Funniest characters in literature

The guy in "Choke"

Haven't read it in awhile, and can't remember his name, but just the thought of a guy working at Colonial Williamsburg, attending sexaholics meetings to pick up chicks and making a living by pretending to choke on food is some really funny shit

Calvin and Hobbes

The main character (the chair of the English department) in Richard Russo's Straight Man. Goose scene.

jurgen - a comedy of justice - by cabell

"To think of it," Jurgen reflected, "that the world I inhabit is ordered by beings who are not one-tenth so clever as I am! I have often suspected as much, and it is decidedly unfair. Now let me see if I cannot make something out of being such a monstrous clever fellow."

the stripper in confederacy of dunces is a contender.

"my there were a lot of balls on them beaux. But at least I still have my honor."

Candide.

Henry Chinaski - in any Charles Bukowski book..Post Office, Factotum, Ham on Rye, etc ( all autobiographical )

ham on rye does have a really funny scene. When his dad is driving henry around delivering milk in the winter and he asks him (parapharasing)

"what would you do if I dropped you off right now? you wouldn't know how to survive"

Whereupon henry says:

"I guess I would go back and drink the milk we just dropped off."

My favorite books are the ones by kurt vonnegut.

During my trip to Ilium and to points beyond—a two-week expedition bridging Christmas—I let a poor poet named Sherman Krebbs have my New York City apartment free. My second wife had left me on the grounds that I was too pessimistic for an optimist to live with.

Krebbs was a bearded man, a platinum blond Jesus with spaniel eyes. He was no close friend of mine. I had met him at a cocktail party where he presented himself as National Chairman of Poets and Painters for Immediate Nuclear War. He begged for shelter, not necessarily bomb proof, and it happened that I had some.

When I returned to my apartment … I found [it] wrecked by a nihilistic debauch. Krebbs was gone; but, before leaving, he had run up three-hundred-dollars’ worth of long-distance calls, set my couch on fire in five places, killed my cat and my avocado tree, and torn the door off my medicine cabinet.

He wrote this poem, in what proved to be excrement, on the yellow linoleum floor of my kitchen:

I have a kitchen.

But it is not a complete kitchen.

I will not be truly gay

Until I have a

Dispose-all.

There was another message, written in lipstick in a feminine hand on the wallpaper over my bed. It said: “No, no, no, said Chicken-licken.”

There was a sign hung around my dead cat’s neck. It said, “Meow.”

queequeg in Moby Dick

Alex from Everthing is Illuminated (Jonathan Safran Foer). no doubt.

crit lit wrote:

Jim Dixon, the title character in Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, maybe the funniest novel in English literature. Classic hangover scene, among many highlights.

agreed.

zooey in the short story 'zooey' by jd salinger.

David Foster Wallace:

In his non-fiction essays.

Nabokov's Humbert Humbert. Dry, messed up, and hilarious.