There are writers who make you think and writers who make you feel. And then there are writers who make you laugh so suddenly on a train that the person next to you looks alarmed and the person across the aisle moves to a different seat. These writers are rare, and they are precious, and they are not taken as seriously as they should be, because the literary establishment has always been suspicious of anything that produces involuntary joy.
P.G. Wodehouse and Terry Pratchett are the two finest practitioners of the funny sentence in the English language. They operated in different centuries, different genres, and different registers, but they shared one essential quality: they could construct a sentence that detonates in your head three seconds after you have read it, by which point you have already inhaled your coffee and the person next to you on the train has started looking for another seat.
If you have not read either, you are about to have a very good month. If you have read both, you already know everything I am about to say, and you are reading this with the warm satisfaction of a person whose excellent taste is about to be publicly validated. You are welcome.
Wodehouse: The Perfect Machine
Pelham Grenville Wodehouse — Plum to his friends, and he seems to have been friends with everyone — wrote about a world that never quite existed. Edwardian England, or a version of it: country houses with imperious aunts, young men of good breeding and no visible occupation, valets of superhuman competence, and a social order in which the most serious problems are broken engagements, stolen cow creamers, and the question of who will win the prize for the fattest pumpkin at the village fête.
None of this sounds funny. It should not work. The plots are farcical and the stakes are trivial and the characters exist in a bubble that has no relationship to the world outside it. And yet Wodehouse is, line for line, the funniest writer who has ever worked in English, and this is because Wodehouse understood something that most comic writers miss: the comedy is in the sentences.
Not the situation. Not the plot. Not the characters, though they are wonderful. The sentences. Wodehouse wrote comedy at the level of grammar. Each sentence is engineered — there is no other word for it — for maximum delight. The rhythm, the word choice, the elaborate similes that arrive from angles you did not know existed.
A friend — the one responsible for my Wodehouse habit — handed me Right Ho, Jeeves during a particularly grim week in 2011 and said, "Read the first chapter and if you are not laughing by page three, I will buy you dinner." I did not get dinner. I did not get past page two. The book opened something in me that has not closed since. I have read it four times. It is funnier every time, which should be impossible and yet is the defining characteristic of Wodehouse: the jokes improve with repetition because you start to appreciate the engineering.
The essential thing about Wodehouse — the thing that separates him from every comic writer who has tried to imitate him — is his kindness. There is no cruelty in his comedy. The aunts are terrifying but never malicious. The young men are idiots but never contemptible. Even the villains — and Wodehouse had villains, of a sort — are more foolish than wicked. He laughs at humanity without despising it, which is the hardest trick in comedy and the reason his work has lasted a century while sharper, crueller satirists have faded.
Pratchett: The Philosopher in Funny Shoes
Terry Pratchett wrote forty-one Discworld novels about a flat planet balanced on the backs of four elephants standing on a giant turtle swimming through space. This is the premise. If you have stopped reading because this sounds like whimsical fantasy nonsense, I understand your reaction and I assure you it is wrong.
Pratchett used fantasy the way a magician uses misdirection. While you were busy enjoying the jokes about trolls and dwarves and a personification of Death who SPEAKS IN CAPITAL LETTERS and has developed an unhealthy interest in cats, Pratchett was writing about justice, governance, economics, prejudice, the nature of belief, the mechanics of propaganda, the corrosive effects of cynicism, and what it means to be a decent person in an indecent world. He was the most political writer in English fiction of the last fifty years, and most of his readers did not notice because they were too busy laughing.
Where Wodehouse is precise — every word weighed, every comma deliberate — Pratchett is expansive. His books sprawl. They digress. They contain footnotes that are funnier than most authors' best chapters. A Pratchett footnote will start with an observation about the mating habits of a fictional species and end, four lines later, with an insight about human nature so sharp you have to put the book down and sit with it for a moment before you can continue.
I came to Pratchett late — in my mid-twenties, through Guards! Guards!, which remains the book I would choose if forced to pick one novel to represent the human species to an alien civilisation. It is about a group of incompetent city watchmen who are the only people willing to stand between a city and a dragon. It is funny in the way that all Pratchett is funny: generously, relentlessly, and with a moral seriousness that sneaks up on you while you are laughing. By the end, the comedy has earned something that most "serious" novels never achieve — a genuine emotional payoff, rooted in the idea that ordinary, flawed people doing the right thing is the most extraordinary thing in the world.
