Please can you help me find some gentle, very English/UK humour for my elderly dad?

Also, if he's into golden-age crime type novels, there's a great (and lengthy) series set in 1920s Scotland featuring a heroine/lady detective called Dandy Gilver that I really enjoy. It's gentle but sort of darkly comic, and very well researched.

amp.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/16/great-gags-hope-and-happy-endings-books-to-cheer-everyone-up?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=twt_gu&utm_medium=&utm_source=Twitter&__twitter_impression=true

This may have already been added to the thread but just in case!

Am seconding David Lodge too. And Middle England by Jonathon Coe. Particularly if he will enjoy contemporary references.

Whilst Waugh is very funny I wouldn’t describe him as having a “gentle” sense of humour.

I think he would enjoy Middlemarch, which is both very English and very funny, and Trollope though obviously not recent! Again, a light read but all the quirkiness of human nature is there & obviously beautifully written.

I’m a huuuuge Kate Atkinson fan too but she does veer into darker territory sometimes. There were some short stories years which were very good but not an easy read. I think each story had within it the death of a child iirc.

Alexander Mccall Smith
the heartbeat tv series books
Rachel Joyces Harold Fry book (she may have done others)
Jonas Jonnason & Fredrick Backman (not British authors I don't think but very good)
David Nicholls I am not sure of but other love

Attention All Shipping: A Journey Round the Shipping Forecast - I enjoyed this as an audio book.

Definitely 'My Family and Other Animals', and all the others. I read some of that to a friend once on holiday and she was literally crying with laughter.

I would say the Hitchhikers trilogy of five too, to be honest, although he might not dig it if he doesn't like fantasy.

I must say that I found all the Anne of Green Gables books very funny. Obviously they are Canadian not English but there's a lot of crossover, especially in the books about the war as they track all the major Canadian battles in France. I think it's doing them a disservice to say they are only for children and/or girls.

A lot of Dickens is funny - Martin Chuzzlewhit comes to mind. And what about new things like 'This is going to hurt'? I pissed myself so many times reading that.

Scottish, rather than English but Monarch of the Glen by Compton McKenzie is a wonderful farce.

Another vote here for the A J Wentworth books. And also Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh.

And another vote for Leonard and Hungry Paul.

Magnus Mills. Very British, slightly wry humour. You read each novel in a state of anticipation as so much is suggested and yet the denouement, when it comes, is as understated as the whole plot. So hard to describe just how clever they are.

Phyllis Law Notes to my mother-in-law was lovely

Perhaps Tom Sharpe?

I love Simon Brett's stuff. Mysteries featuring Charles Paris - mostly out of work Actor. The audible one features the voice of Bill Nighy. Lovely!

He also has mysteries with two women who are amatuer sleuths - I think this is the Fethering series of books Also some featuring a Mrs Pargiter. Her husband is dead and was a crook (though she would never admit to that). She has a black book of names of people he 'worked' with and often calls upon them for favours.

Love them all. I think he has written other series as well.

Anything by David Lodge. Deaf Sentence is wonderful.

I came on to suggest Gerald Durrell too as My Family And Other Animals is just such fun. And there are lots more too. Ended up reading through - lots of great ideas on here! It's hard to beat PG Wodehouse for hands down hilarity and the perfection of his writing.

Does he like crime/mystery? Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham and Dorothy Sayers would be my favourite Golden Age three for great characters, plots and writing. A pp also mentioned Edmund Crispin's Gervase Fen books which are good fun. I like to retreat into the past when modern life isn't a very happy place to be, so books written in the middle section of the 20th century are just about right for me

Alexander McCall Smith is also fantastic. Gentle but not fluffy, and full of humour, quiet wisdom and kindness.

David Nobbs

Second from last in the sack race - very very funny

What about Pratchett?

I'm a little wary because my own father is dead set against anything that couldn't actually be true, but assuming that's not a problem then the humour is very intelligent and very English (as are several of the settings, despite being on a world sustained and suffused by magic).

Unless he's already a fantasy fan I wouldn't start with the first one. Guards! Guards! is a good place to jump in, or Wyrd Sisters, or Mort.

His trilogy Truckers, Diggers, Wings (aka the Bromeliad), while dealing with what might be considered impossibly small humanoids, is otherwise entirely realistic () and very funny. Its first section is a take-off of biblical style. The trilogy that starts with "Only You Can Save Mankind" is worth a mention. Good Omens is also delightful (and unlike the previous two, written for adults).

Many thanks to the PP who reminded me about Nigel Barley, I read it at least 20 years ago and it's perfect for lockdown.
I once used reading back to back Bill Bryson as a cure for a mild but persistant depression and it worked! This thread is giving me ideas for the next time.

The Adrian Mole series?

Miss Buncle's Book by DE Stevenson

Have you tried Mark Wallingtons other books, 500 Mile Walkies, Boogie on the river?

Some of these are not very gentle or very English or either but there is a Bollinger Everyman Prize for comic fiction.

Has he read David Lodge's novels? - Small Changes and two others are a trilogy of campus novels. Lodge is now in his 80s - these are his early work.

From the same list, Jonathan Coe's The Rotter's Club

Alan Bennett, various fiction and non fiction

Love, Nina is Nina Stibbe's letters home to her sister in Leicestershire in the early 80s. She was a rather uncoventional nanny for a literary single parent household - her employer was the editor of the London Review of Books and Alan Bennett is a neighbour and is constantly round for dinner/gossip. Claire Tomalin and Michael Frayn are also neighbours and Tomalin's disabled son's carer becomes a good friend and perhaps more.... It is very funny.

There are a few publishers and imprints who bring out a lot of mid 20th century fiction - much by women, a few books by men, some quite interesting social comedy of various levels from gentle on. Examples include Virago Modern Classics, Persephone Books and Dean Street Press (Furrowed Middlebrow). Persephone books include some non fiction as well as fiction.

Suggestions:
Barbara Pym (VMC)
DE Stevenson - Persephone and Furrowed Middlebrow - Miss Buncle's Book (Persephone) is very funny
Barbara Euphan Todd's Miss Rankill Comes Home - first published during WW2 - After a few years stuck on a desert island, Miss Rankill finally gets back to England to find daily life has changed in all kinds of ways

Chris Paling, Reading Allowed is by a former BBC producer and novelist turned public library worker, about working in a large public library and the borrowers who turn up to use the library. When I borrowed a copy from a library someone else reserved it (it was relatively new) and I wondered if a library worker had thought, ooh, interesting....

Oh I'd forgotten Deric Longden - "Lost For Words" is one of the funniest books I have ever read.
"A SPRITE, Mrs Longden, a SPRITE!"

Dear Lupin books by Roger Mortimer I found very English and funny, but poignant.