Quote:
Originally Posted by layers
2. I'm looking for a humor book with the humor being along the lines of Married with Children, or Allo Allo. What would you recommend me?
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Listen very carefully, I shall say this only once…
Some of the very funniest comedic sf/fantasy I've personally read, which I think are kind of 'Allo 'Allo-esque in having
- zany situations
- eccentric characters with wisecracking banter
- spoofing of "known universe" customs & conventions
- increasingly hilarious bizarrely convoluted revealed "surprise" plot twists
- occasional bad puns
- and are based primarily on finding/dealing MacGuffins which are basically an extended reason to extend the zany eccentric wisecracking spoofing puns
- but nevertheless tell a good and satisfying comedic action/adventure romp that wraps up nicely at the end
are the books by Nick Pollotta and John Zakour and John Moore (writing separately, not together).
Nick Pollotta writing as Jack Hopkins did the wonderfully hilarious "Satellite Night" trilogy for Ace Books in the 90s, about a futuristic news team which chases (and sometimes makes) the breaking stories. Sadly, it does not seem to be available in e-book format.
But his "Bureau 13" paranormal Alphabet Agency elite commando squad (think X-Files meets A-Team) books are not too far off from being as good, and you can
get them for a low cost at Fictionwise when they have the weekend discount coupons (keep checking in the Deals forum; they usually get posted if the discount is over 30%).
John Zakour, with the occasional co-write from Lawrence Ganem, does the
"Zach Johnson, last P.I" series set in in a spoofy mid-21st century future that's basically Pop Culture Ideas of Tech/Sci-Fi Gone Wild. They're very funny and have good whodunnits in them as well. The first 2 books are available in an e-book omnibus, but after that there's a gap and only the last few are also digital.
John Moore writes some very humorous similar fantasy which spoofs fairy tale tropes. Unfortunately, only one of his books,
Slay and Rescue which follows the career of Prince Charming, is available in e-format (and in the near-obsolete Secure eReader format, at that) but it's one of my favourites.
However, Moore does offer for
free download from his website a complete unpublished comedy technothriller in PDF. And I'd say it's worth hunting down his other books in the used bookshop.
The above may not turn out to be quite your thing, but I'd say they're at least worth sampling some excerpts to see if you want to try.
Also, the late
John Morressy did the excellent "Kedrigern" series about a wizard who lived in a standard fantasy medieval-ish setting which kind of ported certain ideas from our modern world for humourous effect (annual convention-holding professional organization-like "guilds", building codes standards for castle dungeons, and so forth).
A bit more "serious" than the books recommended above, but still very funny and enjoyable. But they're severely out of print and the author is unfortunately dead as were his immediate next-of-kin, and the publishing company which was going to revive them engaged in a murder-suicide pact with its upcoming releases list, so they're not likely to come out in e-book format or even be all that easy to find used. Still well worth it, IMHO.