The Comedy Western is a Western that was created with the intention of making readers and audiences laugh. In this case, it is typically achieved through a satire and lampooning of the Western genre itself. These narratives will poke fun at the classic tropes, cliches, and caricatures found throughout the genre. Here we see actors heighten the comedy of their performances as they play up their caricatures of classic Western stock characters. Writers turn the Old West on its head as they point out the cliches and inconsistencies that have come to be associated with the genre. The humor can range from fun and light-hearted to dark and grim.
Whoopee!
A musical sparked by Cantor's performance as a hyper-hypochondriac come West for a cure. He offers to give a ride to Sally, a woman in love with a Native American of mixed descent, who is running from an unwanted wedding with another man. But everyone thinks that they have eloped, and they pursue the couple. Features some of Busby Berkeley's most fanciful choreography.
Destry Rides Again
As Destry, a mild-mannered deputy who doesn't like guns, James Stewart is called to restore order to the hopelessly corrupt frontier town of Bottleneck. Though reluctant to undertake such an enormous task, he's soon roped into action after meeting the seductive Frenchy (Dietrich), an alluring saloon girl who belts out unforgettable showstoppers like "The Boys in the Back Room," while winning the hero's heart.
Along Came Jones
A good-natured saddle tramp traveling with his sidekick, is mistaken for a ruthless outlaw with a price on his head.
The Paleface
A timid frontier dentist finds himself gunslinging alongside the fearless Calamity Jane as she fights off outlaws and Indians.
Calamity Jane
The story of Calamity Jane, her saloon, and her romance with Wild Bill Hickok.
McLintock!
A woman returns to the West after leaving her husband two years earlier, seeking revenge and divorce.
The Sheepman
Easygoing Jason Sweet won a trainload of sheep in a poker game and aims to graze them. Powder Valley looks like the perfect place. A cattle baron and a woman try to come between Jason and his sheep.
Cat Ballou
A spoof of westerns that features a schoolmaster that, with the help of a drunken gunman, turns into an outlaw.
The Rounders
Ben Jones and Howdy Lewis are bronc riders. This pair of cowboys who will do any job, except for the one at hand. That job: Saddle a clever, ornery, blaze-faced roan named Old Fooler and make him as gentle as a milk-pen calf. They don't think it can be done, so they start thinking. Maybe they can make a dollar or two by wagering that no one at the rodeo can stay atop him either.
The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin
A young boy stows away on a California-bound ship, determined to strike it rich in the gold fields and save himself and his sister from financial ruin.
Texas Across the River
Phoebe is a beautiful Southern belle engaged to handsome Spanish nobleman Don Andrea. When a former beau interrupts their wedding ceremony, he is accidentally killed by the groom-to-be, sending Andrea to Texas to avoid the authorities and to wait for his beloved. At the border, Andrea teams with wise-cracking Sam Hollis who is recruiting gunmen to help him, and his Indian co-hort to escort a shipment of guns through hostile Comanche territory.
The Ballad of Josie
A young woman stirs things up in a western town by raising sheep instead of cattle and organizing the local women to demonstrate for women's suffrage.
Por mis Pistolas
A man goes to claim a silver mine and suffers comedic misadventures and vicious gunmen along the way.
Son of Paleface
Junior Potter returns to claim his father's gold, which is nowhere to be found.
Support Your Local Sheriff!
A stranger wanders into a Gold Rush town and ends up becoming sheriff.
The Ballad of Cable Hogue
A prospector discovers a waterhole after being left for dead in the desert by his double-crossing partners. When his ex-partners visit the well, a surprise awaits them.
Something Big
Notorious bandit Joe Baker is planning to capture a priceless treasure and live a wealthy life with his fiancé. He embarks on a journey of love, deceit, and violence.
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean
An outlaw establishes his own brand of law and order, building a town on the edge of civilization in this farcical Western.
My Name is Nobody
Jack Beauregard is the fastest gun alive in 1899. When he decides to retire to Europe, he meets Nobody who has been hired to kill the outlaw, but Nobody lets Beauregard live.
Blazing Saddles
Presents Mel Brooks' classic 1974 comedy western about a corrupt political boss who appoints an African-American as the sheriff and promptly becomes his most formidable adversary.
Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson
Buffalo Bill starts a Wild West Show and signs a former enemy. The hysterical clash of cultures reverberates far beyond the theater. The complications multiply when they find out they have to put on a performance for the President of the United States.
Goin' South
Henry Moon is captured for a capital offense in a small southern town. He learns that a law on the books says he can be saved from the gallows if a widow marries him. A woman, a widow who owns a mine, marries him so she'll have a miner.
Three Amigos
The Three Amigos, a silent screen comedy act, arrive in a remote Mexican hamlet for what they think is a lucrative personal appearance, only to discover that they are expected to save the village from a terrorizing gang of bandits.
City Slickers
When a New York man realizes he is having a mid-life crisis, he and his friends decide to go on a cattle drive to find some adventure.
City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly's Gold
Urban cowboy Mitch Robbins is at it again. After Curly's death, he discovers a treasure map in the band of Curly's hat. Mitch and his pal Phil and mooching brother Glen set out to find the treasure.
Shanghai Noon
Two cultures collide when East meets West in Shanghai Noon. Chan goes West to rescue the beautiful kidnapped Princess Pei Pei. When he meets up with laid-back outlaw cowboy dude Roy O'Bannon the best mismatch ever made in the rough and tumble Old West.
Casa de mi Padre
Armando Alvarez has lived and worked on his father's ranch in Mexico his entire life. As the ranch faces financial strains, Armando's younger brother Raul shows up and pledges to settle all his father's debts. It seems that Raul's success as an international businessman means the ranch's troubles are over, but when Armando falls for Sonia, and Raul's business dealings turn out to be less than legit, the Alvarez family finds themselves in a full-out war with Mexico's most feared drug lord.
Good for Nothing
In this gritty and entertaining Western, a young Englishwoman is kidnapped by a savage outlaw in a strange land. With a posse hot on their tail, the duo will have to attempt to survive the brutal landscape of the Old West together.
A Million Ways to Die in the West
After Albert backs out of a gunfight, his fickle girlfriend leaves him for another man. When a mysterious and beautiful woman rides into town, she helps him find his courage and they begin to fall in love. But when her husband, a notorious outlaw, arrives seeking revenge, the farmer must put his newfound courage to the test.
Damsel
It's the Wild West, circa 1870. Samuel Alabaster, an affluent pioneer, ventures across the American frontier to marry the love of his life, Penelope. As his group traverses the west, the once-simple journey grows treacherous, blurring the lines between hero, villain, and damsel.
The Sisters Brothers
In 1850s Oregon, a gold prospector is chased by the infamous duo of assassins, the Sisters brothers.
Anything for Billy by
From the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning "absolute master of 'Western' prose," comes McMurtry's electrifying take on the classic tale of Billy the Kid, the teenage outlaw of the American Old West. The first time I saw Billy, he came walking out of a cloud... Welcome to the wild, hot-blooded adventures of Billy the Kid, the American West's most legendary outlaw. Larry McMurtry takes us on a hell-for-leather journey with Billy and his friends as they ride, drink, love, fight, shoot, and escape their way into the shining memories of Western myth. Surrounded by a splendid cast of characters that only Larry McMurtry could create, Billy charges headlong toward his fate, to become in death the unforgettable desperado he aspires to be in life. Not since Lonesome Dove has there been such a rich, exciting novel about the cowboys, Indians, and gunmen who live at the blazing heart of the American dream.
Billy Gashade by
An exciting historical novel about a young boy who is an accomplished pianist & his adventures in the Wild West of "Wild Bill" Hickok & Billy the Kid.
By Sorrow's River by
McMurtry continues the compelling saga of the Berrybender family, who made their debut in his phenomenal "New York Times" bestseller, "Sin Killer," as they make their way across the endless Great Plains of the West towards Santa Fe.
