Andy Borowitz's Reading List

"Sinclair Lewis isn’t thought of these days as a funny writer, but his portrayal of the fictional Midwestern bore Babbitt is very funny, and it’s been ripped off many times – usually a sign that something works. I’m not sure if self-satisfaction appeals to me as a target so much as lack of awareness. Of course, that’s another signature characteristic of Babbitt. To take a current example, a reason why someone like Mitt Romney is funny to me is that he’s so blissfully unaware of other people and how they will take his comments. On a campaign trip to the Daytona racetrack, he made fun of the inexpensive rain ponchos that the race fans were wearing. The whole point of his visit was to pretend that he had the common touch, but he just couldn’t help himself. I find that hilarious."

"Scoop starts with a case of mistaken identity – a naive nature writer whose last name happens to be Boot is sent to cover a war zone instead of a novelist named Boot, whom the newspaper meant to send. Through no effort of his own, he winds up scooping all the seasoned reporters covering the same events. Everything about this book is perfect, from the prose to the characters to the Swiss-clock workings of the plot. Hypocrisy, laziness, mendacity and arrogance are always good for starters. They’ve been around for a long time and always will be – not so good for humanity, but excellent for satirists."

"This is also Kingsley Amis’s best novel, and maybe the best novel ever written about university life. The main character, Jim Dixon, is one of the great scoundrels in literature, but you love him. I didn’t know that about Larkin, which I guess means I’m not a scholar. My greatest collaborator was Henry Beard, who founded [the American humour magazine] National Lampoon . I worked with Henry Beard in the early 1980s when I was right out of college. We wrote a screenplay together for Warner Brothers, which probably should have been made but wasn’t. The story department called the first draft the best they had ever read, and so the executives proceeded to make us write seven or eight more drafts, each one weaker than the last. After that, I think Henry decided that was enough Hollywood for him. We’ve remained good friends over the years. There’s no one funnier or quicker. I learned no comedy secrets at The Harvard Lampoon except this: It is possible to make a living as a comedian rather than as a lawyer, which had been my Plan A before I joined the Lampoon . So I owe the Lampoon that much, which is considerable."

"Guy Grand is the richest man in the world or thereabouts. The book is a series of pranks in which he sets out to prove that people will do anything for money. It’s almost Candide -like in the simplicity of its conception. What it says is that Hobbes was right."

"The narrative voice of that girl, Mattie Ross, is what makes this book such a standout, and the characterisation of “Rooster” Cogburn, her drunken yet surprisingly effective partner in her quest. As before, I have to demur by saying that describing why something is funny is a pretty good way of making it seem not funny. But I urge everyone who wants a good laugh to read it. Plus it’s very short – a good quality in a comic novel. In the introduction to the anthology I edited, The 50 Funniest American Writers , I pointed out the futility, as it seemed to me, of ranking comic writers – or any artists for that matter – in any pantheon of any kind. The title of the anthology was a joke, something that people who skipped the introduction may have missed. So I’m going to stick with that and plead the Fifth here. I will say that Portis is becoming less and less overlooked as people discover his books. He’s wonderful. On Twitter, it helps to be timely and concise. But that’s nothing new. Mark Twain would have been great at Twitter. But if he had had Twitter he might never have gotten around to writing Huckleberry Finn . Maybe that’s what Twitter is doing to comedy – diverting our attention from longer forms into short bursts of funniness. Only time will tell whether this is a net gain or loss. I try not to think too much about it. It’s a lot of fun right now. Definitely the typos."