Humor Classics

Bertie Wooster has taken up the banjolele, but the manager of the building in central London has issued an ultimatum to either give up the music or clear out. Even the faithful Jeeves threatens to leave, so Bertie seeks refuge in the country.

A legendary sword is left behind by his master, the Godking. Trapped for millennia, the sword's spirit awaits the day he'll be set free. Will his new master be worthy of inheriting the Godking's legacy?

Here, the master of 20th century English humor, P. G. Wodehouse, presents two of his most beloved classics: The Inimitable Jeeves and My Man Jeeves. The perpetually befuddled Bertie Wooster and his knight-in-shining-tuxedo Jeeves have long been hailed as the greatest literary creations of P. G. Wodehouse, the most popular English humorist in history. Here are two complete novels, the latter containing a handful of short stories featuring Reggie Pepper, an early prototype for Bertie.

The holiday film A Christmas Story, first released in 1983, has become a bona fide Christmas perennial, gaining in stature and fame with each succeeding year. Its affectionate, wacky, and wryly realistic portrayal of an American family's typical Christmas joys and travails in small-town Depression-era Indiana has entered our imagination and our hearts with a force equal to It's a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street.

The usual suspects, including Lord Emsworth and his prize pig, the Empress, line up at Blandings Castle for a Wodehousian caper that sees members of the upper-classes getting hot and bothered over a nude painting they all want to get their hands on. This is wit at its very finest, read by one of our superlative actors, who reads Wodehouse with the requisite style and panache.

In Xanth, everyone has a talent. But that doesn't mean everyone loves his talent, and no one understands that better than Hapless. Endowed with the ability to conjure any instrument he wants, Hapless could be an extraordinary musician if only he could play a tune that didn't fall ear-piercingly flat. His one desire is to find an instrument he can play. When the Good Magician hears about Hapless's desperate desire, he sends the young man on a quest to find the elusive Isis Orb, a magical talisman that could fulfill his wish.

Meet Psmith, with a silent 'P' as in psychic. A gallant, charming individual, Psmith has a gift for getting into awful scrapes, and when he takes over a gentile journal known as Cosy Moments with the aid of Billy Windsor, its sub-editor, he turns it into a radical publication...with alarming and hilarious results.

My Man Jeeves, first published in 1919, introduced the world to affable, indolent Bertie Wooster and his precise, capable valet, Jeeves. Some of the finest examples of humorous writing found in English literature are woven around the relationship between these two men of very different classes and temperaments. Where Bertie is impetuous and feeble, Jeeves is coolheaded and poised.

H.H. Munro (Saki) is one of the undisputed masters of the short story. In this complete compendium, the full gamut of his subjects and themes is experienced. His stories are imbued with humorous satire, biting irony, and often the macabre, all of which have one target: the stupidities and hypocrisies of Edwardian upper-class society.

Born in England in 1869, Stephen Leacock would immigrate to Canada and become a teacher, political scientist, and writer. He would ultimately come to be best known and loved as a humourist. Literary Lapses was first published as a collection of sketches in 1910, although many of the individual stories were first printed in various newspapers and periodicals, such as Punch, New York Life, and the Detroit Free Press.

P.G. Wodehouse, the master of British humor, produced dozens of books and hundreds of short stories in his long and prolific career. But none of his creations has quite captured the world's imagination as much as his bumbling, empty-headed, man-about-town Bertie Wooster and Bertie's faithful, knight-in-shining-tuxedo Jeeves. Collected here are three of Wodehouse's most beloved "Jeeves and Wooster" tales—including eight short stories from the anthology My Man, Jeeves, as well as the complete novels The Inimitable Jeeves and Right Ho, Jeeves.

Being born undead can have its disadvantages, such as eternal youth and flawless beauty-things most unsuitable for a witch. Hiding behind the guise of a grimy old crone, the witch is content living outside Fort Stalwart with her unlikely band of allies: a troll named Gwurm, an enchanted broom, and a demonic duck named Newt. She leads a simple life filled with spells, potions, and the occasional curse.

Published in rapid succession in the middle 1930s, these two books shocked European literature and world consciousness. Nominally fiction but more rightly called "creative confessions," they told of the author's childhood in excoriating Paris slums, of service in the mud wastes of World War I and African jungles. Mixing unmitigated despair with Gargantuan comedy, they also created a new style, in which invective and obscenity were laced with phrases of unforgettable poetry. Celine's influence revolutionized the contemporary approach to fiction.

Says Charles Pooter, "I fail to see - because I do not happen to be a 'somebody' - why my diary should not be interesting." Surprisingly, Mr. Pooter's life is fascinating! The fascination is two-fold: firstly, his astounding arrogance that we should care about his domestic trivia and narcissistic scribblings. Secondly, we can all sympathize with (and wince at!) this ridiculous slave to convention.

"I am Myra Breckinridge, whom no man will ever possess." So begins the irresistible testimony of the luscious instructor of Empathy and Posture at Buck Loner's Academy of Drama and Modeling. Myra has a secret that only her surgeon shares; a passion for classic Hollywood films, which she regards as the supreme achievements of Western culture; and a sacred mission to bring heteronormative civilization to its knees. Fifty years after its first publication unleashed gales of laughter, delight, and ferocious dissent, Myra's moment to instruct and delight has once again arrived.

Orphaned cousins Jane and Lucilla, both 19, receive the exciting news that their guardian is at last allowing them to leave boarding school. But their rosy future is thwarted when they find he has made some bad investments and fled, leaving them with a cottage in the English countryside and a modest bank account.

Here, we have a glorious ensemble of Woodhousian characters knocking elbows to foreheads in the elegant and grand Blandings Castle. Meet Freddy Threepwood, the vagrant son of doddering old Lord Emsworth of Blandings Castle. Freddy has recently become engaged to Aline Peters, the American heiress of an irascible father. The snag is that Freddy seems to have at one point become enamored of a struggling actress, Joan Valentine, and written some impetuous and imprudent letters to her.

Summer 1977. The Blyton Summer Detective Club (of Blyton Hills, a small mining town in Oregon's Zoinx River Valley) solved their final mystery and unmasked the elusive Sleepy Lake monster - another low-life fortune hunter trying to get his dirty hands on the legendary riches hidden in Deboën Mansion. And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for those meddling kids.

A savage and hilarious satire, Gulliver's Travels sees Lemuel Gulliver shipwrecked and adrift, subject to bizarre and unnerving encounters with - among others - quarrelling Lilliputians, philosophising horses, and the brutish Yahoo tribe that change his view of humanity - and himself - forever. Swift's classic of 1726 portrays mankind in a distorted hall of mirrors as a diminished, magnified, and finally, bestial species, presenting us with a comical yet uncompromising reflection of ourselves.

Walsingford Hall belongs to Sir Buckstone, who is in a little financial difficulty. So for a little monetary help he puts a roof over the heads of an odd assortment of people.