H ere at Five Books , we love covering the shortlists for the annual Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction . The judges are fantastic at flagging up new books with humorous elements—sometimes cosy, feel-good comedy and sometimes ‘serious’ literary fiction whose dark themes are offset by hilarious turns of phrase. There’s room for both in the well-kept library!
This year, to celebrate the Wodehouse Prize’s 25th anniversary, they decided to offer an extra award to recognise the ‘winner of winners’. To do so, they asked a group of judges—comedian Tatty Macleod, designer Patrick Grant, television presenter Claudia Winkleman, comic Sindhu Vee, and Hay Festival founder Peter Florence—to review every winning novel since the prize’s founding.
But how to choose the funniest book of the 21st century? Judge Tatty Macleod told Five Books : “‘Funny’ can be a complicated thing to ask of a book, because you are not always necessarily going to be laughing out loud. That’s a hard bar to hold a book to, especially if it’s over 300 pages. I can’t expect to be laughing out loud all the time.
“It’s more about whether the book is observationally funny, if it gives me an interesting perspective. Do I want to pick this book up? Is it like a warm hug? Because that’s what I look for in a funny book. Finding abook that captures that sense of lightness and escapism, or of going into a different world or a different life and losing themselves in that, and having a good chuckle along the way—that’s what I was looking for.”
Comparing older books with more recently published novels could be tricky, she noted—”it’s been an interesting exercise to see how humour and comedy adapts over time.” Nevertheless it was a 2005 novel that ultimately won out, when the judges selected A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian as their winner. Its author, the British-Ukrainian writer Marina Lewycka died earlier this year, but reportedly was told of her triumph shortly before she passed away.
“A Short History of Tractors in Ukraine captures perfectly the hilarious complexity of family dynamics,” explained Tatty Macleod of the judge’s decision. “It deals marvellously with the shifting relationship with ageing parents. It’s as absurd as it is moving and a very worthy winner for the Vintage Bollinger Prize.”
Below, we’ve compiled the full list of previous winners of the Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, to help you select your next humorous read. We’d love to hear if you agree with the judges—let us know how many of the books you’ve read, and which you think is the funniest book of the 21st century (so far).
2025
“It’s a debut novel set in the Middle Ages in England. It’s narrated by a young girl, Tibb, who is very put-upon—a vagrant who is looking after her mother. Vagrancy is a capital offense, so she has to stay on the run. It’s written in this extraordinary register. The sensibility is very Chaucerian. There’s low humour, bawdiness, slapstick, and it is all set within this world where people want to believe in miracles. Tibb falls in with a group of travelling players, who come up with a way to confect a miracle.” Read more...
The Funniest Books of 2025
Stephanie Merritt ,
Journalist
2024
“With no preamble, he presents us with an informal, chatty Syracuse of 412 BC. He can see the place and hear the tone so clearly in his head that the reader, whilst knowing perfectly well that both tone and story are fiction, never doubts him. That’s quite a feat.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction of 2025
Katharine Grant ,
Historical Novelist
2023
“Yes, there are very good jokes in it. But it’s also just a humorous way of approaching the world that feels like a beautiful infusion of sanity. It’s easy to be anxious, concerned, traumatised, disrupted… the world is really difficult. But a bit of Mortimer makes it bearable and amusing, and he reminds you of the joy of talking and telling stories.” Read more...
The Funniest Books of 2023
Peter Florence ,
2022
🏆 Winner of the 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction⭐ Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022
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“That’s one of the most powerful elements of this book—the disjunction between the horror and the humour. Again, this is a historical narrative, beginning with the killing of Emmett Till in 1955, and addressing racial oppression in the United States, but with wonderful moments of fantasy, mysticism, magic, mixed with knockabout farce. It’s disconcerting, while you’re thinking about the long tradition of lynching in the South, to have these Keystone Cops moments. But it does intensify the emotional response and keeps you thinking on every page about what it is really like to live with this kind of systemic injustice over centuries.” Read more...
The Best Fiction of 2022: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Neil MacGregor ,
Art Historians, Critics & Curator
2021
🏆 Winner of the 2021 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction
Herman Gertsch married into money. Feeling self-conscious about his lack of career, he asks for a job in a glitzy new gallery in rural Somerset, where he soon fails his way to success. This art world caper features jet-setting dealers, snobbish curators and a case of mistaken identity. An entertaining satire with an extensive, pleasingly eccentric cast of characters.
