Humor audiobooks page 12

The Bab Ballads

The Bab Ballads are a collection of light verse by W. S. Gilbert, illustrated with his own comic drawings. Gilbert wrote the Ballads before he became famous for his comic opera librettos with Arthur Sullivan. In writing the Bab Ballads, Gilbert developed his unique “topsy-turvy” style, where the humour was derived by setting up a ridiculous premise and working out its logical consequences, however absurd. The Ballads also reveal Gilbert’s cynical and satirical approach to humour. They became famous on their own, as well as being a source for plot elements, characters and songs that Gilbert would recycle in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. The Bab Ballads take their name from Gil...

Pieces of Hate and other Enthusiasms
This book is a collection of humorous short stories about ordinary instances in daily life. We learn many interesting things about life, such as how to court women successfully, what it feels like to be a god, and why sometimes it would be a good idea to exchange one's own newborn baby for a better one at the hospital.
Third Person
The Third Person is an amusing spoof on spooking. The 'ghostly man about the house' in whom two increasingly competitive maiden ladies come to take a proprietary interest is as unlikely to inspire terror as the wraith in one of James's earliest tales. The anticlimactic crisis may need a footnote for younger readers: a Tauchnitz was an unauthorized continental paperback edition of a british or american book which, purely for copyright reasons, was not supposed to be brought back to England. To think of this as smuggling certainly placed, for James's contemporaries, the crimes of the ghostly third person in a hilarious perspective.
What Dress Makes of Us

A wickedly funny book of advice on women’s dress. However old, fat or plain you are, Dorothy Quigley will tell you what not to wear.

Contes humoristiques

Un voyageur rencontre l’amour de sa vie lorsque objets et peintures prennent vie dans une chambre d’hôtes. L’âme d’une maison vit dans un recoin de cheminée. Un acteur de grande notoriété rencontre le diable en personne en jouant le rôle de celui-ci. 1843. Un inventeur original fabrique une machine volante, il disparaît…

Théophile Gautier nous transporte dans le monde fantastique et humoristique du début du XIXe siècle. Ce recueil publié, en 1880, compile huit contes extraordinaires.

• La cafetière, conte fantastique
• Laquelle des deux, histoire perplexe
• L’âme de la maison
• Le garde national réfractaire • Deux acteurs pour un rôle
Lark
"The Lark" has all the charm and freshness which have made Miss Nesbit's former novels so justly popular, and yet the story ts entirely new and original. Two girls, Jane and Lucilla, are led by Jane's guardian to entertain high hopes. The fortune, however, which Jane was to have inherited, has been lost by unlucky speculations, and the two girls have to set about earning their own livings. They experience many adventures and ups and downs of fortune before they meet with the two men who ensure their happiness and prosperity. A delightful story, well worth reading.

Crome Yellow

A shy, introverted young poet. A weekend in a magnificent English country house. A beautiful young lady whom the poet is secretly in love with. An assorted group of guests with varied interests, motives, ambitions and aspirations, and the complex web of history and events that connect all of them.

Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley was his first book, published in 1921, when he was just 27 years old. It is typical of many books written during this period by writers like Thomas Love Peacock and Somerset Maugham, centered round a country mansion and the quaint, British tradition of being invited to spend a weekend with a group of people whom one may or may not know. Crome ...

Chimes From A Jester’s Bells

Part I. The Story of Rollo; Mr. Holliday knows all there is to know about raising children, or at least he thinks he does. His attempts to train his son, Rollo, "in the way he should go," are well-meant, but hilariously unsuccessful--or are they? I believe this is a sort of spoof of the “Rollo” series for children, that was written by Jacob Abbot in the mid 19th century. The characters have the same names and the chapters have a little Q&A at the end like the Abbot books, except these are definitely tongue-in-cheek. These Rollo stories use humor (and a bit of pathos) to teach plain home truths to parents, rather than children.

Part II. Stories and Sketches; It is difficult to give...
Bizarre
A series of essays offering a humorous look at commonplace items and occurrences.
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker was the last of the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett, and is considered by many to be his best and funniest work.

Published in London on 17 June 1771, it is an epistolary novel, presented in the form of letters written by six different characters: Matthew Bramble, a Welsh Squire; his sister Tabitha; their niece and nephew, Jery and Lydia Melford; Tabitha’s maid Winifred Jenkins; and Lydia’s suitor, Wilson.

Much of the comedy arises from differences in the descriptions of the same events by different participants. Attributions of motives and descriptions of behavior show wild variation and reveal much about the character of the teller. T...