[asark]

Books that set out to be comedy don't really work for me. HHGTTG is probably the best I've read but even that was just... tolerable. Biggest laughs I've had came from "normal" fiction, sprinkled in here and there. Dickens is good at that. Best laugh I've had from a book may have been from a set up chapter followed by a punchline first sentence of the next in Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora, a book that's otherwise occasionally funny but not at all a comedy. I had to put it down for a while to stop laughing.

By contrast, comedy's almost the only thing that works for me in silent film. And not just the slapstick (though that's great) but also visual-narrative comedy. That and mind-blowingly-large-scale spectacle, like the epics usually manage for some part of their runtime. Serious, personal drama? Nope. Books or talkies for that.