Free summaries
Humour — page 3
522 public-domain humour books, summarised. Page 3 of 11.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
All on the Irish Shore: Irish Sketches
E. Oe. (Edith Oenone) Somerville
A set of linked, sharply drawn comic sketches opens a window into the horse-dealers, impoverished gentry, and eccentric cottagers of rural turn-of-the-century Ireland.
Baddeck, and That Sort of Thing
Charles Dudley Warner
A lighthearted summer journey through the Canadian Maritimes exposes the delightful friction between grand travel ambitions and the mundane realities of provincial transport. Through foggy bays, late-night stages, and sleepy villages, a wry American observer discovers that the true destination is often secondary to…
English as she is spoke
José da Fonseca
A Portuguese instructor sets out to write an English conversation manual using only a dictionary and a French phrasebook, producing a masterpiece of unintended comedy.
A House-Boat on the Styx
John Kendrick Bangs
A group of historical luminaries finds an eternal social life on a luxurious houseboat, only to have their exclusive club hijacked by a vengeful pirate.
Condensed Novels: New Burlesques
Bret Harte
This collection is a sharp-witted assembly of parodies that takes the most popular, earnest, and often melodramatic literary trends of the late nineteenth century and gleefully turns them inside out.
The Crow's Nest
Clarence Day
The modern man is a bewildered creature, a descendant of slime who finds himself spinning through space while trying to navigate the absurd, rigid requirements of civilization.
The Turkish Jester
George Borrow
This collection of traditional anecdotes follows the legendary folk hero Nasreddin Hoca, a wise-fool who navigates the absurdities of life with a sharp tongue, a stubborn donkey, and a penchant for turning logic on its head.
Best Short Stories
Unknown
This collection of anecdotes and brief tales offers a snapshot of early twentieth-century wit, capturing the social tensions, war-time anxieties, and everyday ironies of its era. It serves as a reminder that the human impulse to find levity in the face of bureaucracy, marriage, and conflict remains a constant…
$1,000 a Plate
Jack McKenty
A group of beleaguered astronomers on a colonized Mars must contend with the relentless light pollution of a local gambling district that threatens their vital research. Their solution, however, proves far more explosive than intended.
Love Letters of a Rookie to Julie
Barney Stone
The trenches of the Great War feel miles away in these frantic, funny dispatches, where a soldier’s true battles are fought against ill-fitting uniforms, missing ham and eggs, and the relentless antics of his comrade-in-arms.