Review - The Bare Bones Book of Humour

8 Mar 2026

HANNA NIELSON

Recently I was asked to review this anthology by its editor Ankit Raj Ojha because, as he put it, I’m one of the few editors on the scene with an appreciation for literary comedy. In the pages of The Belfast Review, and on our blog, I have routinely featured writing and plays which blend literary and comedy genres, not just literary writing that features a bit of humour.

I watched with interest (via social media) this anthology’s evolution from concept to completion. It’s a smartly designed book, inside and out, and quite a ‘win’ for the independent, global publishing community.

In the anthology’s Foreword, author Mike Nagel laments the scarcity of a humour section in his local bookstore, finding it sandwiched at the back between cookbooks and memoirs, and containing little but dad joke compendiums.

It made me think back to my 1980s childhood (which is now totally trendy, thanks to Stranger Things) when humour books and comics were everywhere. My mother managed a bookstore and humour books were always situated at the front – for readers needing a quick pick me up on their lunch break. No joke, that’s how frequently people bought books – daily, weekly. Weekends were the busiest and she often had to stay until closing, meaning that I would be stashed in the backroom reading whatever I fancied.

She would give me the advance reader copies of the newest releases, and then repeat my recommendations verbatim to customers. ‘My daughter loved it! She said…’

At Christmas, there was always a humour book waiting for me beneath the tree – the newest Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson, Bloom County and Outland by Berkeley Breathed, The Far Side by Gary Larson, or Garfield by Jim Davis. These books weren’t just for kids, adults were reading them too. It was a conversation starter across generations, to be seen out and about reading one of those books – back in the days when you’d take a book with you everywhere because again, no smart phones.

It was a gateway to more ‘serious’ comedy as my reading tastes matured – Shakespeare, William Goldman, Vonnegut, Swift, Voltaire, Heller, and onwards. But my university education treated all literature like a Very Serious Subject, and wrung the joy out of comedy with the cold, dead hands of literary criticism.

Reading the Introduction by Ankit Raj Ojha, it seems he shares a related experience, in focusing his PhD on comedy writing despite the Very Serious tone of academia. This anthology is partly his attempt to bring humor back into the fold of literature. 

The anthology features writers from eight different countries, but I was particularly delighted by the stories featuring contemporary India and how it’s both changed and not changed since I lived there, as an exchange student for a year in my teen years.

There were still no smart phones then, in the pre-digital olden times of the mid 1990s. The Internet was only new, and practically useless as dial-up modems took an hour to load a single web page. (Not a website, a web page – a single page!)

As a seventeen-year-old from the American Midwest, I was a perpetual fish out of water, in my t-shirts and blue jeans, with Irish blue-white skin that never tanned and a mane of auburn hair that turned bright gold in the subtropical sun. I was variously mistaken for a divine apparition, a privileged child of diplomats, and sometimes, Julia Roberts.

I was from a working class family and had never known an ounce of opulence, yet everyone believed my life must be identical to the privileged teens on the Beverly Hills, 90210 TV show, and that my parents were exactly like the soap opera stars of Days of Our Lives, and that if I only lost a little weight I would magically resemble Pamela Anderson of Baywatch. I argued against such fantastical thinking, but to no avail. My Indian hosts seemed to believe all American films and shows were true stories. Documentaries.

There was a difference, I tried to explain, between the (then) newly released films Braveheart, based on actual history, and Pretty Woman, which was entirely fictional. No, I was told – both were absolutely true. As true as the Bhagavad Gita.

How could I argue? Gods and idols and strange Western technologies and trends existed cheek by jowl with thousand-year-old traditions in India.

This was a country that on a whim collectively shut down – stock markets, government, international travel and all – so that everyone could witness the statues of the gods drinking milk, during what became known as ‘The Milk Miracle of 1995.’

1995: My host mother received a phone call from a friend who heard it from her friend the miracle was happening. She rushed to the kitchen altar of Lakshmi, insisting that the maid and myself stand beside her as witnesses as she offered a spoonful of milk to the statue.

Spoonful after spoonful, our scientific – or spiritual – experiment progressed. Nothing dramatic happened, but the maid fervently believed. My host mother wanted undeniable proof. And myself, an Irish Catholic, familiar with the notion of statues doing strange things, I simply had no stake in the game.

The maid declared the statue was drinking the milk, direct from the spoon. I pointed out the milk was only dribbling down the statue and collecting at the base. My host mother argued there was not enough milk at the base of the statue to account for all that had been offered. Perhaps the reports from New Delhi – delivered from auntie to auntie, uncle to uncle, by phone or by foot – of gods guzzling milk had been exaggerated.

I said we couldn’t rule out environmental factors. It was a hot day, and the milk might be evaporating as it dripped down the statue. This was dismissed – the window was closed; the air conditioning was on. It wasn’t a hot day inside the house, my host mother argued.

I speculated the statue might have cracks in the paint, and the milk might be absorbing into the clay.  (This was in fact the official scientific explanation for the miracle, capillary dilation in the stone which caused milk to be drawn inward – though why it happened on 20-21 September, 1995 in Hindu temples across the world, and even reportedly to a statue of the Virgin Mary has yet to be explained.)

As a final test, my host mother decided to put one drop of milk on the statue’s head and we’d all watch to see what happened as it travelled down. If it evaporated or was absorbed into a crack in the paint, we would see it happen.

We drew close and stared, watching the drop trickle down Lakshmi’s nose, dangle a bit ingloriously, and touch her lips. Her lips were not cracked or chipped; it was a new statue. The drop reduced by half upon her lips (was that a slight smirk I saw upon them?) and then travelled down to the pool of milk at her feet.

