Humorous Medieval Fantasy Book to Read Suggestions

[castlewise]

This isn't fantasy, and its not strictly speaking humorous, but the Cadfael books are really good dark ages mystery stories. They made a TV series out of them that holds its own.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uB20YH0ZT0

 

[Siege_TF]

A lot of anime have their beginnings as manga, Pokemon being an exception, and the very first run was penned by a former h-manga artist, which shows in the JP version, and is hilarious. With Slayers there are a few novels as well. Can't say which came first though, but the novel I read is told from a first-person perspective of Lina, and does give you some insight as to why she's a bit of a *****.

 

[syaoran728]

If you could possibly find them, the "Slayers" is a fun fantasy series.

Isn't this a Manga/Anime series? Don't tell me it was a novel at first.

Yes it was, the Slayers were originally a novel series. I think it even was partially a retelling of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign the author was a part of. The first few books were translated and published but are now really hard to find.

 

[Drathnoxis]

I remember the Xanth books by Piers Anthony to have a fair bit of humor, or at least a lot of puns.

 

[Tsukuyomi]

If you can find them, Robert Asprin's Myth series was pretty damn good to me.

The story kind of messes with a lot of traditional themes of sorcery and whatnot and pokes fun at a bunch of things. The main character is Skeeve, a human from a fairly backwater dimension who gets apprenticed to a Magician named Garkin who....well, let's just say Garkin isn't his mentor for long and things get weirder and funnier after that. I think what I enjoy best about the series is that it likes to take the mystic and make it mundane, meanwhile mundane things we know are outright odd. The biggest example of this is the way magic itself works in the series, as well as what constitutes a 'Demon.' In both cases, things kind of get flipped on their head in enjoyable ways. Plus I'm usually a big fan of the two-man show if it's done well and Skeeve and his second mentor do it in a pretty good way to me.

 

[trollnystan]

I might try a few more, better recieved, books.

If you ever decide to give Discworld another go I suggest skipping the first two books and starting from the third, then just reading down the list from there.

The first two are... kinda messy. They're still entertaining, but I would hesitate to call them good. The third book was where he really hit his stride.

I was told this same thing by the person who got me onto them, and I disregarded the advice. ("Start a series at number three? Sacrilege!")

The rest of the series is, in my opinion, solid gold, with a few iffy ones here and there. However, the latest few books (inluding Snuff have been, once again my opinion, a definite decline. I'd say the last of the greats was Unseen Academicals, although some people didn't like that one either.

Thank you for your suggestion, but I have to ask:
Doesn't need to read the first two to see the Theme of the world to understand the other books?

Not really as the first two, and to a lesser extent also the third, are really rather different from the rest of the books. The character Death for example is vastly different in the first two than he is in Mort, which is the fourth book. I don't think I've read the first two more than twice, while I've read all the others LOTS of times.

However it is the first time you meet Rincewind and Twoflower, the latter making the later book Interesting Times a little more fun to read.

 

[beastro]

Never found these kinds of books and humourous books in general like Hitchhiker's Guide.

So much of humour to me is seeing people stuck in circumstances either not of their choice or completely of their choice and them getting their just deserts. It's hard to imagine a situation like that when you're essentially creating it in your mind, manufacturing the situation and thus making it "fake".

With that said, works like Discworld and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy come off as someone going on about things as if they're the most cleverest bastard in the world when they're coming off as being as sly as a little kid telling his first knock-knock joke.

 

[Ratty]

If you could possibly find them, the "Slayers" is a fun fantasy series.

The first 2 seasons of the anime cover the same material as the books that were translated into English, if you'd rather go that route. (The 3rd season was an original story with input from the author of the books. As I believe the much-later 4th season, which was split into two parts, was.) Unfortunately the vast majority of the Slayers books, and none of the even-more popular prequel-spinoff "Slayers Special" series[footnote]Which co-starred Naga the Serpent.[/footnote] were ever translated into English. Though some of the Slayers Special books were adapted into OVA episodes.

captcha: "hard captcha is hard" more like trying to hard captcha! I'll get my coat.

If you could possibly find them, the "Slayers" is a fun fantasy series.

Isn't this a Manga/Anime series? Don't tell me it was a novel at first.

It was. More precisely the franchise began as a series of "light novels", which are books that are somewhere between manga and a traditional book, short with plenty of illustrations. And before long there was a prequel spinoff series which ran twice as long as the original "main" series. As I mentioned above, most of these books were never translated into English.

 

[Mikeybb]

Triumff by Dan Abnett.

It's not strictly fantasy, in the sense that it's set in an England that reached the Elizabethan period and, due to the existence of magic, stayed there.

http://angryrobotbooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Triumff-front-72dpi-198x300.jpg

?Triumff: Her Majesty?s Hero is a witch?s brew of alternate history, hocus pocus, cracking action and cheesy gags. Reads like Blackadder crossed with Neal Stephenson. It?s a Kind of Magick ? don?t miss it.?
? Stephen Baxter

 

[SweetShark]

Just to update for the book I am reading "MogWorld" for the people are interested to read it:

I will admit, the whole story of the book have a well planned structure to keep the things interesting and humorous, but after you learn the big secret of the whole plot, it get a little repetitive fast...
The places the heroes meet are little boring and not very colourful and and the other annoying character I told at first is still f*cking annoying.
However, a specific character who made a appearance in the middle of the story made me to keep reading. Let's just say he is just WONDERFUL to be part of this story.

 

[Twoflowers]

Although it's not strictly speaking comedy I would recommend the Trylogia Husycka by Andrzej Sapkowski. The books have a lot of funny moments in them and are in my opinion superior to his more well-known witcher novels.