You might find some (terrible) books that try to teach you how to be funny, but you certainly won't find any funny novels there. You'll find musings from Larry the Cable Guy and pictures of cats making stupid faces (these, in fact, might be the same book), but nothing that would make you say, "Hey, wow, this is like Wet Hot American Summer, but in book form!"

That's because they don't put novels in the humor section. Even if they're hilarious, they stick them with every other novel. And if you're digging through just the general fiction section, you'll have a hard time finding funny books, because ...

I don't know what the criteria is for getting "funny" slapped onto the back of a book, but I have to assume it's "having a number of different words," because that's the only thing that The Great Gatsby (heartbreaking and brutal) has in common with Christopher Moore's Lamb (almost impossibly hilarious), both of which have the word "funny" printed on the back cover.

Almost every truly funny book that I've found was discovered by accident. I'll go to a bookstore and pick something out either because of its cover (this is a good thing to do, children) or because the description on the back sounds like it might be funny. Since every description tries to make every novel sound funny, it's a total crapshoot. For every time I blindly stumbled into a Lamb or a Tricky Business or a John Dies at the End (now a major motion picture that just debuted at the Sundance film festival!), there were plenty of times where I ended up with a bunch of novels that were terrible that I won't mention by name because that would be rude (except for About the Author, which was so terrible that I'm still mad that I read it six years ago).

Amazon.com
Give me back the money that I didn't spend on this because I got it from the library, you stupid jerk!

Publishing houses don't know what funny books are, so we're forced to look out for authors on whom we can rely. Which is always tough, because ...

There is nothing like that for comedic novels. As hard as I've looked, I haven't found anything close to what I would consider to be a "production studio" for books that all fall under the same general category of comedic taste. There's no "Apatow Company" for books, or a series of novels that have "Produced by Edgar Wright [or] Paul Feig" stamped on the cover. Why is there an Oprah Book Club and not a collection of novels that Bill Murray likes? I can and do follow individual authors and keep a lookout for what they're doing, but I'm faster at reading books than these authors are at writing them (but, like, barely), so there's usually a lot of waiting around on my end. I can read a new Christopher Moore novel and then wait a year or two until he writes another one, or I can just wander around the bookstore hoping I randomly stumble upon a new hilarious author the way I randomly stumbled upon Moore several years ago.

I Googled "Funny Books," and this was the top result:

Amazon.com
"Those blonde jokes are clean AND short, you say? Sign me up!"

Most "Hilarious Novel" lists you'll find online stick almost exclusively to books published in the early 1900s (at the absolute latest), like they get extra credit for citing obscure older books that are usually less "hilarious" and more "surprisingly not dated" (I don't care how many New Yorker "Funniest Novels of All Time" lists it appears in, Tristram Shandy is not a fucking funny book).

So what, then? What's a guy supposed to do when he runs out of Douglas Adams novels? I want a book as funny as Arrested Development, a book that I have to put down because I'm laughing too hard, with quotes that I want to share with my friends (I'm not very cool and have few long-term friends). Hilarious books should not be this hard to find.