Free summaries
Humour — page 3
265 public-domain humour books, summarised. Page 3 of 6.
The Comedies of Carlo Goldoni: edited with an introduction by Helen Zimmern
Carlo Goldoni
A single fan dropped in a Venetian square triggers a cascading farce of pride, secret courtings, and frantic misunderstandings.
Further nonsense verse and prose
Lewis Carroll
A quiet Oxford don turns strict logic inside out to create a world of play where words, numbers, and social etiquette obey their own hilarious laws.
The Gland Stealers
Bertram Gayton
A ninety-five-year-old millionaire restores his youth through a primate gland transplant, then leads a crowd of elderly men to Africa to harvest wild gorillas for their own operations.
The Autobiography of Methuselah
John Kendrick Bangs
An aging patriarch chisels his memories onto stone slabs, transforming ancient biblical history into a parade of absurd modern domestic complaints.
A line-o'-verse or two
Bert Leston Taylor
This collection of lighthearted, rhythmic verse captures the daily rhythms, social pretenses, and small-town ironies of the early twentieth century. It serves as a witty, unpretentious mirror for anyone who finds life’s minor frustrations better handled with a rhyme than a complaint.
Mate in Two Moves
Winston K. (Winston Kinney) Marks
The world’s sudden descent into a global epidemic of uncontrollable romance leaves even the most rational scientists reeling. When a cold, career-obsessed pathologist discovers the viral cause of the hysteria, he must grapple with the fact that he is not immune to the very thing he seeks to cure.
Mr. Punch's Book of Love: Being the Humours of Courtship and Matrimony
Unknown
A whimsical compendium of Victorian satire, this collection lampoons the solemnities of courtship and the realities of marriage with sharp, relentless wit.
The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany. Parts 2, 3 and 4
Hurlothrumbo
Graffiti serves as the ultimate mirror of a society, capturing the unfiltered thoughts, grievances, and bawdy humor of eighteenth-century England through the scribbled verses left on tavern windows and washroom walls.
Miss Civilization: A Comedy in One Act
Richard Harding Davis
In this brisk, late-Victorian one-act comedy, a young woman finds herself alone in her country home on Christmas night with three armed burglars, matching their brute force with her own cool-headed wit.
The Beggar's Purse: A Fairy Tale of Familiar Finance
Samuel Hopkins Adams
A man discovers that a mysterious, enchanted wallet can cure the expensive habits of vanity and timidity. By tracking his daily expenditures, he finds that true economy requires shedding the performative costs of social expectation.
The Harlequinade: An Excursion
Dion Clayton Calthrop
A whimsical invitation to step away from the rigidity of modern life, this excursion traces the enduring journey of the Harlequinade from ancient myth to the mechanical present.
An Elephant for the Prinkip
Stecher, L. J., Jr.
A freelance space captain agrees to deliver Earth’s largest land animal to a wealthy alien collector, only to discover his contract contains a colossal biological misunderstanding.
Vile bodies
Evelyn Waugh
A frantic generation dances through post-war London, chasing pleasure and running out of money while the world slides into chaos.
Poetical Ingenuities and Eccentricities
Unknown
Boundless linguistic cleverness meets cheerful absurdity in a collection that transforms verse into an intricate playground of echoes, puns, puzzles, and unexpected cross-language rhymes.
The Touch of Abner
H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
The unlikely hero of this tale is an eccentric, plain-spoken farmer who proves that a sharp wit and a generous heart are more powerful than city money and legal maneuvering.
Three Hats: A Farcical Comedy in Three Acts
Arthur Shirley
A case of mistaken identities, lost hats, and romantic entanglements leads to a farcical comedy of errors.
The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes: Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection
Various
A clever piece of courtroom misdirection turns on an altered almanac, while a frightened poet finds unexpected comfort in the comical tale of a runaway rider.
Household Gods: A Comedy
Aleister Crowley
A husband's domestic despair leads him on a wild, moonlit night of wilder revelations, where every sacred affection and base desire is completely upended.
The Rubáiyát of a Persian Kitten
Oliver Herford
A high-bred feline reflects upon the grand mysteries, daily temptations, and cosmic absurdities of domestic existence in a verse parody of Persian philosophy.
Across America by Motor-cycle
C. K. Shepherd
Rough roads, mechanical breakdowns, and endless dust meet an unyielding British traveler crossing post-war America on a solo motorcycle.
The humour of Italy
Unknown
A vibrant journey through centuries of laughter reveals how Italian satire uses sharp wit, irreverent trickery, and human vulnerability to illuminate society.
Humorous Readings and Recitations, in Prose and Verse
Unknown
This collection gathers an eclectic assortment of Victorian-era sketches, poems, and monologues designed to amuse parlor audiences through satire, absurdity, and the domestic trials of the nineteenth-century middle class.
The Gay Gnani of Gingalee
Florence Huntley
A cynical, biting satire, this story pits a pragmatic, small-town druggist against a pretentious, otherworldly mystic in a struggle for a woman’s affection, using the clash between "New Thought" spirituality and hard-headed materialism to comedic effect.
Ever Heard This? Over Three Hundred Good Stories
F. W. Chambers
This collection of over three hundred brief anecdotes serves as a time capsule of early twentieth-century British humor, capturing the wit of the pulpit, the courtroom, and the parlor in quick, punchy bursts.
