"Oreo" by Fran Ross (1974)

Of all the novels I've been told were "really funny" I'd say maybe 2 percent actually were. This one's packed with wacky characters and jokes, mostly of the kind kids in honors classes might find funny—upon hearing his Black daughter was marrying a Jewish man, an anti-Semitic father goes into a paralyzing coma, his body rigidly molded into the shape of a half-swastika. The main character, Christine Clark, is called "Oreo" not because she's necessarily "white on the inside," or because she's of mixed Black-Jewish blood, but because her Black grandmother speaks with a heavy southern accent and tried to give her the nickname "Oriole"—it's humor like that. It's also postmodern and Pyncheon-esque and it parallels Theseus of Greek mythology and it's littered with Yiddish and mixes math jokes with dick jokes and mixes wordplay with physical comedy set pieces and mixes feminist bad-assery with a naggingly odd fixation on Jewish culture and there's a mute man who has to hold up a series of cartoon bubbles next to his head in order to speak and if this all sounds like a try-hard tedious mess to you I can assure you that it very much is. One star.