There exists a particular species of book — and we are terribly fond of it — that makes one snort with laughter in public places, much to the alarm of nearby strangers. These are the books that combine the wonder of magic with the delicious sting of wit, and they are, we must confess, precisely the sort of books we wish to celebrate today.
We have assembled here a collection of the funniest fantasy novels suitable for younger teens — those marvellous readers of approximately twelve to fourteen years — though we hasten to add that the humour in these volumes has no respect whatsoever for age. A good joke, like good magic, works on everyone.
Some of these books lean toward the absurd, some toward the sly, and some toward a warmth of humour that sneaks up on you like a cat pretending it wasn’t interested in your lap. All of them are, in our considered opinion, magnificent.
1. The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett
We begin, as one must when discussing funny fantasy, with Sir Terry Pratchett — a man who could make philosophy hilarious and swordfights philosophical. The Wee Free Men is the first book in his Tiffany Aching sequence, set within the beloved Discworld, and it serves as perhaps the finest entry point into Pratchett’s genius for younger readers.
Tiffany Aching is a nine-year-old who decides, with admirable pragmatism, to become a witch. Armed primarily with a frying pan and an ironclad common sense that would make most adults weep with inadequacy, she must venture into Fairyland to rescue her kidnapped brother. Her allies in this endeavour are the Nac Mac Feegle — a clan of six-inch-tall blue men who were, according to legend, thrown out of fairyland for being drunk and disorderly. They speak in thick Scottish accents, they fight everything that moves (and several things that don’t), and they have names like Rob Anybody, Daft Wullie, and Not-as-big-as-Medium-Sized-Jock-but-bigger-than-Wee-Jock Jock.
Pratchett’s humour is layered like a particularly well-constructed cake: younger readers devour the slapstick and absurdity, while older ones savour the sly observations about human nature tucked underneath. The book won the Locus Award and was named an ALA Best Fiction for Young Adults, and it thoroughly deserves both. Four more Tiffany Aching books follow, each funnier and more profound than the last.
2. The Wendy by Erin Michelle Sky & Steven Brown
If one were to take the wit of a classic fairy tale, the adventure of a high-seas romp, and a narrator with the driest sense of humour this side of the English Channel, one would arrive at something very like The Wendy. This Peter Pan retelling reimagines Wendy Darling as an orphan in 1780s England who dreams of captaining her own ship — a dream that everyone around her considers perfectly absurd, which only makes her more determined to achieve it.
What makes this book sing with comedy is its narrative voice. The omniscient narrator comments, aside-whispers, and occasionally editorialises in a manner that calls to mind the very best tradition of storytelling — the sort where the teller is having quite as much fun as the audience. Wendy herself possesses an uncannily expressive eyebrow, and the interplay between her unshakeable determination and the utter bewilderment of the men around her produces a steady stream of understated hilarity. Captain Hook is pompous and infuriating. Peter Pan is enigmatic and wild. The magic smells green and tastes like pickles.
It is charming, clever, and laugh-out-loud funny in a gentle, warm-hearted way — the sort of book that makes you grin for hours after you’ve put it down. The complete Tales of the Wendy trilogy is now available, so there is no need to wait for more.
3. Skulduggery Pleasant by Derek Landy
A skeleton detective who throws fireballs, wears impeccable suits, and delivers one-liners with the timing of a seasoned comedian — if this premise does not immediately appeal to you, we respectfully suggest you may be reading the wrong list.
Skulduggery Pleasant is the most dapper dead man in fiction. When twelve-year-old Stephanie Edgley discovers that her late uncle’s horror novels were based on a real magical world, she finds herself drawn into a partnership with the aforementioned skeletal sorcerer. Together, they must solve a mystery involving dark magic, ancient villains, and a great deal of snappy dialogue.
Derek Landy’s genius lies in the banter. Skulduggery and Stephanie fall into an effortless rhythm of sarcasm and wit from the very first chapter, and it never lets up. The series won the Red House Children’s Book Award and has sold over six million copies worldwide — numbers that suggest we are not alone in our admiration. The tone blends fantasy, horror, mystery, and comedy with the confidence of a man who knows exactly how funny a talking skeleton can be. Which, it turns out, is very.
4. Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan
Rick Riordan accomplished something rather extraordinary with this book: he made Greek mythology hilarious and accessible without ever dumbing it down. Percy Jackson is a twelve-year-old who discovers he is a demigod — the son of Poseidon — and is promptly sent off to Camp Half-Blood, where he embarks on a quest to prevent a war among the gods.
