I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review and this is the Book Review

podcast. I'm joined today by our staff critics

our three regular book reviewers, all of whom worked on a project that we

recently published and which hopefully you saw. 22 of the funniest books since catch 22.

Dwight Garner, welcome.

Hey Gilbert, it's good to be here.

Alexandra Jacobs, hello there.

Hello, Gilbert.

Jen's a lie, it's wonderful to see you.

Great seeing you, Gilbert.

So Dwight, why catch-22, a book that maybe some of us have not read since we were forced to do so in high school.

Yeah, it was just, you know, give us a landmark book.

It came out at a time when the sort of culture was changing.

It was pre-Vietnam, pre-ippies but it caught that presage that vibe in

American culture a dark sardonic sense of humor it was a really a dark book a

dark comic book about war which American fiction had not quite seen to that

extent and just the glory of his voice Joseph Heller was just terrific to

read and dark punchy strange it caught the culture at the time.

And when people say funny, this is going to be a big sort of strain of our conversation here, right?

But I'm curious when you say funny, Alexandra, and you say funny, Jen, when you say funny, Alexandra, you say funny, Jen, when you say funny, maybe that all means

different things to different people because humor is so subjective.

I know our listeners are curious about how our process generally works and I imagine specifically about something like this

...