Caprice by
WITH A FOREWORD BY ARITHA VAN HERK. It's the mid 1890s in Kamloops, British Columbia. Two men argue over a bottle of whisky and, in the struggle Frank Spencer, an American outlaw-turned-farmhand, kills Pete Foster, a French-Canadian and fellow farmhand. Enter Caprice: a vision and a brain. Almost six feet tall, with flaming red hair and long legs, and toting a lethal bullwhip, she sets out to avenge her brother's murder. Travelling with her beloved black Spanish stallion, Caprice trails her brother's murderer to Mexico and back. Determined and headstrong as she is smart, she leaves an impression on the people she encounters in her journey: Gert, the whore with a heart of gold; Gert's son, for whom she provides affirmation, and not the least Frank Smith, her lover, a teacher and amateur baseball player who wants her to leave the law enforcement to the professionals and marry him. Caprice finally comes face to face with her brother's murderer at Deadman's Falls. First published in 1987 and based on actual events in BC's history, Caprice is a witty, adventurous and colourful recreation of a Canadian heroine's quest in avenging her brother's murder, a woman well ahead of her times, who refused to be pigeonholed into a stereotype, who questioned authority and did so with unflinching resolve. Caprice is a companion to Bowering's Burning Water and Shoot!, reissued by New Star in 2007 and 2008.
Deadwood by
DEADWOOD, DAKOTA TERRITORIES, 1876: Legendary gunman Wild Bill Hickcock and his friend Charlie Utter have come to the Black Hills town of Deadwood fresh from Cheyenne, fleeing an ungrateful populace. Bill, aging and sick but still able to best any man in a fair gunfight, just wants to be left alone to drink and play cards. But in this town of played-out miners, bounty hunters, upstairs girls, Chinese immigrants, and various other entrepeneurs and miscreants, he finds himself pursued by a vicious sheriff, a perverse whore man bent on revenge, and a besotted Calamity Jane. Fueled by liquor, sex, and violence, this is the real wild west, unlike anything portrayed in the dime novels that first told its story.
Fancy Pants by
When British Lady Sydney Hathwell's father dies, the American who planned to wed her suddenly reneges. Stranded in America and penniless, Sydney contacts a relative in Texas who, mistaking her male-sounding name invites his 'nephew' to join him on the ranch. Together they discover the importance of family.
Folly and Glory by
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author concludes his frontier epic about the Berrybenders, an English family making their way across the America in the 1830s, with this novel of triumph, tragedy, and destiny. A worthy close to an outstanding quartet.--Booklist.
Ghost Town by
A nameless rider plods through the desert toward a dusty Western town shimmering on the horizon. In his latest novel, Robert Coover has taken the familiar form of the Western and turned it inside out. The lonesome stranger reaches the town - or rather, it reaches him - and he becomes part of its gunfights, saloon brawls, bawdy houses, train robberies, and, of course, the choice between the saloon chanteuse or the sweet-faced schoolmistress whom he loves. Throughout, Robert Coover reanimates the Western epics of Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour, infusing them with the Beckettian echoes, unique comic energy, and exuberant prose that have made him one of the most influential figures in contemporary American literature. It is, as The Washington Post Book World put it, "a fast-forward, ribald vision of the American West, a free-for-all that slides from surreal to ridiculous like a circus-goer's grin through a funhouse mirror . . . a heady frisson, a salon entertainment, one helluva ride."
Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians by
Sequel to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. begun by Mark Twain in 1885, finished by Lee Nelson
Huck Out West by
At the end of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, on the eve of the Civil War, Huck and Tom Sawyer decide to escape "sivilization" and "light out for the Territory." In Robert Coover's Huck Out West, also "wrote by Huck," the boys do just that, riding for the famous but short-lived Pony Express, then working as scouts for both sides in the war. They are suddenly separated when Tom decides he'd rather own civilization than leave it, returning east with his new wife, Becky Thatcher, to learn the law from her father. Huck, abandoned and "dreadful lonely," hires himself out to "whosoever." He rides shotgun on coaches, wrangles horses on a Chisholm Trail cattle drive, joins a gang of bandits, guides wagon trains, gets dragged into U.S. Army massacres, suffers a series of romantic and barroom misadventures. He is eventually drawn into a Lakota tribe by a young brave, Eeteh, an inventive teller of Coyote tales who "was having about the same kind of trouble with his tribe as I was having with mine." There is an army colonel who wants to hang Huck and destroy Eeteh's tribe, so they're both on the run, finding themselves ultimately in the Black Hills just ahead of the 1876 Gold Rush. This period, from the middle of the Civil War to the centennial year of 1876, is probably the most formative era of the nation's history. In the West, it is a time of grand adventure, but also one of greed, religious insanity, mass slaughter, virulent hatreds, widespread poverty and ignorance, ruthless military and civilian leadership, huge disparities of wealth. Only Huck's sympathetic and gently comical voice can make it somehow bearable.