The humour here is rapid-fire, first-person, and thoroughly modern. Percy’s narration is packed with wisecracks about the absurdity of his situation, and the way Riordan weaves ancient myth into contemporary settings produces jokes that are both clever and genuinely funny. Medusa runs a garden-statue business. The Underworld has a waiting room. The humour never overshadows the adventure, but it makes the adventure twice as enjoyable.
What gives the series its heart, beyond the laughs, is Riordan’s treatment of dyslexia and ADHD as strengths rather than weaknesses — a demigod’s brain is simply wired for Ancient Greek and battle reflexes. A wildly popular series for excellent reasons, and a perfect starting point for any teen who likes their mythology served with a generous side of wit.
5. Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
Diana Wynne Jones was a national treasure of fantasy writing, and Howl’s Moving Castle may be her crowning achievement in comedy. When Sophie Hatter is cursed by a witch and transformed into an elderly woman, she decides — with a stubbornness that would impress even the most determined teen — to seek help from the wizard Howl, who lives in a castle that walks about the countryside on mechanical legs.
The humour of this book is a particular and wonderful thing. Sophie, now a little old lady, becomes hilariously particular and forthright in the way that only someone who has stopped caring about appearances can be. Howl is a gifted wizard who is also spectacularly vain, melodramatic, and prone to covering himself in green slime when he’s having a bad hair day. Calcifer the fire demon is petulant. The plot is a magnificently tangled knot that somehow resolves itself with the logic of a dream and the satisfaction of a perfectly told joke.
Jones’s wit is quieter than Pratchett’s and sharper than most, and the result is a book that is whimsical, surprising, and deeply funny in a way that rewards rereading. The Studio Ghibli film is lovely, but the book — with all its eccentric, glorious prose — is lovelier still.
6. Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer
Eoin Colfer once described Artemis Fowl as “Die Hard, with fairies,” and we cannot improve upon that summary, so we shall simply expand it. Artemis Fowl is a twelve-year-old Irish criminal mastermind who discovers that fairies are real, technologically advanced, and not remotely the gossamer-winged creatures of bedtime stories. He kidnaps one — Captain Holly Short of the LEPrecon Unit — and demands a ransom of fairy gold.
The wit here is sharp and inventive. Colfer writes with a clever, pithy style that reviewers have compared to Douglas Adams crossed with Terry Pratchett — high praise that the book earns with every page. Artemis is brilliantly, deliciously morally grey, and the fairy world is a wonderful inversion of expectations: their technology is superior to ours, their society is bureaucratic, and their response to a hostage situation involves full tactical assault teams.
Time magazine called the book “pacy, playful, and very funny,” and we heartily concur. The series grows in emotional complexity as it progresses, but the first book is a masterclass in action-comedy that appeals equally to readers who love fantasy and those who love a good heist.
7. The Amulet of Samarkand by Jonathan Stroud
Jonathan Stroud achieved something remarkable with the first volume of his Bartimaeus sequence: he created a djinni narrator so entertaining that readers would happily follow him through the footnotes. And there are many footnotes, because Bartimaeus — a five-thousand-year-old djinni of considerable power and even more considerable ego — has opinions about everything, and he is not shy about sharing them.
The story follows Nathaniel, a young magician’s apprentice in an alternate London ruled by magicians, who summons Bartimaeus to steal a powerful amulet from a rival magician. The plot is gripping. The world-building is inventive. But it is Bartimaeus himself who steals the show, with his razor-sharp wit, his dryly sarcastic asides, and his habit of punctuating dramatic moments with observations that are both hilarious and surprisingly insightful.
The humour is distinctly British, gloriously irreverent, and absolutely irresistible to readers who like their fantasy served with intelligence and a raised eyebrow. The trilogy rewards readers who enjoy being the cleverest person in the room — or at least reading about characters who think they are.
8. Dealing with Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede
Princess Cimorene is bored. She is bored with her proper royal life, bored with her parents’ expectations, and above all bored with the parade of princes who keep trying to rescue her from things she does not wish to be rescued from. So she runs away to live with a dragon. On purpose.
Patricia C. Wrede’s Dealing with Dragons, the first book in the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, is a delightful sendup of every fairy tale convention you have ever encountered. Damsels are not in distress. Dragons are excellent employers. Every traditional role is cheerfully, thoroughly upended. And Cimorene, who is practical, brave, and refreshingly unimpressed by tradition, handles it all with a competence that is itself a source of constant comedy.
