The Hell of It All

8 best books like The Hell of It All (Charlie Brooker): Playing the Moldovans at Tennis, Stalin Ate My Homework, Love All the People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines, Ricky Gervais Presents: The World of Karl Pilkington, James Acaster's Classic Scrapes, Parsnips, Buttered: How to baffle, bamboozle and boycott your way through modern life, How I Escaped My Certain Fate, Tickling the English

Playing the Moldovans at Tennis

Author	Tony Hawks
ISBN	0312305184

It doesn't take much - "£100 is usually sufficient" - to persuade Tony Hawks to take off on notoriously bizarre and hilarious adventures in response to a bet. And so it is, a pointless argument with a friend concludes in a bet - that Tony can't beat all eleven members of the Moldovan soccer team at tennis....

Stalin Ate My Homework

Author	Alexei Sayle
ISBN	0340919582

Alexei knew he was doomed to be different the day he was taken to see Sergei Eisentein's Alexander Nevsky instead of Walt Disney's Bambi. Born on the day that egg rationing came to an end, Alexei grew up with his parents and the Soviet Weekly. Each year they holidayed in Eastern Europe, where they were shown...

Love All the People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines

Author	Bill Hicks
ISBN	1845291115

So it was disappointing as hell not to love this book. In fact, it was disgusting to realize that during large sections, I was bored. The problem is not Bill. The problem is the editing. The idea behind the book was to show Bill’s comedy routines as he performed them throughout his career so that the reader...

Ricky Gervais Presents: The World of Karl Pilkington

Author	Karl Pilkington
ISBN	1401303420

In this pithy and hilarious book, Karl Pilkington is in conversation with (the often bewildered) Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, the writers and stars of The Office and Extras, unwittingly outwitting even those comedy Goliaths as he struggles in vain to make sense of the world around him. Unencumbered...

James Acaster's Classic Scrapes

Author	James Acaster
ISBN	1472247183

James Acaster has been nominated for the Edinburgh Comedy Award five times and has appeared on prime-time TV shows like MOCK THE WEEK, LIVE AT THE APOLLO and RUSSELL HOWARD'S STAND UP CENTRAL.

But behind the fame and critical acclaim is a man perpetually getting into trouble. Whether it's disappointing...

Parsnips, Buttered: How to baffle, bamboozle and boycott your way through modern life

Author

Joe Lycett

Dear Reader,

Life is hard. We are a bombarded generation: Facebook, billboards, Twitter, Instagram, taxes, newspapers, watches monitoring our sleep, apps that read our pulse, terrorism. There's such an onslaught to the senses these days it's a marvel any of us manage to get out of bed....

How I Escaped My Certain Fate

Author	Stewart Lee
ISBN	0571254802

The Goodreads Censorship Fiasco of 2013 has got a lot of people considering works by Adolph Hitler, convicted sex offenders, and flagrant P2P artists. I have found myself repeatedly thinking of a particular routine from 90s stand-up comedian Stewart Lee.

If you don't know Lee, his style...

Tickling the English

Author	Dara Ó Briain
ISBN	0718154371

No, no, no. This book actually made me angry. Marketed as an outsider's look at the nuances of national character, this is merely an extremely cynical attempt to cash in on a comedian's popularity, with nothing offered up in exchange.
O'Briain isn’t completely terrible when he tries a bit of Bryson-esque...