High Fidelity

Top 5 reasons why Nick Hornby's classic High Fidelity is so funny:
1)    While being written by a man for men about men, it's pretty scathing about masculinity and male bravado, treating the reverence for records and films with love, affection and tongue-in-cheekness.
2)    The arcane dissections of obscure pop facts, the one-upmanship on the most trivial of answers and knowledge titbits are not only painfully familiar but searing in their deconstruction of modern man.
3)    The use of top 5 lists to put things in perspective, to keep things ticking over in a manageable way in your brain, to rank things in order of greatness are a funny device for telling the story, showing more about Rob's absurdity and fickleness.
4)    The voyage of self-discovery that Rob sets himself on, having been dumped on the first page, is pretty absurd: re-dating your most pivotal break-ups to try and decipher just why you're such a dumpable guy sounds like masochism in the extreme, thus becoming an amusing device for 'finding oneself.'
5)    The writing is light and full of pop culture references and warm to its characters, horrendous characters of the worst aspects of maleness that they are, ranging from selfish to argumentative to fickle to arrogant to insular, each character is drawn so lovingly and with enough one-liners to floor a novel-sized elephant, making the book a masterstroke of modern-day humour.