The humour is sly and knowing — the book is packed with winking references to the fairy tales it gleefully subverts. Kirkus Reviews called it “smoothly written and ingenious fantasy,” and it appeared on the ALA Best Book for Young Adults list. It is the sort of book that makes you laugh because it trusts you to notice what is funny, and that trust is never misplaced.
9. The Princess Bride by William Goldman
We must make a confession: The Princess Bride was not written for a younger audience. It was written for everyone, by a man who understood that the very best fairy tales refuse to take themselves seriously. And since it is one of the funniest fantasy novels ever committed to paper, we find ourselves entirely unable to exclude it.
William Goldman presents his book as an abridgment — the “Good Parts Version” — of a longer, drier work by the fictional S. Morgenstern. Goldman interrupts his own fairy tale with editorial asides explaining what he has cut and why, and the result is a comedy that operates on two levels at once: a swashbuckling romance full of sword fights, giants, and a pirate called the Dread Pirate Roberts, nested inside a sly, affectionate satire of the genre itself. The word “Inconceivable!” is deployed with magnificent frequency by a character who does not know what it means. A Spaniard hunts a six-fingered man. Rodents of Unusual Size are a legitimate concern.
The New York Times called it “a witty, affectionate send-up of the adventure-yarn form,” and Time magazine placed it among the hundred best fantasy books of all time. Many readers know the beloved film, but the novel — with Goldman’s deliciously unreliable narration and his elaborate, entirely fabricated publishing history — is funnier still. It is a book that respects its readers enough to let them in on the joke, and the joke is magnificent.
10. The Hero’s Guide to Saving Your Kingdom by Christopher Healy
Have you ever wondered what became of all those princes from the fairy tales — the ones the bards simply called “Prince Charming” because they could not be bothered to learn anyone’s actual name? Christopher Healy has, and his answer is one of the most thoroughly entertaining fantasy comedies we have encountered.
Four princes — Frederic (Cinderella’s prince, who is timid and pampered), Gustav (Rapunzel’s prince, who is brawny and perpetually furious), Liam (Sleeping Beauty’s prince, who is genuinely heroic but saddled with a dreadful reputation), and Duncan (Snow White’s prince, who is cheerfully peculiar in every possible way) — are brought together by circumstance and an evil witch to form the most unlikely band of heroes imaginable. The result is a fairy-tale adventure in which the comedy springs not from pop-culture references or modern winking, but from the characters themselves and the glorious gap between who they believe themselves to be and who they actually are.
Kirkus gave it a starred review, calling it “inventive and hilarious, with laugh-out-loud moments on every page,” and the Los Angeles Times praised it as “one of the more clever, hilariously successful” fairy-tale retellings. The chapter titles alone — including “Prince Charming Defends Some Vegetables” and “Prince Charming Should Not Be Left Unsupervised” — are worth the price of admission. Two sequels follow, each as riotously funny as the first.
11. Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians by Brandon Sanderson
Yes, that Brandon Sanderson — the one famous for sprawling epic fantasies with intricate magic systems. In this middle-grade series, he channels all of his creative energy into something entirely different: a wildly funny, fourth-wall-breaking adventure in which the greatest villains on earth are librarians.
Alcatraz Smedry receives a bag of sand for his thirteenth birthday, discovers he belongs to a family of people with magical “Talents” (his is the Talent of breaking things), and learns that the world is secretly controlled by a sinister cult of Evil Librarians who have been lying to everyone about, well, everything. The humour is relentless, irreverent, and unapologetically bizarre. Alcatraz narrates directly to the reader, argues with the reader, and occasionally warns the reader that this is not, in fact, a good book and they should stop reading immediately.
Sanderson’s commitment to the absurdist tone is total, and the result is a book that catches readers off guard with how genuinely, consistently funny it is. If you enjoy narrators who refuse to behave, this series will delight you enormously.
12. The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde
Jasper Fforde is a writer whose imagination appears to have no speed limit whatsoever, and The Last Dragonslayer is what happens when he points it squarely at the fantasy genre and floors the accelerator.
Fifteen-year-old Jennifer Strange is a foundling who manages Kazam, an employment agency for wizards in the Ununited Kingdoms — an alternate Britain where magic is real but fading. The remaining sorcerers are old, cantankerous, and mostly reduced to mundane work: rewiring houses, clearing drains, and delivering pizza by magic carpet. When a prophecy declares that the world’s last dragon will soon be slain, and that Jennifer is the one destined to do it, every land developer, corrupt politician, and opportunistic king in the realm descends upon her with undisguised greed. Jennifer must navigate corporate scheming, incompetent wizards, a surprisingly polite dragon, and an extremely enthusiastic Quarkbeast — a creature that is, we are informed, nine-tenths velociraptor-and-kitchen-blender and one-tenth Labrador.