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2020
“I used to work with this theatre director called Ken Campbell, and he used to say that the secret of comedy is silly plus sensible equals funny, while silly plus silly equals stupid. Flake , for me, is the ultimate silly plus sensible equals funny. Because it’s ice cream trucks warring about whose space is whose, who should be selling ice cream on what land, that kind of stuff. Territory war, essentially. There’s so much heart in it.” Read more...
The Funniest Books of 2020
Pippa Evans ,
Comedians & Humorist
2019
🏆 Winner of the 2019 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 🏆 Winner of the 2020 Comedy Women in Print Prize
Nina Stibbe—author of the charming Love, Nina, diaries written while working as a nanny for London Review of Books editor Mary-Kay Wilmers—finally won the Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction in 2019 after previously being shortlisted in 2015 and 2017. Reasons to be Cheerful, a humorous coming of age story about a young dental assistant in Leicester, was her fourth novel. Expect "sharp observations, period details and cheeky moments of insight and open-hearted affection" says The Guardian .
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2018
Prize withheld ‘after judges failed to laugh ‘
2017
🏆 Winner of the 2017 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction
The fourth book in the Bridget Jones's Diary
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2016
🏆 Joint winner of the 2016 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction⭐ Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2016
When Annie, a struggling London chef, discovers she has unwittingly purchased a valuable painting in a second-hand shop, she finds herself a target of unscrupulous collectors, auctioneers and 'experts' of all kinds. "The book may on occasion be silly and over-the-top, even for a satire," declared the New York Times reviewer. "But Ms. Rothschild writes with such exuberance and spins such a propulsive yarn that you happily accept these excesses as part of the package."
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Set in Dublin in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, The Mark and the Void follows French émigré Claude Martingale through his daily life as an investment banker —quite literally, through the eyes of a fictional novelist called Paul. This follow-up to Paul Murray's breakthrough book Skippy Dies is tricksier than its predecessor, explained Publishers Weekly, but shares the same "quick wit". A "page-turner with smarts, an absurdist riff on our economic follies."
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2015
🏆 Winner of the 2015 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction
A gentle standalone comedy from the author of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, which has sold more than 25 million copies. In Fatty O'Leary's Dinner Party, a good-natured American couple attempt to uncover their roots in rural Ireland, but suffer indignities at every turn. McCall Smith matches his comic invention with his trademark compassion.
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2014
🏆 Winner of the 2014 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction
Edward St. Aubyn's satire on the pretentious world of literary prizes represents a departure for the novelist, best known for his shocking, semi-autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels. Widely received as a revenge novel, after the final novel of that series, At Last , failed to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize—something St. Aubyn brusquely denies—it has received mixed reviews. Expect "sly, chatty third-person narration," explains The Guardian, and a "constant onslaught of wordplay, bathos, farcical mishap and circular logic."
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2013
🏆 Winner of the 2013 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction
This satirical follow-up to Jacobson's Booker Prize-winning The Finkler Question introduces the writer Guy Ableman, "a man ruled by pointless ambition and a blazing red penis." His twin preoccupations with his temptingly attractive mother-in-law and the decline of modern literary culture drives this rambunctiously clever meta-comedy.
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2012
“Most people will have heard of Discworld . There are 41 books in the series. Pratchett was an amazing and prolific writer…Snuff is one of those great ones, and it stands alone quite well. It is a cozy murder mystery set in a stately manor in the equivalent of the English countryside—a place called The Shire, in which the local magistrates are the great and the good, and in which they are all complicit in a murder…The hero of this book is Sam Vimes. He’s one of the most important heroes of the Pratchett canon. He’s a cop and he’s on vacation. A delightful trope of the police procedural is the cop on vacation who stumbles upon a murder, and this novel has some of the best little tasty elements of that. His loving and quite well-drawn wife, Sybil, has told him he’s overworked and has conspired with his colleagues and his boss (who’s effectively the dictator of the city for which he is chief of police) to force him to go on vacation. Of course, Vimes immediately literally stumbles upon a murder.” Read more...
The Best Noir Crime Thrillers
Cory Doctorow ,
Novelist
2011
“This book was a lot of fun. It’s obviously fiction, but what I like about it is the way Shteyngart takes a pretty wonky concept in geoeconomics and makes it real. It begins in a not too distant America that is over a barrel with its Chinese creditors, financially strapped and therefore constrained in a lot of the geopolitical choices that it’s trying to make in the world.” Read more...
