Humour in literature is often relegated to the margins, treated as an embellishment rather than a mode of intellectual inquiry. Yet The Bare Bones Book of Humour, edited by Ankit Raj Ojha, insists that humour belongs alongside the most serious aesthetic traditions. The anthology situates itself within a global lineage, from Aristophanes to Rabelais, from Cervantes to Dickens, from Mark Twain to Bulgakov, where laughter becomes a method of philosophical scrutiny. It reveals, with quiet rigour, that humour is not the opposite of seriousness but its partner, its pressure valve, and often its most incisive diagnostic tool. 

Ojha’s introduction, ‘A Series of Un-serious Events,’ declares humour as a cultural inevitability: “I was born and raised in Bihar, where humour is obvious, inevitable—like life and death.” In invoking this regional instinct, and citing Tabish Khair’s lament that “Indian English in India” does not take humour seriously enough, Ojha calls attention to a long-standing hierarchy in literary thought: Tragedy has long been canonised, while comedy must perpetually defend its intellectual legitimacy. Like Kundera or Eco, he positions humour as a way of thinking—the capacity to destabilise received narratives through wit, irony, and the gentle violence of laughter. When he notes that the stories “span cultures and ‘senses’ of humour … laugh out loud … cheeky grin … all-knowing smile,” he is echoing Henri Bergson’s insight that laughter arises not from a single emotional register but from a series of cognitive negotiations between the mechanical, the human, and the unexpected. 

This range becomes evident in Merlin Flower’s “Robes and Roles,” where a man’s disorientation on unexpectedly experiencing menstrual symptoms reads like a modern inversion of Aristophanic body-comedy: “Why was he having knives shoved into the stomach? … Why did it have a weird smell?” The humour is physical, immediate, and yet epistemologically charged. Like Virginia Woolf’s satirical essays or Swift’s scatological attacks, Flower uses bodily confusion to expose gaps in gendered understanding. When her protagonist anxiously wonders, “Would he have periods every month?”, it becomes a contemporary gloss on the long comic tradition of men misinterpreting the mechanisms of the world around them—an embarrassment that fuels insight. 

Steve Akinkuolie’s “Because of Ram and Rice,” where a stolen (or mis-stolen) ram is dragged across a compound “with missionary zeal,” evokes not only R.K. Narayan’s light-footed village comedies but also Gogol’s appetite for escalating disorder. The shouted retort, “Is that not not your business?!” carries the rhythm of linguistic play familiar from Shakespeare’s clowns, where the doubling of negatives becomes its own form of slapstick rhetoric. 

Padmanabh Trivedi’s “Barambaba” leans into ritualistic village justice with a tonal restraint that recalls Chekhov’s early comic sketches. Ramu’s immediate willingness to swear innocence, regardless of guilt, satirises the performative nature of truth-telling in small communities. Like Chekhov’s peasants or Premchand’s villagers, the moment functions as a miniature study of authority, gullibility, and the social choreography of suspicion. 

In Allan Miller’s “The Developments,” the narrator’s attempt to identify a possible dinosaur fossil and his eagerness to mail it to Professor Brusatte echo the naïve narrators of Twain or Wodehouse—figures who are confident, curious, and often disastrously wrong. His imagined discovery of a “prehistoric treasure trove” mirrors the comic delusion that animates Don Quixote: the desire for the world to be grander, stranger, more dramatic than it is. 

Amit Majmudar’s “Regeneration” uses mock-heroic language to articulate male vanity: “The pill watered the Tree of Life with blood.” This stylistic inflation recalls Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, where trivial material becomes mythic, only to expose the absurdity of the myth itself. Majmudar turns the bodily into the epic, parodying both genres simultaneously and revealing how humour critiques the narratives men build around potency and ageing. 

Ankit Raj Ojha’s “A Man of Culture” situates its humour in the theatre, where two boys spy on their math teacher and cheer during a film whose posters dominate the “public pee stalls.” This juxtaposition of decorum and urban masculinity echoes the social wit of Hanif Kureishi or the bittersweet embarrassment of Junot Díaz. The power reversal, where the teacher becomes the one who should be “scared”, plays into a global comic tradition of the authority figure being undone by context. 

In Abhilipsa Sahoo’s “The Haunting of Chill House,” the comedy arises from the collision of spiritual ritual and modern digital convenience: a priest with “a 600-rupee ‘Digital Shanti Package.’” This fusion recalls the magical-realist humour of García Márquez, in which the supernatural is domesticated, bureaucratised, and sometimes monetised. 

Swapnit Pradhan’s “Enlightenment Begins at Home” transforms constipation into philosophical epiphany: “Nothing in life moves unless you push a little”—a line that might have fit into the comic aphoristic mode of Oscar Wilde, had Wilde been more interested in bowels than beauty. Mr Patra’s attempt to distribute wisdom via WhatsApp aligns with a distinctly twenty-first-century satire of self-help culture. 

Sahana Ahmed’s “A Memsahib Learns to Cook” uses quiet irony to reflect on domestic expectations: “She must adjust herself to the community as she finds it.” The humour resembles Jane Austen’s more understated social critiques, where wit becomes a scalpel in the examination of gendered instruction. 

Vishaal’s “Greetings to Jack” descends into chaos when hijackers find themselves drowned out by toddlers—an inversion reminiscent of Heller’s Catch-22, where existential danger collapses into absurdity. Sylvia Beaupré’s “Weeds”, in contrast, relies on Beckettian quietude, as Harold contemplates doing nothing and waiting for consequences to decay on their own. Grace Q. Hu’s “Two Good People,” with its shopkeeper who complains of having received “a pile of fake money” while his customer alone offers real tender, matches the structural humour of Luigi Pirandello, where reality and unreality flip with deadpan precision. 

