Some of the funniest moments in 'The Hobbit' come from absurd situations, not jokes. Bilbo, a comfort-loving hobbit, trying to have a polite conversation with a dragon while riddling and stealing a cup. The sheer incongruity of the situation is hilarious. Tolkien’s humor often lies in placing ordinary, sensible characters (hobbits) into fantastical, deeply unreasonable scenarios and watching them react.
For a quieter, more literary absurdity, try 'The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared'. The entire plot is an escalating chain of absurd events triggered by a simple act of escape. A centenarian accidentally gets involved with criminals, finds a suitcase of cash, and his past intersperses with hilariously improbable historical encounters. The comedy is entirely in the serene, matter-of-fact way these ludicrous events just keep happening to him.
Kafka, but funny. That's the vibe I get from something like 'The Metamorphosis' if you read it with a certain darkly absurd lens, but for a pure novel, maybe 'The Third Policeman' by Flann O'Brien. It's a surreal nightmare about bicycles and atomic theory that's hilarious because of how deeply, philosophically ridiculous everything becomes. The situations—being trapped in a police station discussing the molecular exchange between men and bicycles—are the joke. No punchlines needed.
2026-07-21 03:05:20
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Strange short stories
Gabriela Berri
10
19.1K
Bedtime stories, fantasy, fiction, romance, action, urban,mystery, thriller and anything more you can think ...
Just a warning ... none of them are normal.
Everette and Jack know next to nothing about romance novels.... or women. So when they accidentally join a book club full of both, they have no idea what to think. But, as the book and time goes on, the ladies in their book club become more interested in a different plot. The love lives of both men.
From the time I was little, something in me was always a little off—I never listened to the whole story, only half of it.
My grandmother called me a good-for-nothing who was financially burdening the family. She bought a little boy to be my younger brother and told me to take good care of him. I understood the part about buying a child, so I immediately called the police and reported her for illegal human trafficking.
My father pointed at my face and cursed me for being unfilial, accusing me of cutting off his family line. I obeyed him, crept into his room while he slept that night, and used a knife to "cut off his lineage."
My father screamed in agony. In the chaos, he accidentally killed me.
When I opened my eyes again, I had transmigrated into the female lead of a melodramatic abuse novel.
After ten years of marriage to the cruel male lead, his childhood sweetheart had just returned from abroad and was undergoing kidney surgery.
He dragged me to the hospital and cruelly ordered me to donate a kidney to his precious first love.
I nodded obediently, went out and bought a pig, and on the spot dug out the pig's kidney and handed it to him.
A young guy keeps getting into trouble in very funny and unfortunate ways. He wrecked havocs on people too, mistakenly. He hallucinated and had great fantasies about people to brighten up his hearers. Afterwards, he came back to his mundane reality.
Francesca Zappia's 'Eliza and Her Monsters' is a YA novel that fits beautifully. Eliza is the anonymous creator of a hugely popular webcomic, but in her daily high school life, she's a socially anxious loner. The absurdity lies in the dual identity—the grand, epic fantasy world she controls online versus the awkward, small-scale reality of cafeteria politics and group projects.
The humor comes from the stark contrast between these two worlds and Eliza's deadpan, internal narration as she navigates them. It explores the daily life of a creative person in the internet age, where your online self can be a giant while your offline self feels invisible. It's about the absurd pressure and freedom of living in two realities at once.
I feel like 'A Confederacy of Dunces' by John Kennedy Toole is the epitome of a certain kind of academic, slobbish satire. Ignatius J. Reilly is a monstrous, hilarious character whose warped medieval worldview clashes with 1960s New Orleans. The book satirizes consumerism, intellectual hypocrisy, and modern degeneracy through his outraged, pompous eyes. The humor is broad and grotesque, but the critique of a society with no place for his kind of outdated principle is strangely poignant.