Books - Laugh Out Loud

Don't you just love books that make you laugh out loud? I just finished another Bill Bryson book (I think it's the only one I hadn't read) and parts of it still make me smile. Even though the book takes place in the 50s when Bryson was growing up in Iowa, some of it you can just relate to - at least I could - reminding me of people or places I've known. . .a couple excerpts I found funny. . .

"Actually I don't know why he had a hole in his throat. It was just a fact of life. A lot of rural people in Iowa in the fifties has arresting physical features - wooden legs, stumpy arms, outstandingly dented heads, hands without fingers, mouths without tongues, sockets without eyes, scars that ran on for feet, sometimes going in one sleeve and out the other. Goodness knows what people got up to back then, but they suffered some mishaps, that's for sure."

"Getting money from Mrs. Vandermeister was a perennial nightmare. Her front door had a small window in it that provided a clear view down her hallway to his living room. If you rang the doorbell at fifteen second intervals for an hour and ten minutes, you knew that eventually she would realize that someone was at the door - "Now who the heck is that!" she would shout to herself - and begin the evening long process of getting from her chair to the front door, 25 feet away, bumping and shoving her walker before her. After about 20 minutes, she would reach the hallway and start coming toward the door at about the speed that ice melts. Sometimes she would forget where she was going and start to detour into the kitchen or bathroom, and you would have to ring the doorbell like fury to get her back on course."

"The only heat the sleeping porch contained was that of any human being who happened to be out there. It couldn't have been more than one or two degrees warmer than the world outside - and outside was perishing. So to sleep on the sleeping porch required preparation. First, you put on long underwear, pajamas, jeans, a sweatshirt, your grandfather's old cardigan and bathrobe, two pairs of woolen socks on your feet and another on your hands, and a hat with earflaps tied beneath your chin. Then you climbed into bed and were immediately covered with a dozen bed blankets, three horse blankets, all the household overcoats, a canvas tarpaulin, and a piece of old carpet. I'm not sure that they didn't lay an old wardrobe on top of that, just to hold everything down. It was like sleeping under a dead horse."

And so on it goes.

What was the last book you read that made you laugh out loud?