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Mark Twain's classic novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, tells the story of a teenaged misfit who finds himself floating on a raft down the Mississippi River with an escaping slave, Jim. In the course of their perilous journey, Huck and Jim meet adventure, danger, and a cast of characters who are sometimes menacing and often hilarious.
Though some of the situations in Huckleberry Finn are funny in themselves (the cockeyed Shakespeare production in Chapter 21 leaps instantly to mind), this book's humor is found mostly in Huck's unique worldview and his way of expressing himself. Describing his brief sojourn with the Widow Douglas after she adopts him, Huck says: "After supper she got out her book and learned me about Moses and the Bulrushers, and I was in a sweat to find out all about him; but by and by she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn't care no more about him, because I don't take no stock in dead people." Underlying Twain's good humor is a dark subcurrent of Antebellum cruelty and injustice that makes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a frequently funny book with a serious message.

Widely considered one of Dickens most superb and complete novels, "Bleak House" has a complex plot that contains one of his most elaborate attacks on a flaw of society: the chancery system. The kind John Jarndyce is tied up in litigation that only his wards Richard and Ada care to discuss. He then becomes guardian of Esther, an orphaned young woman who comprises a part of the experimental narration of the novel. A series of events take the vast array of comic and tragic characters from the slums of London to the mansions of noblemen, involving some in treachery and others in discovery. Dickens blends the perfect balance of comedy and social satire in a story that contains mystery, tragedy, murder, redemption, and enduring love.

Two-part religious allegory by John Bunyan, at one time second only to the Bible in popularity. It is a symbolic vision of the pilgrimage through life. The first and best-known book, published in 1678, in which the character Christian travels on the road to salvation from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, is presented as a dream. Written in homely yet dignified biblical prose, the work has some of the qualities of a folktale, and in its humor and realistic portrayals of Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Faithful, Hopeful, Pliant, and Obstinate, it anticipates the 18th-century novel. In The Pilgrim's Progress, Second Part (1684), which deals with the effort of Christian's wife and sons to join him, the psychological intensity is relaxed and Bunyan's capacity for humor and realistic observation becomes more evident.