Sure, I like humor: Serious lit that makes you feel good about life

Friend WS (not William Shakespeare) and I resume discussion about "uplifting" books that are not schlock - that is, books worth reading that make you feel good about yourself and about life - well, started reading Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (New American Library ed.) last night - and that's not one of them! More about Anderson in future posts, but thinking about what WS said: amazing how almost every novel that we consider great or serious or literary is also "dark" - not necessarily nihilistic or fatalistic, but containing at least a significant element of melancholy and despair. So what works include this despair, and then move  beyond and above? Among recent novelists, the first to come to mind is Nick Hornsby; then I wonder about some of the novels of ethnic assimilation - again, a # of British writers, such as Zadie Smith, esp White Teeth, and the author Small Island, whose name I don't remember, and of course early Rushdie. And then the British classics, Austen and some of Dickens. But why is this not an American phenomenon as well? Our great books have always and probably will always focus on outsiders, and on those trying to break away from society, not join it. Americans don't do comedy - in the classic sense, in which the work ends in marraige and unification and celeration (often with an outsider or class of outsiders omitted from the festivities) - our comedy is satiric and sardonic. But we do have comic novels - Rioh (Philip), for one, Coover for another. Toole. Maybe Boyle. And comic short story writers for sure: Twain, Lorrie Moore, G. Saunders, to name 3 very different writers. To add to the list, though, how about the under-appreciated Woody Allen (Side Effects), or maybe Thurber, or, stretching a bit from fiction but still - SJ Perelman? Laughter never hurt serious fiction. As a very doctrinaire Marxist I knew once ludicrously proclaimed: Sure, I like humor. Who doesn't?