Taken together, these stories position humour not as escapism but as a rigorous interpretive force. Like the works of Gogol, Zoshchenko, Thurber, or Krishan Chander, they recognise the comic as a means of understanding contradiction, exposing hypocrisy, and navigating the dense, often bewildering terrains of contemporary life. The Bare Bones Book of Humour thus joins a long-standing global archive of texts where laughter marks the intensities of human experience. It argues—convincingly—that to laugh is not to step away from seriousness, but to step more precisely into its muddy, complex centre. 

In the final reckoning, The Bare Bones Book of Humour stands as a reminder that laughter is not the opposite of depth but one of its most enduring expressions. The anthology gathers, with scholarly precision and artistic daring, the many ways human beings resist collapse through wit, absurdity, and the sly grace of comic imagination. Whether through bodily farce, philosophical irony, cultural satire, or the quiet comedy of ordinary days, each story affirms what World Literature, from Aristophanes to Narayan, Cervantes to Kunder, has always known: that humour is a mode of knowledge, a way of seeing the world without being destroyed by it. 

Ojha’s collection does not merely assemble humorous pieces, it restores humour to its rightful literary stature, showing that the smallest joke can illuminate the largest truths, and that sometimes the mind thinks best when it smiles.  

The Bare Bones Book of Humour (ed. Ankit Raj Ojha) can be ordered here.  

Regeneration
by Amit Majmudar

When he pounded his pillow out of frustration instead of his wife out of desire, she proposed he talk to his doctor. So in a sense it was her fault. She even picked up the prescription because she had to get milk and brownie mix anyway. 

‘Did the pharmacist look at you?’ 

‘Well, yes. She had to hand me the package.’ 

‘You know what I mean. Did you two exchange a look. Like she was thinking, girl, you’re going to have a fun weekend. They call it the weekend pill, you know.’ 

‘She was professional. So am I. Listen, Dinesh. I want the best for you. This is stressing you out, and it’s turning into a cycle.’ 

‘You think there’s nothing really wrong with me.’ 

‘No. It’s not right or wrong or a reflection on you or on us as a couple. You just have to break the cycle. That’s all. Here.’ 

In other words, she thought it was all in his head. Of course she did; she was a psychiatry nurse. But Dinesh had studied physiology and humanely beheaded mice for a living. He knew too much. He knew the role of nitrous oxide. He knew that erectile function depended on the vascular ‘stretchiness’ that diminished with age, the pipes getting calcium deposits just like the plumbing in a house. He knew the mechanism of action, the duration of action, the potential side effects and interactions, the half-life, and the molecular structure of the weekend pill. 

What he didn’t know was how it would shoot a searchlight out of his pelvis. How it would return to him the kind of bludgeon that had him thrusting into the couch when he was fourteen years old, face down flipping through issues of Fantastic Four. How he would carry the Roman standard of his spermatic legion deep into the Teutoburg Forest of his fantasies. How he found his id wandering over to the dumpy researcher with the long braid. Just back from maternity leave, she sweated the spices of her hot and dirty country. Repulsive once, now ripe. He noticed women of all shapes, sizes, races as he made his way across campus to his car. On the drive home, even the voices of NPR ladies sounded sensual, thrilling. What towered out of him could break that racism-fixated uptalk, that ‘objectively analytical’ tonal affectation. If given the chance, he could make that voice groan. 

He texted his wife. Could you open the door? I am carrying something. She met him at the door. He stepped inside, closed the door, and wordlessly took her from behind while she held on to the freestanding coat rack, just as he fantasised on the way home. He overpowered her three times before dinner. 

What he did next was not cheating. It was self-testing in the spirit of self-discovery. Also, competition. What was his body, in his early fifties, still capable of? The pill and he were one; he did not think of it as the pill fortifying his prowess but feeding the prowess that was already there. The pill watered the Tree of Life with blood, and the tree shot up strong, rooted deep in his pelvis. He paid for sex because he did not want to break some lonely woman’s marriage and leave her body stretched and bruised in so many delicious ways that no future partner would ever satisfy her. He used 401(k) money in spite of the withdrawal penalty because his wife never checked that account. With that money in cash, he cruised downtown, fearing no holdup, no carjacking. Too much quiet authority emanated from him now. Something about his posture and gait had changed. It was the confidence that came from carrying a weapon. 

If he asked the prostitutes whether he had bested their best, they would have said yes just to make him happy and get his money next time. So he watched the pupils: did they dilate? He watched for the sex flush, the pink wash from collarbones down, that could not be faked. He watched for fasciculations of the thigh muscles and loss of bladder control. All those were physiological indicators. But there was also the unquantifiable gaze of an admiring, satisfied woman. Always mixed, of course, with the surprise that a fiftysomething who looked like Dinesh could fuck like that. He made believers out of his whores, sometimes two at a time, and still poured himself into his wife when he got home. 

The bottle was getting low. He had been taking one every three days, weekend after weekend strung together all month. He messaged his physician while his sweat cooled. His wife, her abdominal muscles still twitching with the aftereffect of her climax, clung lovingly to his back, kissing the moles and freckles. She read his screen over his shoulder. ‘You don’t need those pills, honey.’ 

‘I like them. And so do you.’ 

‘It was all a cycle. You broke the cycle. You did it all by yourself.’

‘With the help of the pills.’ 

‘I switched them out with over the counter Claritin. It was a placebo. This, tonight—what we’ve shared every night this month… All you, honey. All you.’

The Bare Bones Book of Humour (ed. Ankit Raj Ojha) can be ordered here.  

Excerpted with permission from The Bare Bones Book of Humour edited by Ankit Raj Ojha published by Bare Bones Publishing 2026