Discworld, anyone ? ;D
To me, Terry Pratchett is everything Douglas Adams ever wanted to be as a little boy. And he failed miserably. I can read the Discworld series over and over again, but I never bothered to plough my way through hitchhiker’s guide :-\
Thats just a disgusting comparison 
Terry Pratchett is brilliant - but his comedy is like slap stick compared to the beauty of what Adams did. Get the Salmon of Doubt and read Adam’s random musing over the world - I was crying with laughter at points.
Though I don’t think anything beats the passage in the Light Fantastic (Colour of Magic?) where the thief gets dress in front of mirror - strapping on every gadget in existence - tool for this tool for that - then… well I suppose I should let those who don’t read Pratchett find out on their own.
Two very different authors, both brilliant and both capable of making me cry with laugheter.
Kev
[quote]Discworld, anyone ? Grin
To me, Terry Pratchett is everything Douglas Adams ever wanted to be as a little boy. And he failed miserably. I can read the Discworld series over and over again, but I never bothered to plough my way through hitchhiker’s guide Undecided
[/quote]
You can’t say that! Somebody do something! He can’t say that, can he?
Still - I love Terry Pratchett’s work very much, particularly Truckers. I never thought about any similarity between him and Douglas Adams.
The whole idea of the origin of our species is BRILLIANT (that’s in one of the other stories commonly packaged with HHGTTG). There are lots of really funny sequences in HHGTTG, although even I find some of it a bit far fetched (what’s with all the random teleportation? I mean even when they are NOT using the improbability drive).
I’m genuinly surprised nobody compared the two before!
There are many similarities in their sense of humor: both use wacky, insufferable characters in a world that is much more like ours than the first glance would reveal. And they use those characters to tell us something about our own world. The big difference is: Pratchett loves his characters deeply, and none of them is a cartoon character: they all have real personalities. Heck, for every sidekick ever introduced in any of the Discworld books, there’s another book where this character plays the lead 
Zaphod, on the other hand, is so one dimensional, I’m sure it took Adams a lot of WORK to avoid any character development! It feels more like a literary experiment than a story. And call me crazy, but I prefer a story :
PS: Truckers is to Discworld what “the hobbit” is to “the lord of the rings” !
Angthat is exactly what makes Zaphod work, IMO. He is one dimensional, and DA does not pretend that he is any more than that. Trying to expand Zaphod’s depth would destroy, IMO, the essence of who he is and what the character represents.
-Chris
Hitchiker’s Guide, the Dirk Gently books, all the funniest stuff I’ve ever read. Completely brilliant. Yes the ship hanging in the air quote is funny… though I suppose you have to get into the HH mindset before it hits you. Isolated it isn’t quite as funny.
I remember reading the books as a kid and I couldn’t stop myself from laughing out loud.
It was soo depressing when DNA died and I knew I would never be able to read another one of his books. When I got to the end of Salmon of Doubt it was painful to be left hanging after being sucked into another one of DA’s twisted adventures.
The Zaphod character was well done in the movie, but overall the movie totally bit. It was bad. There just wasn’t enough time to fit in all the little details to properly set up the “jokes”. The production quality of the BBC series was so depressingly lame that it sucked the enjoyment out of it as well. It’s funny because I managed to get past that when watching the original Dr. Who series, but with HG I just can’t.
[quote]I’m genuinly surprised nobody compared the two before!
[/quote]
Maybe that’s because I have known the Terry Pratchett books since childhood and therefore had a somewhat different relation to those books, seeing as HHGTTG is a relatively new acquaintance for me. But I do see the similarities, at least in the case of Discworld, though I have only read a single Discworld book. I insist that the cute Truckers books are good no matter your age. Rarely have I seen such an absurd yet fitting parody of human society (yes, the first of the Truckers books is the best IMHO). While Discworld is surely aimed an older audience this is no argument for the inferiority of Truckers.
Douglas Adams was much less story driven than Pratchett, but there is a deeply humane intelligence and humour that is common to both authors.
I also suspect that a lot of people, particularly in the US, won’t understand all of the stuff that Adams is writing about from a cultural and geographical perspective- he namechecks a lot of places in suburban England, the insane beaurocracy of the Vogons is very much a british thing (actually I suspect france may be worse) and apparently much of the time he was trying to make a movie of Hitchhiker he had movie execs going “why is this Dent guy a hero? Things just happen to him! He keeps going on about wanting a cup of tea! What’s heroic about that?” To most of the world maybe it’s not heroic, or funny, to most people in britain it’s both.
There is a lot that is universal there, but some of his appeal is very much local.
I guess coming from Australia i can appreciate both American and Brittish humor. And yes as a child I had an copy of the first 60 minutes of the Radio adaption of HHG. I can remember laughing so much. Surprisingly the humor didnt get old quickly. That poor casette must have been played a thousand times.
That said, i didnt really enjoy the books as much… I guess it was the voice actors’ delivery which made it that much more humorous.
@OP:
I read the first book a few years ago and while funny was kinda complicated and a little to chaotic.
The movie is only something for people who read the book(s) and the film simply speeds down the plot to fast.
A new (mini-)series would have been a LOT better. Not to mention I am still hoping for a Pratchett series.
Ramen!
I have more success reading Pratchett then Adams, mostly because names and me don’t mix well and Pratchett uses more ‘human’ names.
Though he does have some slower books, they are still very good.
Nope, germany is the top scorer there.
Though the difficulties of beauracracy is also in one of the famous Asterix comics by a french writer (Asterix in rome or something like that. sorry. clueless on names)
The nerd in me can appreciate that fact, and smile (not laugh out loud) about it.
The child in me jumps from one foot to the other and whines about wanting to read a REAL STORY rather than a literary experiment with “smart” jokes.
The child in me wins. Always :
who said bureaucracy is annoying in the uk? you couldn’t possibly have lived in germany!
i personally think the books are best, closely followed by the radio play, than the new movie, than the bbc series.
btw, since pratchett was already mentioned, all hail to robert rankin.