So often we think of funny entertainment as escapist and silly and therefore less important than entertainment that’s more overtly serious. But to laugh, to be truly surprised and delighted by something, is a beautiful kind of vulnerability; it can open your mind to seeing humanity in new, profound ways, or shine a clarifying light on the world you already know. Laughing can open your heart, too, sometimes unexpectedly flinging you into a different kind of catharsis: the cry. In honor of the release of Crying Laughing—in which I explore the ways, both successful and not, we use humor to get by—here are some amazing books that made me genuinely laugh and also genuinely think/cry/both.
Grendel’s Guide to Love and War, By Ariel Kaplan
I picked this one up expecting to laugh at some good prank-war high-jinx, and I did—I laughed a lot—but I was not ready to cry so much. It was impossible not to care about the funny, self-deprecating Tom Grendel, so when he started uncovering new revelations about his mother, who’d died from cancer many years before, it pretty much wrecked me. This is a prime example of the genuinely laugh & genuinely cry genre.
Tyrell, By Coe Booth
Tyrell is one of my favorite YA protagonists of all time. From the first page he feels completely real, a voice so alive it jumps off the page and cracks you up with its honesty. But as funny as Tyrell can be, his situation isn’t. He’s living with his mom and younger brother in a homeless shelter in the Bronx, trying to find a way to get the money they need to live elsewhere. And as you read, you think about how many real-life Tyrells there are across the country, across the world, having to grow up way too fast because of circumstances far out of their control, because of oppressive systems of rigged inequality. It takes your breath away. It makes you want to help enact change.
The One Thing, By Marci Lyn Curtis
Oh, how I love a good sarcastic narrator, and Maggie is a fantastic one. Having lost her vision six months earlier, she’s still trying to adjust to her new life when the book starts. But then she meets ten-year-old Ben, and she can see him. This one’s surprising and funny and immensely moving. I laughed at Maggie’s sharp take on everything, and then spent the last thirty pages of the book crying. So, yeah. Another fine addition to the gen-laugh/gen-cry gen-re.
Slaughterhouse-Five, By Kurt Vonnegut
This was probably the first book that showed me humor can be used to tackle Very Serious topics. Somehow, Vonnegut’s book about Billy Pilgrim—a U.S. soldier during WWII who was a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany when it was fire-bombed—and his resulting PTSD, manages to be both hilarious and devastating. I reread it this year for the first time since high school to celebrate its 50th anniversary, and—aside from some outdated, offensive bits—it completely holds up. War is still absurd, and so are Americans.
Beauty Queens, By Libba Bray
And speaking of writers brilliantly and hilariously unpacking American culture, there’s this gem, about a plane full of Miss Teen Dream Pageant reality show contestants that crashes on a tropical island. Full disclosure: I’m in the middle of reading this one, so I can’t speak to the ending, but I have already LOL’d so many times that I couldn’t not include it. Bray’s intelligence and wit tornado through every sentence, bringing on the kinds of belly laughs that are quickly followed by thoughts like, Wow, America’s deeply-ingrained misogyny, not to mention its obsession with materialism, is highly problematic. Not an easy feat.
This One Summer, By Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki
I could not believe how well this incredible graphic novel captured that time in your life when you’re about to become a teenager. It all feels so painfully, joyfully, cringingly real. Which is also why the book is so funny. No matter who you are, it’s hard not to recognize yourself in at least some of these panels. It’s a sad, messy, hopeful, hilarious masterpiece.
The Summer of Jordi Perez (And the Best Burger in Los Angeles), By Amy Spalding
Here’s an extremely tiny moment in this book that’s stuck with me: main character Abby is texting with her sister, waiting and staring at the three dots as her sister writes a response, and when it finally appears, it’s just a short generic couple of sentences. What the heck was all that typing about then? Abby wonders. I LOVE small, hilarious, deeply relatable moments like this one, and Spalding’s book is filled with them. It’s also deceptively powerful. Girl-girl rom-coms are rare enough, and then to have one that’s also refreshingly fat positive means that, as you read, you can actually feel your brain being deprogrammed from years upon years of stories centering the heteronormative experience and its conventional ideas of love and beauty. May we all live long enough to see the straight white dude as sassy sidekick become a tired cliché.
Hope and Other Punch Lines, By Julie Buxbaum
That I’m choosing to put a book that so prominently involves 9/11—one of the most gutwrenchingly awful events in American history—anywhere near this list is a testament to Julie Buxbaum’s abilities as a writer. Through the story of teenagers Abbi, who was in an iconic 9/11 photo when she was one year old, and comedy-obsessed Noah, who has his own connection to that terrible day, Buxbaum looks at how humor can connect and heal us, even in the most somber situations, and she does it masterfully. As Noah says, “But you can be serious and funny at the same time. We need the serious to recognize the funny, and the funny to give us even a shot in hell at surviving the serious.” Well said.