Funny Epitaphs
Unknown
A final word carved in stone, these pithy and often irreverent verses capture the humor, tragedy, and eccentricities of lives long concluded. It is a collection that proves the urge to have the last laugh survives even the grave.
The Man from Home
Booth Tarkington
The American lawyer, Daniel Voorhees Pike, arrives at a swanky Italian hotel to rescue his ward from a predatory European marriage. Beneath the wit of his blunt, small-town charm lies an unyielding resolve that forces a clash of cultures and class.
A Lady's Tour in Corsica, Vol. 1 (of 2)
Gertrude Forde
HOOK A determined party of travelers navigates the rugged, untamed beauty of Corsica, finding that the island’s legendary perils—brigands and rough terrain—often yield to unexpected moments of chivalry and profound, quiet isolation.
Frenzied Fiction
Stephen Leacock
A collection of satirical sketches that captures the jittery, disjointed spirit of the First World War era through a lens of biting wit and weary observation.
Master of None
Neil Goble
Finding a singular, well-rounded individual in a society defined by extreme specialization proves impossible for the government—until a park-dwelling philosopher accidentally qualifies for a mission to the stars.
The Mythological Zoo
Oliver Herford
Hook Classic monsters step out of the shadows and into modern society, revealing that while their shapes have changed, their bizarre temperaments remain remarkably familiar.
Poison: A Farce
George M. (George Melville) Baker
** A wealthy, anxious sugar merchant discovers he may have poisoned thousands of people, sparking a frantic comedy of errors involving fake funerals, desperate suitors, and an unwanted houseguest.
The Hero
Elaine Wilber
This story follows a crew of soldiers whose mission to occupy a seemingly primitive planet takes an unexpected turn when their own arrogance blinds them to the true nature of the inhabitants.
Tales of the Trains: Being Some Chapters of Railroad Romance by Tilbury Tramp, Queen's Messenger
Charles Lever
The iron rail transforms the rhythm of life, pulling travelers into a world of rapid collisions, bizarre encounters, and the relentless, mechanical pulse of a new age.
Tales of Humour, Gallantry & Romance, Selected and Translated from the Italian
Thomas Roscoe
These tales serve as a gateway into the vibrant, often precarious world of early Italian life, where wit is a survival skill and irony is the primary language of the streets.
The Bicyclers and Three Other Farces
John Kendrick Bangs
A lighthearted collection of turn-of-the-century comedies, these plays offer a witty, satirical glimpse into the domestic anxieties and social posturing of the American middle class.
The Holes Around Mars
Jerome Bixby
A team of astronauts discovers an impossible series of perfect, uniform tunnels piercing the Martian landscape. They soon realize these holes are not ruins, but the orbital path of a singular, invisible, and terrifyingly swift object.
Junior
Robert Abernathy
The generational divide takes a literal, evolutionary turn when a rebellious adolescent refuses to accept the constraints of his stationary, deep-sea society.
The Bunsby Papers (second series): Irish Echoes
John Brougham
These vibrant, rhythmic tales capture the spirit of nineteenth-century Irish folklore and the immigrant experience, blending whimsical superstition with the grounded realities of struggle, romance, and moral redemption.
Gallantry: Dizain des Fetes Galantes
James Branch Cabell
These ten interconnected vignettes capture the fragile, performative elegance of a bygone aristocratic world. They present life as a grand, often reckless masquerade where the only cardinal sin is the lack of a graceful gesture.
The humour of Russia
E. L. (Ethel Lillian) Voynich
The melancholy of the Russian soul finds its most piercing expression in these pages, where laughter acts not as a relief from misery, but as a sharp, necessary witness to the absurdities of life under autocracy.
What's He Doing in There?
Fritz Leiber
An extraterrestrial visitor arrives on Earth and seeks out a private room, only to cause a night of agonizing suspicion and mounting domestic dread for his well-meaning academic host and his family.
Count Bunker: Being a Bald Yet Veracious Chronicle Containing Some Further Particulars of Two Gentlemen Whose Previous Careers Were Touched Upon in a Tome Entitled "The Lunatic at Large"
J. Storer (Joseph Storer) Clouston
A bored German Baron and his mischievous British accomplice assume a false identity to infiltrate Scottish high society. What begins as a lark quickly devolves into a hilarious, high-stakes tangle of impersonation and romance.
The Mercy of Allah
Hilaire Belloc
The path to immense wealth is paved with calculated deception, a lesson an elderly merchant imparts to his impressionable nephews through the story of his own ruthless ascent.
A Yankee in the Far East
George Hoyt Allen
HOOK A determined Yankee navigates the eccentricities of global travel, from the chaotic streets of the Far East to the claustrophobic indignities of a steerage-class passage home during the dawn of the Great War.
My Father, the Cat
Henry Slesar
An elegant, impossible secret binds a man to his father, a creature of pedigree and intellect who exists entirely outside the laws of nature.
The Dramatist
Frederick Reynolds
Mistaken identities, theatrical obsession, and romantic scheming collide when an eccentric playwright turns a Bath inheritance plot into material for his next production.
Mother Goose for Grown Folks
A. D. T. (Adeline Dutton Train) Whitney
This witty volume of nineteenth-century social commentary reclaims classic nursery rhymes as sharp, surprisingly adult allegories. Through rhythmic verse, it dissects the foibles of modern life, marriage, ambition, and human nature.
30-day wonder
Richard Wilson
When invincible aliens land in New York and force humanity to obey its own laws, a cynical news editor finds himself drafted as their chief publicist.