Books For A Laugh Trivia Quiz

Answer: Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle

Top "Heal the World" passage to cheer you up when you have too much work and not enough time to do it - the chapter entitled "Lessons and How To Avoid Them", which contains useful advice on not doing Botany, History, Science, and various other subjects. These can easily be extended to cover anything at all that you wish to get out of.

Strictly speaking, Geoffrey Willans wrote the words and Ronald Searle drew the pictures, but both are equally hilarious. "Down With Skool!" (1953) is supposedly written by Nigel Molesworth, a pupil at the fictional English boarding school, St Custard's. Molesworth's idiosyncratic spelling and wry observations about school life, including his fellow pupils and their teachers, are still funny today. Three further books followed: "How to be Topp" (1954), "Whizz for Atomms" (1956) and "Back in the Jug Agane" (1959), the last of these published after the tragically early death of Willans the previous year, aged only 47.

Interesting fact - Chapter 3 of "How to be Topp" includes an extract from a supposed Latin play about a family named "The Hogwarts". This is generally believed to be the source of the name of Harry Potter's school: J K Rowling has admitted that she was familiar with the Molesworth books before she began writing her own successful boarding-school series.

Answer: Stella Gibbons

Top "Heal the World" passage to cheer you up when you are fed up through having to visit some tedious relatives - the episode in which Flora finally gets to meet her Aunt Ada Doom, who claims that she "saw something nasty in the woodshed" when she was a child and has used this as an excuse to be waited on hand and foot ever since.

Stella Gibbons wrote her first novel, "Cold Comfort Farm" (1932), as a parody of the then-popular earthy rural novels of writers such as Mary Webb. It tells of a young woman named Flora Poste who goes to stay with her relatives who live on a run-down farm in Sussex. The farming relatives are all parodies of popular rural stereotypes: the sex-mad youth (Seth); the flighty tree-hugging girl (Elfine); the tormented mother (Judith); and the aged woman who refuses to come out of her bedroom (Aunt Ada Doom). The joke is that, while Webb and her fellow ruralists had romanticised the lives of such people, Stella and her heroine both regard them as self-centred and foolish, and the book shows how Flora sorts out their complicated lives using her metropolitan common sense.

Ironically, while Webb is little read these days, "Cold Comfort Farm" remains as funny and popular as ever. Before her death in 1989, Stella Gibbons published around 25 other novels and collections of short stories, although none of them achieved the lasting success of her first.

Answer: Richmal Crompton

Top "Heal the World" passage to cheer you up when your family are getting you down - the chapter entitled "The Outlaws", in which William is forced to look after a baby in a pram, much to his embarrassment. This goes about as well as you'd expect.

Richmal Crompton (1890-1969) began writing stories about the mischievous schoolboy William Brown while she was a teacher at Bromley High School in south-east London. The first book, "Just William", was published in 1922, and was followed by around 40 others, the last being published posthumously in 1970.

Originally aimed at an adult audience and intended to poke gentle fun at the adult world as seen through the eyes of a somewhat cynical 11-year-old, they soon became popular with children of around William's age. William and his friends Ginger, Henry and Douglas are members of a gang named the Outlaws, which meets in the "old barn" near the village where they live. Other regular characters include William's parents and his older brother (Robert) and sister (Ethel), as well as the annoying schoolgirl Violet Elizabeth Bott.

Answer: George and Weedon Grossmith

Top "Heal the World" passage to cheer you up when your latest DIY project is a disaster - the incident in which Mr Pooter paints the family bath red, thinking it looks rather smart, but the red paint comes off while he is having a soak, leaving him "resembling the Red Indians I have seen depicted at an East-End theatre."

Extracts from "The Diary of a Nobody" first appeared in the magazine "Punch" in the late 1880s, before publication in book form in 1892. The "diary" is supposedly written by a middle-class City clerk named Charles Pooter, married to Carrie, and with a son named William. Pooter is somewhat self-important, and much of the humour comes from his dismayed reaction to incidents and social situations that don't go quite to plan. Throughout all this, he remains likeable and sympathetic, which has ensured that the book has remained popular and in print ever since its first publication.

George Grossmith (1847-1912) was a hugely popular entertainer in Victorian England, who originated many of the main comic baritone roles in the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. His brother Weedon (1854-1919) was equally successful as an actor, playwright and illustrator. But it is safe to say that they are chiefly remembered today as the authors of this book.

Answer: Daisy Ashford

Top "Heal the World" passage to cheer you up when you feel your social life is a mess - the chapter entitled "High life", when Mr Salteena attends a "levie" at Buckingham Palace and meets the Prince of Wales, who wears "a lovely ermine cloak and a small but costly crown."

Before you hit the "Correction Note" button, please note that the spelling of the word "Visiters" is correct. Unlike the other books in this quiz, this wasn't written specifically to make the reader laugh. "The Young Visiters" is a short novel written in 1890 by Daisy Ashford when she was just nine years old. It tells of the introduction into fashionable London society of Mr Alfred Salteena, his unrequited love for young Ethel Monticue, and Ethel's eventual marriage to the eligible bachelor Bernard Clark.

