What are (some of) the best comic novels?

livemint.com:

Snippet. The first description of Aimée: “Her full face was oval, her profile pure and classical and light. Her eyes greenish and remote, with a rich glint of lunacy." The charms of Ignatius Reilly will be lost on some, but the protagonist of John Kennedy Toole’s novel is a comedic colossus. At odds with the modern world, this slothful behemoth of a man-boy farts, belches and bickers his way through a succession of lowly jobs in New Orleans to pay off his drunken mama’s debts, the erratic Mrs Reilly being his only consistent companion.

The laughs are all in Ignatius’s haughty, misanthropic reflections on those unfortunate enough to come into his odorous orbit. Several publishers rejected Toole’s book—one reason why he committed suicide in 1969, aged only 31. It was due to the persistence of his mother Thelma, clearly a more capable woman than Mrs Reilly, that “A Confederacy of Dunces" was published 11 years later.

Snippet. A policeman rides his motorcycle up a New Orleans street: “The siren, a cacophony of twelve crazed bobcats, was enough to make suspicious characters within a half-mile radius defecate in panic and rush for cover. Patrolman Mancuso’s love for the motorcycle was platonically intense." Starting life as a newspaper column, the Bridget Jones novels of the 1990s spawned an entire genre, “chick lit".

Its heroines, like Bridget, are often SINBADS (Single Income, No Boyfriend and Absolutely Desperate). “Bridget Jones’s Diary" started the series, but its sequel, “The Edge of Reason" (published in 1999), is even funnier, partly because Bridget at least starts off with “boyfriends 1 (hurrah!)", Mark Darcy. This allows Ms Fielding to get into Bridget’s pantomime of a love life that much quicker.