The best books on Geoeconomics
Jennifer M Harris ,
International Relation
2010
“I thought it was very funny. It was an interesting take on the perceptions of some of the big issues between society and scientists, and the fact that we as a society don’t really understand what scientists are doing. Scientists are these objects that go around winning Nobel prizes, but actually not many of us really appreciate that they are human beings as well. “ Read more...
The best books on Renewable Energy
Juliet Davenport ,
Environmentalist
2009
🏆 Winner of the 2009 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction
Jeff Atman, an arts journalist, meets the enchanting Laura while in Venice to cover the opening of the Biennale. The opening section, Dyer has said, is a play on Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, but "operates at a far lower cultural level." In the Mann novella, he added, "Aschenbach's obsession with the young boy, Tadzio, is tied up with some quest for ideal beauty, in my book the romance with Laura is very carnal and hedonistic—though that could itself be said to represent some kind of ideal."
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2008
🏆 Winner of the 2008 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction
In a moment of recklessness, Tom Brodzinksi flicks his last-ever cigarette butt off a balcony—hitting a man below and setting off a surreal chain of events that will soon find him trekking through the desert hinterlands of a war-torn country. A smart, satirical, speculative novel that divided critics on its release in 2008.
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2007
🏆 Winner of the 2007 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction
A fisheries expert working for the British civil service is tasked with an impossible project—populating the desert wadis of Yemen with Scottish salmon—in the name of improving international relations. Told in the epistolary style, the narrative takes the form of emails, letters, Hansard transcripts, and newspaper articles. It was adapted into a hit romantic comedy starring Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt in 2011.
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2006
🏆 Winner of the 2006 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction
A law-abiding housewife from Glasgow discovers her dark side in this comic thriller. Expect murder, mayhem and madcap missions in Brookmyre's ninth novel. The Guardian declared it: "sharp, memorable and occasionally surprisingly touching".
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2005
🏆 Winner of the 2005 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction⭐ Shortlisted for the Orange in 2005⭐ Longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2005
In this humorous family drama—which was a major bestseller on release in 2005—two feuding sisters join forces to see off a glamorously unsuitable suitor for their widower father. It was named the 'funniest book of the last 25 years' when it won the Vintage Bollinger Prize in 2025. Peter Florence, co-founder of the Hay Festival and chair of the judges, said they came to the book fresh eyes and still found its humour fresh. Lewycka "has us at the title," he said, "and she rocks us on every page. And it’s a book that is reshaped by the 20 years since it was first published, by both the history of Ukraine and the story of refugee experience in the UK. The comedy is somehow both darker and more vivid.”
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2004
🏆 Winner of the 2004 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction
The third book in the Thursday Next series, which takes a satirical approach to the crime and thriller genre. Thursday, the lead investigator, visits 'the well of lost plots', where stories goes to die—and finds herself trapped in a complex web of fiction. Gloriously silly.
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2003
🏆 Winner of the 2003 Booker Prize 🏆 Winner of the 2003 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction
Texan teenager Vernon Little's best friend has just committed a school shooting, killing fifteen of their peers. When it seems like Vernon will be implicated in the press, he goes on the run. This exuberant story of a foul-mouthed fugitive was, as the broadcaster James Walton has described it, "one of the more unexpected Booker winners... possibly ever."
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2002
🏆 Winner of the 2002 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction
Two children play at domestic espionage in this beloved coming-of-age tale by the writer of Headlong and Towards the End of the Morning The Guardian called it "a slim and piquant novel of childhood"; it remains is a common feature on English A-level syllabi.
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2001
A group of school friends come of age in 1970s Birmingham, England. A hilarious and nostalgic coming-of-age tale, drawn heavily from Coe's own experiences, and which features, famously, an almost 14,000-word sentence. Expect dry British humour and postmodern elements.
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2000
“The Mighty Walzer is certainly one of his best. It’s a novel about table tennis in the 1950s and is very autobiographical. What I love so much about it is that Jacobson has an eye for the folly of the sport but also for its grandeur. He has an ability to articulate the psychology of sport even at an amateur level. Even when it is being played at the local Allied Jam and Marmalade factory on a table in the basement where the ball keeps going behind stacked-up chairs or falling behind the stage. It was very evocative of my learning to play table tennis, and Jacobson has a rare genius for encapsulating the sociology of the thing.” Read more...
The best books on Champions
Matthew Syed ,
Journalist
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