Pratchett died in 2015 and I am still angry about it. Not in a performative, literary-tribute way. In the way you are angry when a person you relied on stops existing and the world becomes measurably less funny and less wise as a result.
What They Share
On the surface, nothing. Wodehouse wrote about idle English aristocrats in the 1920s. Pratchett wrote about a disc-shaped fantasy world. One avoided meaning; the other smuggled it in by the cartload. One was precise to the point of clockwork; the other was expansive to the point of joyful excess. They occupied different shelves, different centuries, different literary traditions.
But underneath the differences, they shared the things that matter most.
Both took comedy seriously as a craft. Wodehouse revised endlessly — he would pin pages to a clothesline and move them up or down based on how well each one worked, rewriting anything below a certain height until every page earned its position. Pratchett wrote obsessively — multiple books a year, each one denser and sharper than the last, working at a pace that would have destroyed a lesser writer and that eventually, in a different way, destroyed him. Neither treated funny as easy. Both understood that the effortless-seeming joke is the one that required the most effort.
Both were kind writers. This is rarer than it sounds. Comedy, especially English comedy, has a strong tradition of cruelty — of punching down, of finding victims, of making the reader feel superior to the characters. Wodehouse and Pratchett both rejected this. Wodehouse's characters are ridiculous but lovable. Pratchett's are flawed but dignified. Both writers invite you to laugh with humanity rather than at it, and this is why their books make you feel better about the species rather than worse.
And both were, in the deepest sense, optimists. Not naive optimists — Pratchett especially was clear-eyed about the world's capacity for cruelty and stupidity — but optimists in the sense that mattered: they believed that people, given the chance and the right comic novel, might choose to be decent. They wrote books that made decency attractive. This is, I think, the most subversive thing a writer can do.
Where to Start
You want recommendations. Here they are, opinionated and non-negotiable.
Wodehouse: Start with Right Ho, Jeeves. Not The Code of the Woosters, which is marginally better but benefits from knowing the characters. Not the short stories, which are excellent but do not demonstrate the sustained brilliance of a full Wodehouse novel at peak power. Right Ho, Jeeves is the gateway. If you read it and do not laugh, we have nothing further to discuss and I wish you well with whatever joyless existence you have chosen.
After that: The Code of the Woosters, then Leave It to Psmith, then anything in the Blandings Castle series if you prefer eccentric peers and prize-winning pigs to London club life. Wodehouse wrote over ninety books. You will not run out.
Pratchett: Do not — I repeat, do not — start with The Colour of Magic. It is the first Discworld novel and it is the weakest, and it has put more people off Pratchett than any other single factor. Pratchett found his voice around book five and reached full power around book eight, and telling someone to start at book one is like telling them to judge a marathon runner by the first hundred metres.
Start with Guards! Guards! if you want the heart of the series — Sam Vimes and the Night Watch, which became Pratchett's finest creation. Start with Small Gods if you want a standalone that showcases everything Pratchett could do in a single volume. Start with Mort if you want something shorter and lighter that still contains more ideas per page than most authors manage in a career.
After that, you will not need my guidance. The books will lead you.
Why This Matters Now
We live in an era of relentlessly earnest content. Hot takes and outrage cycles. Think pieces that exist to perform seriousness rather than to think. Social media posts calibrated for moral positioning. A content landscape where being Right has become more important than being interesting, and being interesting has become more important than being funny.
Funny is out of fashion in a way that would have baffled both Wodehouse and Pratchett. Not funny as in jokes — there are plenty of jokes online, most of them serving as sugar-coating for opinions. Funny as in the sheer delight of a well-made sentence. Funny as a form of intelligence. Funny as an end in itself, requiring no justification beyond the fact that it makes the reader's day slightly more bearable.
Reading Wodehouse and Pratchett is, in this context, a minor act of resistance. It is a reminder that English can do things other than argue and persuade and sell. It can dance. It can surprise you. It can make you inhale your coffee on a train and frighten the person next to you and not care, because the sentence was worth it, and the next one will be too.
Go read them. Start tonight. Your month is about to get better.