Flann O'Brien general? Any good? Where to start? Don't

At Swim Two Birds
The Third Policeman

Both great funny books. I read a collection of his newspaper columns too. They were fun but not as good as the novels.

I haven't read The Dalkey Archive of The Poor Mouth, so I don't know about them.

>>9277025
Thanks! I was thinking At Swim. Put off a bit by the concept (gimmicky?), but intrigued. Glad to hear it's funny.

>>9277037
It is very meta and took me a little while to get into but there's genuinely funny stuff in there. So yes it is gimmicky but it's still fun.

>>9277025
The Dalkey Archive is a re-working of Third Policeman (because it remained unpublished in Myles lifetime) isn't as good, but fun all the same. Poor Mouth/Hard Life are satires on druidic Irish life.

>>9277037
knowing the old irish epics are all about stealing someones cows with hilarious and deadly consequences helps with at swim. it's hilarious, and most of the boring bits you'll find a character saying it's boring soon after. if there's a fault, it's that the terrible poetry isn't really that terrible for poetry.

>>9277068
Dalkey's good fun if you like things after Joyce. It's worth it to read the two, though Third Policeman is amazing, because of the additions.

Poor Mouth is more a satire on traditional poor mouth tales (Peig, and other affiliated islanders) and on language revivalists (like neo-pagans, not pagans). If you can read Irish, read both, because it does have the local/learnt Irish.

Third Policeman is the best start. At Swim can put people off, and it is better if you know about the myths and Latin poetry and social movements it riffs off. Dalkey is also a good start. Hard Life is a good start too, but it's mostly about being educated by the Jesuits and while it is funny, it's not really in the same vein as the rest of them. Newspapers are hit and miss because some are universal (the hired book readers) but some are also jokes a civil servant in the mid 20th Century in Dublin would make about a contemporary.

>>9277008
I recently read At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman. Both are hilarious and really fun to read. I bought the Everyman edition of his complete novels and am currently working through it so I haven't read his other novels yet.

At Swim is the more formally experimental of the two and has lots of metafictional elements. Very easy to recommend if you like Joyce and Beckett.

The Third Policeman has more of a Kafka vibe. More straightforward but the plot is equally bizarre and absurd. I don't want to spoil anything about either of these books because they are both fantastic and you should read them.

If any anons could recommend other authors who do humor well, it would be much appreciated.

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>>9277008
the third policeman is one of the best written works of all time, i would honestly read it first and then read swim-to-birds, because swim-to-birds can be overwhelming at times and it'd be easier going into it with an idea of what his baseline is.

the poor mouth and the hard life are also incredibly funny, less masterful but just as entertaining. i actually would have preferred to read them before swim-to-birds as well but it was harder to find copies. the dalkey archive is substantially better than those two but not as well-written as third policeman or swim-to-birds.

my only warning would be to not start with swim-to-birds and then lose interest because you don't like the style. even if you don't like that, there's almost no way you won't like the third policeman or his less popular stuff. when i first read it i thought it was campy and a little contrived, but i read it again after having read his other stuff and i loved it.

>>9277477
I started with Swim; put me off a little, but fortunately I bought his collected novels so I kinda had to read them. Very glad I did. The Poor Mouth is hilarious, funniest book I've read. Maybe it's time to revisit Swim.

>>9278365
i definitely got more humor out of swim-two-birds after having read the pour mouth and the hard life, but it's also hard for me to pick up on humor in lit so it may have just been me

why not just keep reading it over and over though anyway :^)