Free summaries
Humour — page 5
605 public-domain humour books, summarised. Page 5 of 13.
Jonathan and His Continent: Rambles Through American Society
Max O'Rell
This sharp, witty nineteenth-century travelogue views the bustling energy of Gilded Age America through the charmingly skeptical eyes of a cultured French observer.
Yorkshire Ditties, Second Series: To which is added The Cream of Wit and Humour
John Hartley
Hard work, tight budgets, and local pride shape life in the industrial North.
The Merman and the Figure-Head
Clara F. (Clara Florida) Guernsey
A enchanted sea-creature mistakes a merchant ship's wooden figurehead for a living ocean goddess, giving up his sea home to follow an unrequited, wooden love around the globe.
Why Marry?
Jesse Lynch Williams
A bright, fiercely intelligent young woman refuses to marry the scientist she loves, arguing that legal matrimony will destroy their equality and his career—setting off a weekend of hysterical panic among her traditional family.
A Bold Stroke for a Husband: A Comedy in Five Acts
Hannah Cowley
A spirited comedy of manners set in Spain, this play follows two women navigating the constraints of marriage and courtship with wit, disguise, and strategic subversion.
The History of the Hen Fever. A Humorous Record
Geo. P. (George Pickering) Burnham
This satirical account captures a moment when mid-century America lost its collective mind over the breeding and exhibition of fancy chickens. It is a sharp, candid memoir of a self-aware provocateur who both fueled the frenzy and profited immensely from it.
Pine Tree Ballads: Rhymed Stories of Unplaned Human Natur' up in Maine
Holman Day
The Maine woods and coasts are home to a rugged, humorous, and deeply felt brand of humanity. These verses celebrate the lives of the plain-spoken, hard-working people who built their world among the stones and the sea.
Wehman Bros.' Irish Yarns Wit and Humor, No. 2
Anonymous
These gathered anecdotes offer a window into a specific style of immigrant storytelling, where the collision of cultures and the misinterpretation of language serve as the primary engines of wit.
Special Delivery
Damon Knight
A young couple’s domestic life is upended by the arrival of an unborn child who possesses a lethal intellect, telepathic reach, and a profound contempt for his parents.
Jack and the Check Book
John Kendrick Bangs
Wealth, power, and the absurdity of Gilded Age finance collide when classic fairy tale heroes are dropped into the cutthroat boardrooms of early 20th-century New York. Armed with magic, these legendary figures outwit the era’s most ruthless "captains of industry" at their own game.
No Moving Parts
Murray F. Yaco
In a sterile, stagnant future where technology is designed to be perfect and permanent, a young man discovers that the only way to fix a broken ship is to break the rules of his own society.
Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, August 27, 1892
Various
A snapshot of Victorian life, this collection captures the wit, political anxieties, and peculiar amusements of the late nineteenth century. It serves as an archive of a vanished London, preserving the laughter and frustrations of a bygone era.
Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, July 21, 1920
Various
This collection captures the sharp, cynical, and weary wit of post-war London. It serves as a time capsule of a society struggling to find its footing amidst political skepticism and the absurdity of daily life.
The Prince of Graustark
George Barr McCutcheon
The romantic entanglements of European royalty and American wealth collide in this lighthearted, high-society farce. A young prince seeks a bride of his own choosing, only to find that his heart and his political obligations are on a collision course.
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr
Wallace Irwin
A satirical riff on the famous Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, this work imagines a long-lost son of the Persian poet living in Borneo, trading his father’s wine for a steady diet of tobacco and cynical observation.
Unvarnished Tales
William Mackay
A grandly titled gentleman sells his father's stolen snuff-box back to him for a cool thousand pounds, only to discover that every domestic threshold conceals its own absurd, desperate blackmail scheme.
Is sex necessary?
James Thurber
Sex has become unnecessarily complicated, turning a simple biological impulse into an exhausting, paper-heavy obsession.
The Water Ghost and Others
John Kendrick Bangs
Every Christmas Eve, a spectral figure dripping with icy lake water materializes at Harrowby Hall to drench the current heir, initiating a sequence of absurd encounters between stubborn mortals and deeply practical ghosts.
Thursday Evening: A Comedy in One Act
Christopher Morley
A young married couple on the brink of domestic exhaustion lets a mountain of dirty dishes turn a quiet evening into a marital battlefield.
Mr. Punch in Wig and Gown: The Lighter Side of Bench and Bar
Unknown
Lawyers are often seen as solemn figures, but here they are stripped of their dignity through sharp satires and legal parodies.
More E. K. Means: Is This a Title? It Is Not. It Is the Name of a Writer of Negro Stories, Who Has Made Himself So Completely the Writer of Negro Stories That This Second Book, Like the First, Needs No Title
E. K. (Eldred Kurtz) Means
A sleepy Louisiana hamlet becomes a stage where local white authority and an interconnected Black community test boundaries through comedic misunderstandings, runaway panics, and absurd schemes.
The Honeymoon: A comedy in three acts
Arnold Bennett
A newlywed English aviator and his charming bride find their quiet seaside escape shattered on their very first day of marriage when professional duty, overbearing parents, and an absurd legal mistake threaten their future together.
Sweet and Twenty: A Comedy in One Act
Floyd Dell
A pair of strangers accidentally fall in love, only to discover that their families have already orchestrated their union, forcing them to confront the suffocating, absurd reality of modern marriage.
Jiglets: A series of sidesplitting gyrations reeled off—
Walter Jones
A relentless vaudevillian narrator shares a series of disreputable, rapid-fire anecdotes about hard luck, bad actors, and the absurdities of early 20th-century American life.