The Last Kind Words Saloon by
Larry McMurtry has done more than any other living writer to shape our literary imagination of the American West. With The Last Kind Words Saloon he returns again to the vivid and unsparing portrait of the nineteenth-century and cowboy lifestyle made so memorable in his classic Lonesome Dove. Evoking the greatest characters and legends of the Old Wild West, here McMurtry tells the story of the closing of the American frontier through the travails of two of its most immortal figures: Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. Opening in the settlement of Long Grass, Texas--not quite in Kansas, and nearly New Mexico--we encounter the taciturn Wyatt, whiling away his time in between bottles, and the dentist-turned-gunslinger Doc, more adept at poker than extracting teeth. Now hailed as heroes for their days of subduing drunks in Abilene and Dodge--more often with a mean look than a pistol--Wyatt and Doc are living out the last days of a way of life that is passing into history, two men never more aware of the growing distance between their lives and their legends. Along with Wyatt's wife, Jessie, who runs the titular saloon, we meet Lord Ernle, an English baron; the exotic courtesan San Saba, "the most beautiful whore on the plains"; Charlie Goodnight, the Texas Ranger turned cattle driver last seen in McMurtry's Comanche Moon, and Nellie Courtright, the witty and irrepressible heroine of Telegraph Days. McMurtry traces the rich and varied friendship of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday from the town of Long Grass to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in Denver, then to Mobetie, Texas, and finally to Tombstone, Arizona, culminating with the famed gunfight at the O.K. Corral, rendered here in McMurtry's stark and peerless prose. With the buffalo herds gone, the Comanche defeated, and vast swaths of the Great Plains being enclosed by cattle ranches, Wyatt and Doc live on, even as the storied West that forged their myths disappears. As harsh and beautiful, and as brutal and captivating as the open range it depicts, The Last Kind Words Saloon celebrates the genius of one of our most original American writers.
A Million Ways to Die in the West by
From the creator of Family Guy and director of Ted comes a hilarious first novel that reinvents the Western. Mild-mannered sheep farmer Albert Stark is fed up with the harsh life of the American frontier, where it seems everything and anything can kill you: Duels at high noon. Barroom brawls. Poisonous snakes. Cholera-infected drinking water. Tumbleweed abrasion. Something called "toe-foot." Even a trip to the outhouse. Yes, there are a million ways to die in the wild, wild West, and Albert plans to avoid them all. Some people think that makes him a coward. Albert calls it common sense. But when his girlfriend dumps him for the most insufferable guy in town, Albert decides to fight back--even though he can't shoot, ride, or throw a punch. Fortunately, he teams up with a beautiful gunslinger who's tough enough for the both of them. Unfortunately, she's married to the biggest, meanest, most jealous badass on the frontier. Turns out Albert has just discovered a million and one ways to die in the West.
My Calamity Jane by
Hold on to your hats: The authors who brought you the New York Times bestseller My Plain Jane, which Booklist praised as "delightfully deadpan" (starred review) and Publishers Weekly called "a clever, romantic farce" (starred review), are back with another irreverent historical adventure. Welcome to 1876 America, a place bursting with gunslingers, outlaws, and garou--better known as werewolves. And where there are garou, there're hunters: the one and only Calamity Jane, to be precise, along with her fellow stars of Wild Bill's Traveling Show, Annie Oakley and Frank "the Pistol Prince" Butler. After a garou hunt goes south and Jane finds a suspicious-like bite on her arm, she turns tail for Deadwood, where there's talk of a garou cure. But rumors can be deceiving--meaning the gang better hightail it after her before they're a day late and a Jane short. In this perfect next read for fans of A Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue, bestselling authors Cynthia Hand, Jodi Meadows, and Brodi Ashton bring their signature spark to the side-splittin', whopper-filled (but actually kind of factual?) tale of Calamity Jane.
