraction in present-day London, The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise is an exquisite story of love, loss, and a one-hundred-eighty-one-year-old pet. Balthazar Jones has lived and worked in the Tower of London for the past eight years. Being a Beefeater is no easy job, and when Balthazar is tasked with setting up an elaborate menagerie of the many exotic animals gifted to the Queen, life at the Tower gets all the more interesting. Penguins escape, giraffes go missing, and the Komodo dragon sends innocent tourists running for their lives. Still, that chaos is nothing compared to what happens when his wife, Hebe, makes a surprise announcement. What’s a Beefeater to do?
Read an Excerpt | Exclusive Essay by Julia Stuart | Buy the Book

Dexter is DeliciousDexter is Delicious
By Jeff Lindsay
The “Dexter” phenomenon—in bookstores, on TV screens, and in the hearts of millions of fans worldwide—continues with his most delectable dish to date. Dexter Morgan’s neatly organized life as a blood spatter analyst for the Miami Police, devoted husband and father, and killer of only those who deserve it is turned upside down by the arrival of his new daughter, Lily Anne. Feeling surprisingly sunny and loving, he’s trying to suppress the influence of his Dark Passenger—the voice inside who guides his homicidal urges. But Dexter is summoned to investigate the disappearance of a seventeen-year-old girl who has been running with a bizarre group of goths who fancy themselves to be vampires. As Dexter gets closer to the truth of what happened to the missing girl, he realizes they are not really vampires, but cannibals. And most disturbing, these people have their eyes on Dexter . . . and their mouths are watering.
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Sports From HellSports From Hell
By Rick Reilly
A bestselling author and ESPN star, Rick Reilly delivers a hilarious, unabashedly fun, and at times, skin-searing tour through some of the world’s most amazing and outrageous sports. From the physically and mentally taxing sport of chess boxing to the psychological battlefield that is the rock-paper-scissors championship, to the underground world of illegal jart throwing, Rick Reilly subjected himself to both bodily danger and abject humiliation (or, in the case of ferret legging, both) in order to personally find the world’s strangest sporting event. Chronicling his adventures as only he can, Rick enters a world of bizarre characters, fierce competition, and exotic locals–with stops in Australia, New Zealand, Finland, Denmark, England, and even a maximum security prison at Angola, Louisiana–and the result is a laugh-out-loud book perfect for any sport’s fan.
Read an Excerpt | Buy the Book

I Don't Know How She Does ItI Don’t Know How She Does It
By Allison Pearson
Now a Major Motion Picture! Delightfully smart and heartbreakingly poignant, Allison Pearson’s smash debut novel has exploded onto bestseller lists as “The national anthem for working mothers.” Hedge-fund manager, wife, and mother of two, Kate Reddy manages to juggle nine currencies in five time zones and keep in step with the Teletubbies. But when she finds herself awake at 1:37 a.m. in a panic over the need to produce a homemade pie for her daughter’s school, she has to admit her life has become unrecognizable. With panache, wisdom, and uproarious wit, I Don’t Know How She Does It brilliantly dramatizes the dilemma of every working mom.
Read an Excerpt | Buy the Book

You're a Horrible Person, But I Like YouYou’re a Horrible Person, But I Like You
The Believer Book of Advice
By The Believer
A compendium of advice from the producers, writers, and actors of The Office, Saturday Night Live, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Knocked Up, Flight of the Conchords, The Daily Show, Arrested Development, Reno 911!, and The Hangover along with other people who should really never give advice. In these pages Fred Armisen offers help telling your dad you’re a lesbian—give him the phone number and he’ll do it for you. Mindy Kaling provides guidance on ending things with your mistress—dude, you totally have to kill her. Rainn Wilson offers insight on contacting that girl you dreamed about last night—he has created all-purpose web portal for such interactions. Amy Sedaris identifies the best way to a man’s heart—bone saw through the chest cavity.
Read an Excerpt | Buy the Book

NightlightNightlight
By The Harvard Lampoon
Pale and klutzy, Belle arrives in Switchblade, Oregon looking for adventure, or at least an undead classmate. She soon discovers Edwart, a super-hot computer nerd with zero interest in girls. After witnessing a number of strange events–Edwart leaves his tater tots untouched at lunch! Edwart saves her from a flying snowball!–Belle has a dramatic revelation: Edwart is a vampire. But how can she convince Edwart to bite her and transform her into his eternal bride, especially when he seems to find girls so repulsive? Complete with romance, danger, insufficient parental guardianship, creepy stalker-like behavior, and a vampire prom, Nightlight is the uproarious tale of a vampire-obsessed girl, looking for love in all the wrong places.
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The McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes
The McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes
By McSweeney’s
As John Hodgman says in this book’s introduction, “We all know that books are funny. First, they are made of paste and cloth, which is funny, as is the fact that people still buy and read them.” With that in mind, the McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes collects the best book-related humor from the humor-laden archives of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Open it and be regaled by such sketches, lists, letters, and spoofs as: “Postcards from James Joyce to his Brother Stan,” “Winnie-the-Pooh is My Coworker,” “Ikea Product or Lord of the Rings Character?,” “Popular Children’s Fairy Tales Reimagined Using Members of My Family,” “The Very Unauthorized Biography of Steven Seagal,” “Chuck Norris Erotica,” “John Updike, Television Writer,” “Jane Eyre Runs for President,” “Cormac McCarthy Writes to the Editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican,” “Holden Caulfield Gives the Commencement Speech to a High School,” “Letters from Odysseus’s College Roommate,” And many dozens more.
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The Fran Lebowitz ReaderThe Fran Lebowitz Reader
By Fran Lebowitz
The Fran Lebowitz Reader brings together in one volume, with a new preface, two bestsellers, Metropolitan Life and Social Studies, by an “important humorist in the classic tradition” (The New York Times Book Review) who is “the natural successor to Dorothy Parker” (British Vogue). In “elegant, finely honed prose” (The Washington Post Book World), Lebowitz limns the vicissitudes of contemporary urban life—its fads, trends, crazes, morals, and fashions. By turns ironic, facetious, deadpan, sarcastic, wry, wisecracking, and waggish, she is always wickedly entertaining.
Fran On…Everything | Buy the Book

More books For The Humorist: The Best of Wodehouse, by P.G. Wodehouse; Portuguese Irregular Verbs, by Alexander McCall Smith; Bad Mother, by Ayelet Waldman; The Pirates! In An Adventure With Napoleon, By Gideon Defoe; Home Cooking, by Laurie Colwin.