Book Review: The Bare Bones Book of Humour
2 min read
Team Kitaab reviews The Bare Bones Book of Humour (Bare Bones Publishing, 2026), observing how the collection succeeds because it treats laughter as a serious literary resource rather than a decorative flourish.
Humour is often treated as literature’s unruly cousin—welcome at the table but rarely granted the gravitas afforded to tragedy, realism, or the political novel. Yet anyone who has attempted to write it knows that humour may be the most demanding literary mode of all. It requires rhythm, timing, cultural awareness, and an instinct for human frailty.
The Bare Bones Book of Humour, edited by Ankit Raj Ojha and featuring a foreword by Mike Nagel, enters this terrain with confidence. Bringing together twenty-four writers from across continents, the anthology demonstrates that humour is not merely entertainment but an important literary mode through which societies examine themselves.
The anthology’s premise is simple but effective: gather a diverse range of writers and allow humour to unfold in its many shapes. Contributors include Jahnavi Gogoi, Merlin Flower, Steve Akinkuolie, Padmanabh Trivedi, Allan Miller, Amit Majmudar, François Bereaud, Nifemi Adediran, Abhilipsa Sahoo, Rahul Gaur, Nneoma F. Kenure, Sherry Morris, Swapnit Pradhan, Aparna Kalra, Alice Eze, Sahana Ahmed, Aneeta Sundararaj, Vishaal, Mitra Samal, Sylvia Beaupré, Shih-Li Kow, Doug Jacquier, and Grace Q. Hu, among others. The result is a collection that does not attempt to define humour narrowly. Instead, it revels in multiplicity with different narrative strategies, comic traditions, cultural contexts, and tonal registers colliding within a single volume.