Rawhide Robinson Rides the Range by
A Spur Award WinnerWas Rawhide Robinson really there when the Grand Canyon came to be? Is he responsible for Pikes Peak? And how about riding horseback to HawaiiAlthough an ordinary cowboy in every respect, Rawhide Robinson lays claim to these extraordinary accomplishments and more. While on a trail drive from Texas to Dodge City, he regales his cowboy companions around the campfire with tales that entertain and amuse, inspire awe, and invite skepticism. Saddle up and ride along with Rawhide Robinson and the cowboy crew.
The Righteous Revenge of Artemis Bonner by
In 1880, fifteen-year-old Artemis Bonner, an African-American New Yorker, travels to Tombstone Arizona, to avenge his uncle's murder and claim his gold stake. Artemis and his friend Frolic have several harrowing escapes and unusual adventures in this wildly funny romp through the Old West. Walter Dean Myers also wrote the 1989 Newbery Honor Book Scorpions and The Mouse Rap, a 1992 ALA Best Book for Young Adults.
The Rounders by
"It is a book to read if you are in need of a good laugh or if you are tired of reading cowboy novels where there are no cows and where the cowhands never stop waiting around the local saloon for a final showdown with the visiting Indians."--San Francisco Chronicle "One of the funniest cowpoke yarns to come off the presses in many a fall roundup."--Denver Post The bawdy and moving story of two contemporary bronco busters, The Rounders, originally published in 1960, was Max Evans's first novel and is still his best known work, thanks largely to the success of the 1965 movie version starring Henry Fonda and Glenn Ford. Acclaimed for its realistic depiction of modern cowboying and for its humor, it is also a very serious work, described by the author as a tragicomedy.
Sin Killer by
A Pulitzer Prize-winning Author A New York Times BestsellerIt is 1830, and the Berrybender family, rich, aristocratic, English, and fiercely out of place, is on its way up the Missouri River to see the American West as it begins to open up. Lord and Lady Berrybender have abandoned their palatial home in England to explore the frontier and to broaden the horizons of their children, who include Tasmin, a budding young woman of grit, beauty, and determination, her vivacious and difficult sister, and her brother. As they journey by rough stages up the Missouri River, they meet with all the dangers, difficulties, temptations, and awesome natural scenery of the untamed West, as well as a cast of characters that includes Indians, pioneers, mountain men, and explorers (both historical and imaginary), and with as many adventures. At the very core of the story is Tasmin's fast developing relationship with Jim Snow, frontiersman, ferocious Indian fighter, and part-time preacher (known up and down the Missouri as the Sin Killer). The strong, handsome, silent westerner eventually captures her heart, despite the fact that they are two intensely strong-willed people, from very different backgrounds.
The Sisters Brothers by
Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The enigmatic and powerful man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and his henchmen, Eli and Charlie Sisters, will make sure of it. Though Eli doesn't share his brother's appetite for whiskey and killing, he's never known anything else. But their prey isn't an easy mark, and on the road from Oregon City to Warm's gold-mining claim outside Sacramento, Eli begins to question what he does for a living-and whom he does it for. With The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt pays homage to the classic Western, transforming it into an unforgettable comic tour de force. Filled with a remarkable cast of characters-losers, cheaters, and ne'er-do-wells from all stripes of life-and told by a complex and compelling narrator, it is a violent, lustful odyssey through the underworld of the 1850s frontier that beautifully captures the humor, melancholy, and grit of the Old West and two brothers bound by blood, violence, and love.
Six-Gun Snow White by
A New York Times bestselling author offers a brilliant reinvention of one of the best-known fairy tales of all time with Snow White as a gunslinger in the mythical Wild West. Forget the dark, enchanted forest. Picture instead a masterfully evoked Old West where you are more likely to find coyotes as the seven dwarves. Insert into this scene a plain-spoken, appealing narrator who relates the history of our heroine's parents--a Nevada silver baron who forced the Crow people to give up one of their most beautiful daughters, Gun That Sings, in marriage to him. Although her mother's life ended as hers began, so begins a remarkable tale: equal parts heartbreak and strength. This girl has been born into a world with no place for a half-native, half-white child. After being hidden for years, a very wicked stepmother finally gifts her with the name Snow White, referring to the pale skin she will never have. Filled with fascinating glimpses through the fabled looking glass and a close-up look at hard living in the gritty gun-slinging West, this is an utterly enchanting story...at once familiar and entirely new.