Some years later the manuscript was seen by a publisher who recognized that its naïve romantic plot and eccentric spelling could make it appealing to a more sophisticated adult audience. He was right, and the book was hugely successful, being reprinted many times since its initial publication in 1919. It is still in print today.

Answer: Stephen Potter

Top "Heal the World" passage to cheer you up when nothing seems to be going your way - the chapter on "Losemanship", which describes several ploys for subtly putting off or distracting an opponent who is winning, and thus "break their flow" and give you the chance to gain the upper hand.

Stephen Potter (1900-69) was a writer and producer for the BBC when he wrote "Gamesmanship" (1947), the full title of which is "The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship: Or the Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating". The idea behind the book is that an inferior player of any game can nevertheless win by subtly putting off or unsettling their opponent: "without actually cheating", in other words. The book was a huge success, and Potter went on to write several other books on the same theme, expanding the idea to other aspects of life, such as work and courting. The word "gamesmanship" can still sometimes be heard today.

Answer: W C Sellar and R J Yeatman

Top "Heal the World" passage to cheer you up when you worry that you're losing your mind - the "Test Papers" which appear throughout the book, and which parody the sort of questions which used to appear on History exam papers, such as "Which do you consider was the stronger swimmer, (a) the Spanish Armadillo, (b) the Great Seal?" And remember - "Do not on any account attempt to write on both sides of the paper at once."

Like "The Diary of a Nobody", extracts from "1066 and All That" first appeared in "Punch" magazine, before its publication in book form in 1930. Written by W C Sellar and R J Yeatman, it is a comic history of England, based on the idea that history isn't what actually happened, but what you remember. The humour comes from the writers' skilful mix of real history with comic misrepresentation of the facts, to such an extent that their version becomes almost more real than the truth. The book remains in print today, and ironically probably does more to give its modern readers an idea of the scope of English history than most schools.

Answer: Flann O'Brien

Top "Heal The World" passage to cheer you up when you can't make sense of the world - the section towards the end of the book where a group of fictional characters, fed up with the way their authorial creator treats them, submit him to a farcical trial which ends in his being found guilty and punished.

"At Swim-Two-Birds" (1939) is perhaps the best-known work by "Flann O'Brien", a pseudonym used by the Irish writer Brian O'Nolan, who also wrote a popular newspaper column under the name of "Myles na Gopaleen". It is a surreal comedy whose plot defies summary and is populated with many characters from Irish myth and legend, such as Finn MacCool and the bird-king Sweeney. It was praised by writers as diverse as James Joyce and Graham Greene, though it was not until its republication in the 1960s that it began to achieve wider recognition. Dylan Thomas famously praised it with the words "Just the book to give your sister, if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl".

Answer: E F Benson

Top "Heal The World" passage to cheer you up when you feel you're surrounded by idiots - the chapters concerning the "Indian guru", who ingratiates himself into the society of Lucia's home town of Riseholme and encourages everyone to take up yoga. Of course, he turns out to be a complete fraud, but not before deceiving all the social-climbing snobs of the town. Lucia, of course, pretends she knew he was a fake all along.

Edward Frederic Benson (1867-1940) came from a distinguished family: his father became Archbishop of Canterbury, and his brother wrote the words to "Land of Hope and Glory." He himself is best remembered these days for "Queen Lucia" (1920) and its five sequels, about the snobbish social-climbing Emmeline Lucas and her rivalry with her neighbours Daisy Quantock and (later) Miss Elizabeth Mapp. The books, which offer splendid roles for actresses with a penchant for pretentious snobbery, have been adapted for television several times, perhaps most successfully in the 1980s with Geraldine McEwan as Lucia, Prunella Scales as Miss Mapp and Nigel Hawthorne as the somewhat camp Georgie Pillson.

Answer: Jerome K Jerome

Top "Heal The World" passage to cheer you up when nothing seems to be going right - the incident with the tin of pineapple chunks. The three friends find, to their delight, a tin of pineapple chunks - but then discover that they have nothing with which to open it. Their efforts to break into it are all, alas, in vain, and the tin ends up thrown into the Thames.

Jerome Klapka Jerome (1859-1927) wrote "Three Men In A Boat (To Say Nothing Of The Dog)" in 1888, having recently spent his honeymoon in a small boat on the River Thames. It describes a river trip between Kingston-on-Thames and Oxford made by the narrator and his friends George and Harris (and Montmorency the dog) in a small Thames skiff. He originally intended it to be a serious guide to the river, and it still contains several "straight" descriptions of places visited, but it is the comic set-pieces that ensured the book its immediate popularity and enduring charm. A sequel about a bicycle trip in Germany entitled "Three Men on the Bummel" was published in 1900.