The humour is deadpan, inventive, and relentless. NPR described Fforde as “a master world-builder, a specialist in mashing up, with deadpan hilarity, the fantastic and the mundane,” and The Horn Book called the book “smart, funny, and abundantly imaginative.” Readers who enjoy Pratchett’s gift for making the absurd feel inevitable will find a kindred spirit here. Three sequels await, each more wonderfully ridiculous than the last.
13. Castle Hangnail by Ursula Vernon
Ursula Vernon — who also writes as T. Kingfisher — has a gift for making the macabre absolutely adorable, and Castle Hangnail may be her finest demonstration of this talent.
When twelve-year-old Molly arrives at Castle Hangnail to fill the vacancy for a Wicked Witch, the castle’s minions are sceptical. She is barely five feet tall and extremely polite — not exactly the storm-the-battlements, defy-the-gods sort of evil overlord they were hoping for. But the castle is in danger of being decommissioned by the Board of Magic if it cannot complete a series of Wicked Tasks, and Molly is their only applicant.
The comedy here lives in the contrast between the gothic setting and the gentle, earnest heroine who inhabits it. Molly makes friends with the minions — a motley assortment of enchanted suits of armour, cursed goldfish, and one very helpful vampire — and sets about proving that wickedness is a matter of perspective. Vernon’s wit has been compared to both Roald Dahl and Terry Pratchett, and the book is as warm-hearted as it is funny.
14. A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher
From the same wonderfully imaginative mind — writing here under her T. Kingfisher pen name — comes a book whose premise alone should make you smile: a fourteen-year-old wizard whose magic only works on bread.
Mona is a baker’s apprentice. She can make dough rise with a thought, coax pastries into elaborate shapes, and command an army of gingerbread men — though they are, it must be said, not terribly disciplined soldiers. Her sourdough starter, Bob, lives in a bucket in the basement, extends tentacles, eats rats, and is the sort of character one never expected to adore but absolutely does. When an assassin begins hunting the city’s magic-users and the powerful wizards flee, Mona finds herself — an anxious, practical, decidedly un-epic teenager — as one of the last people standing between her city and catastrophe. Armed with nothing but flour, yeast, and an extremely moody bucket of fermented dough.
The book swept the fantasy awards in 2021, winning the Andre Norton Nebula Award, the Lodestar Award, the Locus Award, the Mythopoeic Award, and the Dragon Award — and it earned every one. The humour is absurdist, warm, and wonderfully deadpan in the Pratchett tradition, treating its ridiculous premise with exactly the right amount of seriousness. Reviewers have described it as “clever, charming, and so funny,” and we can only agree while adding that Bob the sourdough starter deserves a book of his own.
15. The Adventurer’s Guide to Successful Escapes by Wade Albert White
We conclude our list with a book that takes the bureaucratic absurdity of the fantasy genre and turns it into a comedy of truly magnificent proportions.
Anne is an orphan living in a world of magical academies, dangerous quests, and an elaborate bureaucracy that governs all adventuring. When she accidentally activates a quest medallion, she is launched into an adventure involving prophecies, dragons, and a truly absurd number of regulations governing the proper conduct of heroic escapes. The humour is woven into the very structure of the world — between each chapter, the narrator provides tongue-in-cheek notes on the rules and guidelines of adventuring, delivered with perfect deadpan.
Wade Albert White writes with a distinct voice that is glib, sarcastic, and enormously entertaining. Kirkus Reviews called it “a highly distinctive, smart take on the fantasy novel,” and readers who appreciate the absurd collision of epic quests and mundane paperwork will feel right at home. It is funny, fast-paced, and far cleverer than it initially lets on.
Finding Your Perfect Funny Fantasy
The beauty of humorous fantasy is that there are so many flavours of funny. If you prefer your wit dry and British, reach for Pratchett, Stroud, or Fforde. If you like your comedy served with warmth and fairy-tale charm, try The Wendy, Dealing with Dragons, or Castle Hangnail. If you want action-comedy with snappy dialogue, Skulduggery Pleasant and Artemis Fowl will not disappoint. And if you enjoy narrators who cannot be trusted to behave themselves, Alcatraz Smedry and William Goldman await.
Whatever your taste, the books on this list share one essential quality: they respect the intelligence of their readers. The best funny fantasy does not talk down to you. It invites you to laugh along with it, trusting that you will catch the joke — and these fifteen books deliver.