Three-Legged Horse by
A Justin Bodean WesternHeading into the Wild West seems an adventure to fifteen-year-old Justin Bodean, until the bullets and arrows begin to fly. The lure of treasure drives him, and he has a map. But out here, where fortunes can be grabbed by the strongest and quickest, he has a lot to learn -- and fast if he wants to be sixteen.
True Grit by
A #1 New York Times bestseller, Charles Portis's True Grit is "an epic and a legend" (Washington Post), a story of danger and adventure in the Old West--the basis for two award-winning films, the first starring John Wayne in his only Oscar-winning role, as Marshall Rooster Cogburn, and the widely praised remake by the Coen brothers, starring Jeff Bridges. "Quite simply, an American masterpiece." --Boston Globe "Charles Portis had a wonderful talent--original, quirky, exciting." --Larry McMurtry Charles Portis has long been acclaimed as one of America's most enduring and incomparable literary voices, and his novels have left an indelible mark on the American canon. True Grit, his most famous novel, was first published in 1968, and has garnered critical acclaim as well as enthusiastic praise from countless passionate fans for more than 50 years. True Grit tells the story of Mattie Ross, who is just 14 when the coward Tom Chaney shoots her father in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robs him of his life, his horse, and $150 in cash. Filled with an unwavering urge to avenge her father's blood, Mattie finds and, after some tenacious finagling, enlists one-eyed Rooster Cogburn, the meanest available US Marshal, as her partner in pursuit, and they head off into Indian Territory after the killer. True Grit is essential reading. Not just a classic Western, but an undeniable classic of American literature as eccentric, cool, funny, and unflinching as Mattie Ross herself. For fans of either the John Wayne classic or the Coen brothers' movie, it's a chance to relive the story of Mattie and Rooster and experience their story as it was originally told. For fans of taut, funny storytelling, it will be a joy to experience in its original form. This edition includes an afterword by bestselling author Donna Tartt (The Secret History and The Goldfinch) and a reading group guide.
Turpentine by
A comic glance at the old American West and a serious story about transformation and redemption, Turpentine is a bold, inventive novel about a young man’s attempt to make sense of the past while unsteadily growing into adulthood. In 1871, Edward Turrentine Bayard III, sick and restless, leaves his Connecticut home to recover out west. But when the private sanitarium in which he is to stay proves to be nothing more than a rickety outpost on the Nebraskan plains, he becomes a buffalo skinner. After returning to the East, Ned teams up with Phaegin, who earns her money rolling cigars, and Curly, a fourteen-year-old coal miner, but the newfound trio is wrongly accused of triggering a bomb at a labor rally, and they must flee. With a Pinkerton agent following their every move, the gang of winsome ne’er-do-wells takes flight on a circuitous escape through northern outposts into Indian country, past the slums of Chicago, and into the boundless Great Plains. En route they become witness to the transformation and growing pains of a burgeoning nation. A picaresque novel of wonderful energy and unforgettable characters, Turpentine is a comic, prescient look at the growth of an individual and a country.
The Wandering Hill by
The Wandering Hill is the continuing story of Tasmin Berrybender and her family in the unexplored Wild West of the 1830s at the point in time when men like Jim Bridger and Kit Carson though still alive, are already legends, and the journey of Lewis and Clark is still a living memory when painter George Catlin is at work capturing the Mandan tribes just before they are eliminated by the incursion of the white man and smallpox; and when the clash between the powerful Indian tribes of the Missouri and the encroaching white Americans is about to turn into full-blown tragedy. Amidst all this, the Berrybender family - English, eccentric, wealthy, and fiercely out of place - continues its journey of exploration, although beset by difficulties, tragedies, the desertion of trusted servants, and the increasing hardships of day-to-day surivival in a land where nothing can be taken for granted.
