The Greatest Humour and Satire
This selection of humorous and satirical literature is based on the continuing research carried out for The Greatest Literature of All Time and additional research into humorous and satirical fiction acclaimed by the world's readers, writers, critics and scholars.
Humor and satire are here considered to belong to the same literary genre. If you have to differentiate them, you might say humour makes funny while satire makes fun of. In practice though, they overlap. It can be argued that all humour has some satirical target, however big or small, and all satire has some humorous content.
The Greatest Humour and Satire focuses on the genre's major fictional works, including novels, novellas, plays, long poems and collections.
You may also be interested in The Greatest Historical Fiction or The Greatest Literary Fiction.
This list is updated as new works are discovered and appreciation of older works evolves. Please note the revision date when citing the list.
Latest update: November 27, 2025
The Misanthrope reads at first like one of those overheated old Russian novels in which everyone talks and talks, all very excitedly, while the action happens elsewhere. It's certainly Molière's most reflective play.... Critique • Quotes • Translations • Buy the book
There's so much to enjoy here, it's surprising this is not Molière's most popular play. After its initial run of twenty performances, it was hardly performed for several centuries until revived in the mid-1900s. And even now... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy the book
Your first go at The Country Wife may leave you mystified. Especially mixed up over all the criss-crossing plots involving characters who can scarcely be told apart. They're all randy, witticism-spouting, wealthy layabouts.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book
I'm not sure why The Rape of the Lock is Alexander Pope's most famous poem. I understand why it might have been popular in its day. It satirizes an incident that was infamous in a certain aristocratic crowd.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book
Two things keep me from dismissing the drama She Stoops to Conquer as severely overrated. One: I don't recall seeing it performed. Live on stage it may be hilarious for all I know. And two: if it's overrated, it's been long.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book
Northanger Abbey is the satire on popular literature Jane Austen had to write before she could get down to creating her own classics. It often happens in a first novel an author is driven to imitate and have fun with the work.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book
In our world the escapades of young Tom Sawyer are recounted in the shadow cast by his more famous friend, Huckleberry Finn. Yet, during author Mark Twain's life, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was his most.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy the book
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of those modern classics you should re-read every ten years or so. Partly because, like most classics, it keeps giving, offering up more and different aspects each time. Read in youth.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy the book
If your first exposure to Mark Twain's time travel tale was the Disney or other screen adaptations, you may be shocked by your reading of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Shocked by.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy the book
If you come to G.K. Chesterton's avowed masterpiece expecting a piece of early twentieth-century realism, you're going to be very surprised. If you've heard it's a mystery—hopefully along the lines of the.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy the book
Stephen Leacock gets compared to Mark Twain all the time, which means people like me have to keep pointing out how different he is. We have to keep pointing to Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town and.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy the book
Stephen Leacock's Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich hardly ever gets discussed without being compared to Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. The two are seen as companion pieces, Sunshine Sketches being.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy the book
Life in smalltown America has long been celebrated or satirized in fiction, but seldom as comprehensively or as pointedly as in Sinclair Lewis's first great novel, some would argue his greatest work. The impact of Main Street.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy the book
A century after its first publication, the story of George Babbitt can elicit reactions of both "This is so dated!" and "Just like today!" And often from the same readers. Sinclair Lewis's most influential novel, Babbitt, deftly satirizes.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy the book
When they got around to making the movie of Elmer Gantry—more than three decades after the novel came out—they still felt compelled to preface it with a warning: We believe that certain aspects of Revivalism can bear.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book
I wonder if people who refer to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World as a cautionary tale—that is, those who aren't confusing it with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four—could actually spell out what it is cautioning against.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book
The Day of the Locust was so underrated in 1939 when it came out and in the years immediately following author Nathanael West's death in 1940, that when critics eventually rediscovered the man's works they.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book
Animal Farm is a work I include on the list of greatest works under protest. It's not that I dislike George Orwell. I like most of his work very much. Nor do I consider Animal Farm particularly bad. It's very cleverly done for.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book
Whenever he was told he's never written anything else as good as Catch-22, Joseph Heller was tempted to reply, "Who has?" A bit of hyperbole. There are plenty of modern novels as good as, or better than, Catch-22.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book
To get an idea of what the Hitchhiker's Trilogy is like, you have only to read the titles of the five novels that comprise it: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; The Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Life, the.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book
The story behind the discovery of this novel has become such an inspiring and sad modern legend that I want to be able to say the novel itself is brilliant. Either that, or be able to call it a disaster—to spite misguided.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book
