Laughter Therapy: 63 Classic Books of Humorous Tales

A Transatlantic Treasury of Satire, Absurd Fantasy, Farce, and Classic Comic TalesBy Ellis Parker Butler, Honoré de Balzac, Mark Twain, John Kendrick Bangs, Thorne Smith, Robert Fitzgerald, Harry Leon Wilson, H. C. Witwer, F. Anstey, S. R. Crockett, Marietta Holley, Sewell Ford, A. S. M. Hutchinson, Anne Warner, Dornford Yates, Charles Heber Clark, Rudolf Erich Raspe, Finley Peter Dunne, Robert W. Chambers, W. W. Jacobs, F. Morton Howard, Richard Marsh, H. H. Sir Bashford, J. Storer Clouston, O. Henry, Charles Battell Loomis, E. F. Benson, Anita Loos, Wallace Irvin, Lawrence Daniel Fogg, Terry Southern, Henry Wallace Phillips, George V. Hobart, Stephen Leacock, Daisy Ashford, W. A. Darlington, Kendell Foster Crossen, Israel Zangwill, Ring Lardner, Charles Eustace Merriman, Wallace Irwin, Howard Roger Garis, W. Heath Robinson, Lucretia P. Hale, Richmal Crompton, Peter Newell

Listen with Sir Michael Caine™ and 1,000+ voices

Try for $0.00 Get for $2.99

Length356h 18m

About this audiobook

Laughter Therapy gathers sixty-three classic books of humorous tales into a capacious archive of comic invention, ranging from tall tales, farce, parody, and social satire to domestic comedy, absurdist fantasy, and the gently anarchic children's story. Its selections illuminate humor's power to expose pretension, soften misfortune, and recast everyday life as an arena of surprise. Fantastic adventures, deadpan hoaxes, comic misunderstandings, and sharply observed portraits of provincial, urban, and transatlantic society give the volume both historical breadth and sustained entertainment. The contributors represent an unusually wide Anglo-American and European lineage, joining nineteenth-century humorists with twentieth-century practitioners of modern satire. Their varied careers—in journalism, popular fiction, children's literature, theatrical comedy, and literary experiment—bring together vernacular wit, caricature, linguistic play, and institutional critique. The anthology consequently traces important currents in comic writing: the tall-tale tradition, Victorian nonsense and burlesque, the social comedy of manners, and the American idioms of regionalism and magazine fiction. Across these voices, laughter becomes not merely diversion but a cultural instrument for testing class, gender, authority, respectability, and national myth. Recommended for students, scholars, and general readers alike, Laughter Therapy offers the rare opportunity to encounter a broad comic tradition within one volume. Its multiplicity of styles rewards both sustained study and casual browsing, while the juxtapositions among tales foster a lively dialogue about what humor can reveal. Readers will find an educative, expansive, and genuinely delightful survey of literary laughter.

Audiobook details

GenreHumor, General Fiction

Length356 hrs 18 mins

Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices

FormateBook with Audio

Publish dateMar 4, 2025

LanguageEnglish

1The Adventures of a Suburbanite

2The Adventures of a Suburbanite

3I. THE PRAWLEYS

4V. THE NEW MR. PRAWLEY

5VII. CHESTERFIELD WHITING

Show all chapters

6X. ADVANCED GOLF

7Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapters 31 to 35

8HUCKLEBERRY FINN

9Josiah Allen's Wife as a P. A. and P. I

10JOSIAH ALLEN’S WIFE AS A P. A. P. I. SAMANTHA AT THE CENTENNIAL. DESIGNED AS A BRIGHT AND SHINING LIGHT, TO PIERCE THE FOGS OF ERROR AND INJUSTICE THAT SURROUND SOCIETY AND JOSIAH, AND TO BRING MORE CLEARLY TO VIEW THE PATH THAT LEADS STRAIGHT ON TO VIRTUE AND HAPPINESS.

11MY REASONS TO THE KIND AND ALMOST GENTLE READER WHY I DON’T HAVE NO PREFACE TO THIS BOOK.

12WHAT I HAVE WRIT ABOUT.

13WHAT THE KIND ARTIST HAS DONE

14THE JONESVILLE DEBATIN’-SCHOOL.

15THE WIDDER DOODLE.

16A DEBATE ON INTEMPERANCE.

17TIRZAH ANN AS A WIFE.

18P. A. AND P. I.

19HOW I WENT TO ’LECTION.

20HOW WE BOUGHT A SEWIN’ MACHINE AND ORGAN.

21PREPARIN’ FOR OUR TOWER.

22THE WIDDER AND WIDOWER.