Something had happened, but was it a miracle? Was it Lakshmi having a laugh? Was it just another day in India?

The India I visited no longer exists – changing technology and social trends have shaped it. I haven't been back to see those changes for myself - but the stories in this anthology allowed me to glimpse those changes. The wider world’s media, once heavily censored by the Indian government, is more accessible. Connections to family and friends, already close (even invasive) in the pre-digital era, are now even closer, on a daily, group chat basis.

I see those tensions and clashes and concepts being mulled over by some of the writers in this collection. Although many other writers are international, I see similar themes in the (humorous) tensions between the traditional and technological.

I’ll shout out a few gems in particular:

Because of Ram and Rice by Steve Akinkuolie, two boys upend a traditional Muslim holiday by asking, What would Jesus do?; The Developments by Allan Miller transposes Irish faerie lore into the modern day tactics of real estate developers; The Haunting of Chill House by Abhilipsa Sahoo gives a twist to modern day dysfunctional families, technology, and hauntings; Enlightenment Begins at Home by Swapnit Pradhan is an almost too likely to come true story about influencer culture and viral fame; Protection by Aparna Kalra, boldly imagines how Indian ‘purity culture’ might be overcome, with the help of government surveillance; and How to Marry a Prince in Ten Business Days by Alice Eze takes a delightful jab at folk beliefs, the pressure to get married at any cost, and women’s empowerment culture.

There are many more stories, 25 in all, that play with both concept and storytelling, feeling at times like overhearing the gossip among friends, complete with the anything-goes mixture of tall tales and truth (A Man of Culture by Ankit Raj Ojha), or even snooping through someone’s WhatsApp messages (Funeral Hopping by François Bereaud). The experiments in form match the experiments in focus, as each writer grapples with their interpretation of what historically has been a challenging task: Comedy, but make it funny.

Comedic writing isn’t necessarily successful if it makes you laugh out loud, nor is it unsuccessful if it doesn’t. Comedy is a way of kicking against what is and asking what’s behind it, coating uncomfortable truths behind the outlandish, and imagining without limits what the world could be like instead - for better or worse.

The comedy lies in how effectively the author sets up the reader’s expectations, and then breaks them – or delivers what’s expected in a highly unexpected way. But how do would-be comedy writers learn the rules?

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, The Princess Bride by William Goldman, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, even Ulysses by James Joyce – all brilliant comedies as intended by their authors (except Ulysses is unfortunately seen as a Very Serious Book by readers, so the joke is on Joyce – or is it on the readers?).

Comedy writing relies on a variety of tactics: plays on words, witty dialogue, outlandish characters, invented absurdities (or absolutely true absurdities), delighting in the unlikely. But at the heart of great comedy writing is a central question around which the world of the story pivots, allowing the author to explore the absurdity of the human condition.

What if an average guy had to survive in the mad, mad world of intergalactic space travel? (Adams)

What if True Love was the only serious thing in an unserious fantasy realm? (Goldman)

What if a man tried to remain sane in the mad, mad world of warmongering government bureaucracy? (Heller)

What if everything, everywhere happened all at once in Dublin, Ireland, on 16 June, 1904? (Joyce)

Because I don’t like leaving the women out, I’ll add: Milkman by Anna Burns (a young woman survives the mad, mad world of Northern Ireland’s Troubles), Yellowface by RF Kuang (a young woman succeeds/fails by following the hypocritical rules of the mad, mad literary world), Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (a young woman fails/succeeds by following the hypocritical rules of the mad, mad normal world), and Orlando by Virginia Woolf (a young woman/man/woman – well, you just have to read the book).

There is that worn out adage that women aren’t funny, but I’d argue women know comedy better than anyone. We’re already living in the essential comedic set up of trying to be successful and/or sane in the mad, mad world of toxic patriarchy. If there’s a bit of darkness, edginess, and meta-ness to women’s comedy, it’s because we’re already heroines in an absurdist comedy – and, there’s no escape.

I thought back to another comedy anthology that I first read age 13 and treasured like it was contraband, Smart Dragons, Foolish Elves (1991), edited by sci fi writer Alan Dean Foster. It was the age where I was deliberately studying other writers to hone my writing ability. It introduced me to a variety of genre- and expectation-defying stories, from a woman whose breasts become sentient and fight back against misogyny, to a scientist who must hatch the last egg of an extinct species, and then faces the perils of motherhood all by himself.

As my first window into the craft of comedy writing, I kept it religiously on my bookshelf, one of the few that survived my changing tastes from adolescence to adulthood. I still recommend it today, to writers I mentor – even if they don’t admire all the stories equally, the methods of each writer are still valuable. There are many types of comedy, and many styles to those types. Learning what works by taking a closer look at what doesn’t work (for you) is an essential skill for an artist, and helps you hone that second essential skill – developing one’s taste.

The best praise I can give to this collection is that I hope it inspires other writers in the same way, and stays on their bookshelves for many years to come, offering entertainment and craft lessons for others attempting to find their own inner (funny) voice.

The Bare Bones Book of Humour, a literary anthology, is available now (£5.87, Bare Bones Publishing, 2026). Edited by Ankit Raj Ojha, of The Hooghly Review.

AUTHOR BIO

Hanna Nielson is a writer-filmmaker and freelance editor based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She has published short stories, articles, poems, and artwork in The Honest Ulsterman, The Ogham Stone, The Scores Literary Journal, and more. Currently she is Editor in Chief of The Belfast Review. Her debut novel, Did You Pay the Piper Man? (Uí Néill Press, 2025) is available now.