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I don't know what the criteria is for getting "funny" slapped onto the back of a book, but I have to assume it's "having a number of different words," because that's the only thing that The Great Gatsby (heartbreaking and brutal) has in common with Christopher Moore's Lamb (almost impossibly hilarious), both of which have the word "funny" printed on the back cover.

Almost every truly funny book that I've found was discovered by accident. I'll go to a bookstore and pick something out either because of its cover (this is a good thing to do, children) or because the description on the back sounds like it might be funny. Since every description tries to make every novel sound funny, it's a total crapshoot. For every time I blindly stumbled into a Lamb or a Tricky Business or a John Dies at the End (now a major motion picture that just debuted at the Sundance film festival!), there were plenty of times where I ended up with a bunch of novels that were terrible that I won't mention by name because that would be rude (except for About the Author, which was so terrible that I'm still mad that I read it six years ago).