The Sunday Times humour book of the year

Sartre's Sink; The Great Writers Complete Book of DIY by Mark Crick (Granta £10.99)

Here is the John Sergeant of humorous books, the one who comes out of nowhere to become a surprise success. At least, it would be if its target market were not Eng Lit students who do a bit of DIY in their spare time. This is a book of parodies: decorating tips in the style of famous authors. So Emily Brontë explains how to bleed a radiator, Dostoevsky tiles the bathroom and Hemingway hangs wallpaper. It's short, to the point, and when I read it out in the office, my colleagues laughed like drains (which then had to be cleared by Jean-Paul Sartre).

Here is a timely idea to beat the recession. Forget comedians; tell your own jokes. In Harry Hill's Whopping Great Joke Book (Faber £6.99), the comedian with the economy-size collars not only reveals some of his stand-up material but offers advice about performing it. It's aimed at children or extremely silly adults, and should come with a health warning: hand this to a member of your family, then run away. Very quickly. There are about 400 jokes, some of which are worse than this one: “Mother: Poor dear, did the bee sting you? Child: (Sobbing): Yes.Mother: Let's put some cream on it then. Child: Don't be silly - it'll be miles away by now.”

Most jokes rely on surprise, and this year's collection of humorous titles just aren't all that surprising. Funny enough in their different ways, but nothing to make you fall off your seat with laughter. Many are television programmes in book covers - The Mighty Book of Boosh (Canongate £19.99), Mock the Week (Boxtree £14.99), the Top Gear 2009 Annual (BBC £6.99), Grumpy Old Drivers by Stuart Prebble (Weidenfeld £9.99) and QI: The Book of General Ignorance (Faber £7.99). Or, like Do Polar Bears Get Lonely? (Profile £7.99), they're hoping to build on a previous year's sucess (after Does Anything Eat Wasps? and Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze?)

If you prefer your laughter more upmarket, there is The Essential Alan Coren (Canongate £20). You know what you're getting with Coren, who died in 2007: jokes with semi-colons. The anthology is introduced by his children, Giles and Victoria, and features essays in praise of the former Punch editor from Victoria Wood, Clive James, Melvyn Bragg and a promising young talent called AA Gill. Coren has been so lavishly and frequently praised since his death that it's difficult to escape a sense of reverence, but in an age when so much humour belittles others, he is one of the few writers who makes his readers feel cleverer as they read. You also know what to expect from Jeremy Clarkson, whose columns for this paper's News Review section have been collected in For Crying Out Loud: The World According to Jeremy Clarkson (M Joseph £20). It doesn't matter what I say here: this will be at the top of the bestseller lists for the next 3,000 years, just like previous volumes of his collected works. Why are they so successful? Because his writing doesn't hang about: it gets from 0-60 in under five seconds, and appeals to readers (of which there are clearly many) who think the world is going to hell in a six-litre, V8 handcart, but who know they are powerless to do anything other than rage in an amusing way. On a trip to Afghanistan, Clarkson finds the nights so cold that “even the Geordies roll their sleeves down”. He speaks out in defence of binge drinking, and asks: is there any word more annoying than “beverage”.

For readers who yearn for the age of Curly Wurly bars and Green Shield stamps, the actor Philip Glenister has written Things Ain't What They Used to Be (Sphere £14.99). As DCI Gene Hunt in Life on Mars, Glenister has single-handedly revived the reputation of the 1970s. He carries on the good work in this book, which compares modern life with the 1970s and 1980s. Which is better: Mouse Trap or Wii? The Liver Birds or Sex and the City? And, perhaps the most soul-destroying decision of them all, Dave Lee Travis or Chris Moyles?

I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue began on Radio 4 in 1972, but was still going strong until the death earlier this year of its host, Humphrey Lyttelton. At the start of each edition, Humph would read a potted history of whichever town or city was playing host that week. Lyttelton's Britain (Preface £14.99), written by Iain Pattinson, the programme's producer, is a collection of those histories. He recalls, for example, how John Cabot set off from Bristol to find a new route to the Spice Islands. Sailing northwest, he discovered a “strange, hostile world” that he called Newfoundland - “until the natives explained that they actually called it Swansea”. As Pattinson half admits in his introduction, these are much funnier when read out aloud by Humph.

Lyttelton, who knew a thing or two about humorous insults, would have enjoyed Scorn: The Anthology (Little Books £10.99), which has been updated by Matthew Parris. It traces the history of the insult back to 2300BC and an Egyptian tomb, where one fisherman appears to be saying to another: “Come here, you ****er.” Insults have become rather more sophisticated down the years. When the Tory MP Dame Jill Knight turned up at the Commons in a fetching floral frock, a sketch writer described the effect as “a fist fight in a hydrangea bush”. We learn what MPs are allowed to call each other in the Commons. Poltroon, dunderhead, fat bounder and gormless alien have all been banned by various Speakers. But Old Etonian twerp, wet-necked twits, Yankee lickspittle and pig's bladder on a stick are perfectly acceptable.

Me Cheeta (Fourth Estate £16.99) is one of the few truly original ideas on the humour bookshelves. Supposedly the autobiography of Tarzan's sidekick, it is actually written by somebody called James Lever, who has clearly read more showbiz memoirs than is strictly good for him. It has all the toe-curling anecdotes, name-dropping and, of course, charity work of the Hollywood biography. But however you admire the parody technique, there is every chance you will reach the end and wonder why you bothered with a 300-page pretend memoir of a chimpanzee.

Kitchen Table Lingo (Virgin £7.99) is more funny peculiar than funny ha-ha, but is included here because it's an original idea that will bring a smile to your face: a dictionary of those words used by members of an immediate family, but nobody else. Tory grandee Alan Clark's family had so many of these that his diaries included a glossary (which is what some families probably call the magazine rack).

The item that inspires most invention is the TV remote control. This dictionary lists 57 words for it, including buttonbox, channel-panel, twanger and - perhaps most poetic of all - the Rees-Mogg, named by a family called Campbell after William Rees-Mogg, the former chairman of the Broadcasting Standards Council. How often does the cry go up at Campbell Towers, “Who pushed Rees-Mogg down the back of the sofa? Damn! Rees-Mogg has been chewed up by the dog”? Do you think the Rees-Mogg family changes channels with a Campbell?

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