Show Me The Funny!

A couple weeks ago I hit a wall with my writing, and at about the same time I hit a wall with my reading too. This prompted a weekend full of existential angst; the fortunately infrequent desire to throw a book across the room; and a couple realizations concerning my personality which I'm going to try to remember during the next hitting-of-wall.

Basically, the realizations boil down to "I like funny, entertaining stories." It's what I love to read and what I love to write. I've gotten too caught up in what online writer culture seems to be telling me I should enjoy, and stopped paying attention to myself. I'd been trying to write intellectual, intelligent stories with underlying metaphors, and reading a bunch of the same, and wondering why I was getting frustrated. Telling those kinds of stories isn't fun for me, and I'm a great believer in having jobs that are fun.

Cue the existential angst. And then the realization that I should just stop trying to go that route. It's funny or bust, baby.

To this end, I have three projects I'm poking at the moment: a short story based on "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park"; the urban fantasy series I've been mulling for a while; and a story set in my superhero 'verse, with a character who's only mentioned in passing. Not sure if any are going to pan out, but I'm hoping they all do. My superhero WIP is currently in limbo. My dad primary beta is seeing how much, if anything, is salvageable, because I'm 90% convinced there are too many flaws to fix as it stands.

I want to read more funny stories, too. I want to stop picking up the award winners, the up-and-coming authors, the postmodern metafiction, the dystopias and apocalypses, the boundary-pushing short stories. More often than not I find them a slog to get through, if they even interest me enough to try the first page. And I want to stop feeling like I'm a bad person for disliking those kinds of stories, because so many people seem to love them to pieces…

So one of my reading goals from here on out is to read more funny books, because if I'm going to write comedy, I have to know what everyone else is doing. But there doesn't seem to be a lot of it, especially not at the short story level. Here's what I know:

• A large portion of urban fantasy has a snarky, silly vibe to it, my faves being Gail Carriger, Seanan McGuire, and Ben Aaronovitch.
• Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan novels have a fantastic sense of irony. 
• Terry Pratchett writes satire like nobody else. 
• Except possibly Douglas Adams. 
• Jasper Fforde writes the most amazingly cracked-out stories imaginable. 
• Piers Anthony has his Xanth novels.
• There's a handful of other comic fantasy writers, such as Lawrence Watt-Evans, Tom Holt, Esther Friesner, Eoin Colfer, and Diana Wynne Jones. 
• I hear John Scalzi's science fiction is pretty funny and plan to borrow his books from a co-worker at some point. 
• I've seen Robert Asprin's name floated around.
• A lot of superhero stories have a campy, comedic tone to them, which is one of the reasons I like them so much.

I'm looking for suggestions, because I've read all the authors listed except for Scalzi and Asprin, and I know I don't know every book out there. I'm especially looking for urban fantasy and short stories, if anyone knows any? Please? I want to get a feel for who and what is being published, and who's publishing them. My poisoned pigeon story needs to go somewhere, after all.