Verse and Worse
Harry Graham
A journey through the absurdity of the human condition, where the only thing more reliable than a bad reputation is the certainty that the righteous are doomed to be bored.
Comical People
Unknown
A whimsical collection of tales set in a humanized animal kingdom, this work offers a satirical lens on the social anxieties and class hierarchies of mid-Victorian England. It captures the absurdity of status-seeking through the eyes of its anthropomorphic cast.
Steve Brown's Bunyip, and Other Stories
John Arthur Barry
The sea and the outback are not merely settings in these tales, but volatile characters that test the limits of human endurance, morality, and survival in the harsh, expansive landscape of nineteenth-century Australia.
Samantha on Children's Rights
Marietta Holley
A sharp-witted rural matron turns her gaze toward the stifling conventions of child-rearing, offering a humorous, common-sense critique of how adults often fail the young by prioritizing vanity over genuine connection.
Make Mine Homogenized
Rick Raphael
A quiet Nevada ranch becomes the unlikely epicenter of the space race when a common Guernsey cow begins producing high-octane rocket fuel.
The Electric Man: Being the One Act Version of the Three Act Farcical Comedy of the Same Name
Charles Hannan
HOOK A frantic inventor tries to hide his failed mechanical double, only to have the automaton come to life and wreak havoc in a chaotic race to save his inheritance.
The Story of the Two Bulls
John R. (John Rogers) Bolles
A deacon’s hidden pride leads to a Sunday morning catastrophe when his obsession with livestock pits two rival bulls against each other, turning his home into a chaotic battlefield of shattered glass and broken furniture.
A Parody on Iolanthe
D. (Davison) Dalziel
A whimsical, brass-heavy satire that reframes the Victorian stage as a love letter to the Chicago & Alton Railroad, where industry and fairyland collide in an engine-room of corporate pride.
The Re-echo Club
Carolyn Wells
A witty collection of literary parodies, this book imagines famous poets reimagining the same trivial subjects, from a purple cow to a Cubist painting, with hilarious and often biting results.
![Cover of The Widow [To Say Nothing of the Man]](https://cdn.myebooksbuy.com/c/the-widow-to-say-nothing-of-the-man-helen-rowland.webp)
The Widow [To Say Nothing of the Man]
Helen Rowland
A cynical, witty exploration of courtship, marriage, and the eternal games played between men and women. This is a playful, sharp-tongued dialogue on the art of romantic manipulation.
Venus is a Man's World
William Tenn
A world run entirely by women sends a ship of hopeful brides to a rough, male-dominated frontier where men still hold the power.
A Parody on Patience
D. (Davison) Dalziel
A satirical, corporate-sponsored adaptation merges Gilbert and Sullivan’s popular operetta with brazen nineteenth-century railway advertising, turning Victorian aestheticism into a commercial for Midwestern train travel.
The Clockmaker
Thomas Chandler Haliburton
A sharp-tongued Connecticut peddler rides through 1830s Nova Scotia, hawking cheap clocks to gullible locals while delivering a relentless, humorous critique of North American society.
As the Crow Flies: From Corsica to Charing Cross
Walter Phelps Dodge
The nineteenth-century travelogue captures a world of Mediterranean sunshine, misty English moors, and fading royal scandals. It offers an intimate, wandering tour through the landscapes and preoccupations of a bygone European aristocracy.
Comic Arithmetic
Percival Leigh
This satirical manual turns the dry, rigid rules of mathematics into a biting critique of Victorian hypocrisy. It invites readers to laugh at the ledger-book morality of a society obsessed with profit, status, and appearances.
Accept no substitutes
Robert Sheckley
A man desperate to escape the constraints of societal morality finds his life upended by a contraband item he barely understands. This fast-paced narrative explores the collision of human obsession and unforeseen biological reality.
English as She is Taught: Being Genuine Answers to Examination Questions in Our Public Schools
Unknown
A collection of genuinely bizarre, humorous answers plucked from late-19th-century classrooms, this volume reveals the absurd results of forcing children to memorize complex information they do not actually understand.
Poems on Golf
Unknown
A collection of verse both humorous and earnest, these pages capture the spirit of an era when golf was as much a social ritual as a test of skill. Through heroic couplets, sonnets, and spirited songs, the game emerges not merely as a sport, but as a central pillar of community, health, and Scottish identity.
Fontainbleau
John O'Keeffe
The charm of this piece lies in its brisk, farcical energy, capturing a moment when English travelers were as preoccupied with their own manners as they were with the foreign customs they sought to mimic or deride.
The Placid Pug, and Other Rhymes
Alfred Bruce Douglas
This collection of verse offers a whimsical, sharp-tongued taxonomy of the animal kingdom, using the habits of beasts to hold a mirror up to the absurdities of human society. It is a witty, rhythmic exploration of manners, morality, and the quiet relief of non-human existence.
Friend Mac Donald
Max O'Rell
The sharp-witted observations of a traveler define a national character through humor, thrift, and a legendary devotion to self-improvement. It is a portrait of a people who manage to be deeply religious and intensely pragmatic at once.
Through Connemara in a governess cart
E. Oe. (Edith Oenone) Somerville
This account of a journey through the Irish wilderness captures the spirit of adventure, the absurdity of travel, and the stubborn personality of an unreliable mule.
An Irishman's Difficulties with the Dutch Language
J. Irwin (John Irwin) Brown
This lighthearted account of a linguistic blunderer captures the absurd gap between textbook rules and the living, breathing reality of a foreign tongue.
Mr. Punch's Dramatic Sequels
St. John Hankin
The curiosity of an audience often outlives the final curtain, leaving us to wonder what becomes of our favorite characters after they exit the stage. This collection provides those missing chapters, imagining the messy, mundane, or ironic aftermaths of literary legend.