Showing titles in Comedy & Humour

It's an ordinary Thursday lunchtime for Arthur Dent until his house gets demolished. The Earth follows shortly afterwards to make way for a new hyperspace bypass and his best friend has just announced that he's an alien. At this moment, they're hurtling through space with nothing but their towels and an innocuous-looking book inscribed with the big, friendly words: DON'T PANIC.

A workhouse orphan, Oliver experiences the terror and brutality of the criminal underworld. His companions, a thief, a whore, a pickpocket, and a fence, are destined for gruesome ends, but Oliver emerges unscathed from the darkness of the underworld.

Bertie Wooster is one of nature's gentlemen, so when Gussie Fink-Nottle gets himself into a spot of bother with the law, Bertie helps out - by impersonating Gussie! The plan seems to be working, until Gussie turns up - impersonating Bertie!

David Mitchell, who you may know for his inappropriate anger on every TV panel show except Never Mind the Buzzcocks, his look of permanent discomfort on C4 sex comedy Peep Show, his online commenter-baiting in The Observer or just for wearing a stick-on moustache in That Mitchell and Webb Look, has written a book about his life.

Two comedians take an unmerciful and hilarious look at athletes who have lost big games.. with the law! Crime in Sports does the research, and finds the funny in the world of sports true crime. New episode every week!

In this classic TV soundtrack, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie explore a seemingly inexhaustible list of subjects with a delicious turn of phrase and elaborate wordplay. The hilarity includes regular acts such as not so super spy Tony Mercheson and his boss Control, yuppies, John and Peter and the critics. With four brilliant series of great satire, comic genius and hilarious use of language, the show cemented Fry & Laurie as a double act and paved the way for their future stardom.

Imagine a world where your position in society depended on what bit of the colour spectrum you could see. This is the world inhabited by Eddie Russett (red, middle-level) and Jane Grey (monochromatic, lowest in society). Eddie and Jane must negotiate the delicate Chromatic politics of society to find out what the 'Something that Happened' actually was, how society got to be this way, and crucially, is there Somewhere Else beyond their borders?

When Lucy Tang Churchill meets George Zao at a lavish Capri wedding, she can’t stand him. He’s a mama’s boy. A self-righteous eco-warrior. A brooding weirdo that takes himself much too seriously. And no-one should look that good in tight white Speedos. Worried about what her Mayflower-descended, Wall Street-wealthy family might think of this Hong Kong surfer boy, Lucy returns to the safety of Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Despite the title, Dickens's portrayal of early industrial society is less relentlessly grim than that in novels by contemporaries such as Elizabeth Gaskell or Charles Kingsley. Hard Times weaves the tale of Thomas Gradgrind, a hard-headed politician who raises his children Louisa and Tom without love and to have no empathy, their lives completely devoid of beauty, culture, or imagination. Only after a series of crises does their father realise that the manner in which he raised his children has ruined their lives.

At dinner parties and over coffee, Rabih and Kirsten's friends always ask them the same question: how did you meet? The answer comes easily - it's a happy story, one they both love to tell. But there is a second part to this story, the answer to a question their friends never ask: what happened next? Rabih and Kirsten find each other, fall in love, get married. Society tells us this is the end of the story. In fact it is only the beginning.

A stunning collection of Just William stories, narrated by Martin Jarvis. These BBC radio readings of the adventures of William have come to be some of the most loved adaptations.

24/7 Demon Mart: Publisher's Pack features two books from the 24/7 Demon Mart series: The Graveyard Shift, book one, and Monster Burger, book two. It also includes the bonus Hell for the Holidays, a 24/7 Demon Mart Christmas special. Lloyd Wallace is the most clueless crossing guard the intersection of hell and earth has ever seen. So clueless, that he doesn't even realize the beer cave in the corner store where he works is the gateway to hell.

After nearly two decades in Britain, Bill Bryson, the acclaimed author of such best sellers as The Mother Tongue and Made in America, decided it was time to move back to the United States for a while. This was partly to let his wife and kids experience life in Bryson's homeland, and partly because he had read that 3.7 million Americans believed that they had been abducted by aliens at one time or another. It was thus clear to him that his people needed him.

A weekly look at religion and the stupidity that breeds it. Hosts Noah Lugeons, Heath Enwright, and Eli Bosnick delve into theistic attempts to intrude on the secular world in an unflinching expose on just how juvenile the whole god thing is.

We all have things in our life that we should know by now, but don’t. Absences in our knowledge and skillset that are frankly shameful in an adult. Things that would be too embarrassing to ask anyone to explain – except our very best friend. Listen in as Mel and Sue tackle their ignorance head on, asking each other to explain something that they still don’t know - but absolutely, as adults, should - from how to parallel park to fully understanding bread (why has it got all those holes in it? What, honestly, is yeast?).

The year is 2108, and the North American Commonwealth is bursting at the seams. For welfare rats like Andrew Grayson, there are only two ways out of the crime-ridden and filthy welfare tenements: You can hope to win the lottery and draw a ticket on a colony ship settling off-world...or you can join the service. With the colony lottery a pipe dream, Andrew chooses to enlist in the armed forces for a shot at real food, a retirement bonus, and maybe a ticket off Earth.

Arbuthnot ‘Arbie’ Swift arrives at Dashwood House, a glamorously modern hotel in the up-and-coming resort of Galton-next-the-Sea, but all plans for a relaxing stay are scuppered when one of the guests is found dead. The body is found in the writing room, the victim part of a set visiting the seaside town for an engagement party, which happens to include Arbie’s old friend, Val. Familiar with Val and Arbie’s previous experience in solving puzzling crimes, the bride asks the pair to investigate.

Multi-award-winning Hannah Gadsby broke comedy with their show Nanette. Now they take us through the defining moments in their life and their powerful decision to tell the truth—no matter the cost. Harrowing and hilarious, Ten Steps to Nanette traces Gadsby’s growth as a queer person, to their ever-evolving relationship with comedy, and their struggle with late-in-life diagnoses of autism and ADHD, finally arriving at the backbone of Nanette: the renouncement of self-deprecation, the rejection of misogyny, and the moral significance of truth-telling.

From the master of tragicomedy and award-winning author of Skippy Dies: a tour de force new novel about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is (maybe) ending. Irresistibly funny, wise and thought-provoking, a state-of-the-nation novel about one unhappy family in the midst of meltdown.

Jack Gladney is the creator and chairman of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. This is the story of his absurd life - a life that is going well enough until a chemical spill from a rail car releases an Airborne Toxic Event, and Jack is forced to confront his biggest fear: his own mortality. White Noise is an effortless combination of social satire and metaphysical dilemma in which Don DeLillo exposes our rampant consumerism, media saturation and novelty intellectualism.