The Best and Funniest Comedy Books of 2023 (So Far)

As a parody news site, Reductress delivers a savage mockery of life’s trivial embarrassments, indignities, and personal injustices, particularly those suffered by women and millennials. That’s all here in this book written by two of Reductress’ top voices. With that signature tone of aggrieved exhaustion all while punching back against the forces which crush the humanity out of anyone young, How to Stay Productive takes aim on grind culture, and how it’s a total scam. This is a passive-aggressive business book, as if written by bosses to smugly encourage their overworked and anxiety-cursed employees to work harder. After all, you can do it, reader, for you are a “girlboss” who could probably make mental illness their whole brand on Twitter. It’s so over the top in how it paints hustle bros, corporate culture, and the gig economy that it’s dangerously close to being a real business book.

Baume is a pop-cultural chronicler with a focus on LGBTQ history and TV, and in Hi Honey, I’m Homo he lays out — with authority and a deep love — the enormous and crucial role that mainstream sitcoms played in increasing visibility, tolerance, and acceptance for gay and lesbian Americans. It’s a fascinating, and downright inspiring, look at the ways cornball sitcoms either expressly included coded messages, subtext, and characters that marginalized groups could identify with, like the witches who must keep their identities secret on Bewitched. Who even knew that a fine but forgettable show like the cop comedy Barney Miller (1975-1982) featured one of the longest-running and most richly developed plot arcs about a gay couple in TV history to that point? This says nothing of the bold allyship of The Golden Girls, or how Will and Grace and Modern Family showed middle America that coastal LGBTQ people were just, like, people. Hi Honey, I’m Homo is a heartbreaking historical document, but ultimately one that will leave the reader feeling proud of how something as maligned and disposable as the network sitcom used comedy to bring about such profound and important social progress.

George Schlatter is an old-time Hollywood pro, a gregarious producer type whose sincere, charming bewilderment with how amazingly his life played out comes across on the page. He presents his showbiz memoir as a long string of crackling, short, and nonchalant vignettes, stretching from his entry into entertainment through his forays into the bygone era of celebrity-driven TV specials, and ultimately, to his masterpiece, Laugh-In. It’s nice to see a contemporary and critical assessment of Laugh-In, even (or especially) if it’s from one of the people responsible for it. The crowning achievement of Schlatter’s life in comedy is how he helped bridge eras of comedy and audience demographics with one impossible gambit of a show, combining an old-fashioned primetime variety show appealing to the elderly squares dressed in the trappings of the ’60s generation. Schlatter’s story is one of the rapidly changing world of TV and the impact it had on changing the culture in the mid-20th century.

Podcasts have become such a part of the culture that people are making books about them now. One of the first of these is about one of the most influential comedy podcasts ever, Scott Aukerman & Co.’s Comedy Bang! Bang! As that show deconstructs and sends up podcast conventions (and the former Comedy Bang! Bang! TV program presented itself as a surreal hybrid of absurdist sketch and talk show), this humor book parodies humor books while being a pretty good one itself. It opens with endless introductory and preamble material that pokes fun at its own pomposity. But then, when the book starts in earnest, it’s like a sketch-comedy show in literary form. Not only do readers get to delve into the lives of characters from the podcast (like Seth Morris’s Bob Ducca and Andy Daly’s Dalton Wilcox), they’re bombarded with silliness like faux ads, mini-games, sheet music, and a taffy order form.

Comedy doesn’t have to have a target. It can be life-affirming and empathetic. (It’s supposed to get to the core of humanity and what connects us, right?) Lane Moore previously proved to be a viable chronicler of modern relationships with the hilarious and thoughtful How to Be Alone, and here, she trains her attention on the specifics of a miraculous act of human connection: friendship. That adults don’t know how to make friends is a cliché at this point, but Moore explains how it’s quite real and tragic, and in this revelatory and sweet guide, she offers real assistance in the reader’s quest for friendship with a humorous dose of encouragement to always be good to yourself.

Blythe Roberson has come to look for “America,” to embark on the great American road trip — that seemingly magical, romanticized act of declaring independence. But in America the Beautiful? she renders that pretentious literary dream of white dudes (like Jack Kerouac) to be false. Sure, she sees a lot of beautiful national parks and bodies of water, meets interesting people with compelling stories and actual problems, and realizes that we’re all in a climate crisis, but she concludes that the idea of such a quest — one that makes good content (on the page or social media) — is perhaps a little too self-indulgent.

Not Funny is refreshingly and astonishingly different from the surface-level, self-deprecating essay collections written by many other comedians. Through her writing and her act, Jena Friedman acts as a conduit of existential dread, her own and that of those around her. This book captures the hopelessness, cynicism, and utter exasperation with the world that makes Friedman’s stand-up so honest, funny, and uncomfortable. Friedman — showing the audacity and bravery she brought to her work as one of the writers of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm — is as critical of her younger, more naïve self as she is of a crumbling, hostile, increasingly misogynistic world. From her adventures in the insular world of improv to her pointed and thorough takedown of American Girl (the doll company) culture, Friedman mines laughs out of bleakness and resignation.

Taylor Kay Phillips’s A Guide to Midwestern Conversation is a wildly entertaining, precisely critical, and lovingly mocking taxonomy of the people of “flyover country.” Of her own quintessentially midwestern brethren, Phillips (a staff writer at Last Week Tonight With John Oliver) breaks down the elements of the aggressively normal — those friends, relatives, and acquaintances who are content to drive around, eat a lot of casseroles, reluctantly entertain guests, engage in gift-giving one-upmanship, and never ever say what they’re thinking or feeling. If you have a passive-aggressive person in your life, even if they aren’t from the Midwest, you will find A Guide to Midwestern Conversation rather cathartic.