Kinds of funny

Cricket is like sex - the similarity is in the ridiculous postures you get into. I can't remember all the positions recommended by the Kama Sutra, but the MCC Coaching Manual probably matches it contortion for contortion. You would imagine that with such rich material (and this is only one aspect of it), cricket would inspire wildly humorous literature. But the fact is, only a few have the gift for it, although there are many categories.

The joke book, and the book about the game in strange places. "If you hit him on the stomach it is lbw, on the butt it is a wide." Not hilarious, but it can raise a smile on a good day. Peter Tinniswood's Collected Tales from a Long Room is a good example of the second type. How the game is played in Lapland, etc.

The have-you-heard-this-one-about-Fred-Trueman genre (or Ian Botham, or Gundappa Viswanath). Funny, but hardly literary.

The anecdotal autobiography. A bunch of remembrances connected by the boring details of birth, early childhood, school, marriage, and so on. It's Been a Lot of Fun, as Brian Johnston, the commentator, wrote, taking care to keep the anecdotes coming thick and fast.

Tour diaries. Desperately boring stuff. Steve Waugh's contributions alone should keep everybody away. But when they are written with malice, like Frances Edmonds's Another Bloody Tour, they are a delight. It is possible that Frances cost her husband, the left-arm spinner Phil Edmonds, some friendships, but we must remember he was perfectly capable of pissing people off on his own and didn't need any help.

Comic autobiographies. A mix of obsession with cricket and with growing up. Bernard Hollowood's Cricket On the Brain is one of the best. "I was brought up to believe that cricket is the most important activity in men's lives, the most important thread in the fabric of the cosmos," the opening sentence goes. Hollowood was an editor of Punch, hence the cartoons in the book (he came this close to calling it Hollowood Be Thy Name).

The season in words. First-class cricketers who can write well (Peter Roebuck, Simon Hughes, Ed Smith) have given us insights and laughter in equal measure.

Confessions of incompetence. Marcus Berkmann rules here. His Rain Men is funny because it mirrors the experiences of players across the world. Berkmann's team is Captain Scott XI (named after the polar explorer who is the symbol of the second best). "To be treated with the respect you don't deserve," he says, "is the dream of every talentless sportsman." Berkmann has since written Zimmer Men: the Trials and Tribulations of the Ageing Cricketer. In much the same vein is Gideon Haigh's Many a Slip, which the author describes as "a short book about a small cricket club with an unremarkable history and an uncertain future".

Incompetence carried beyond natural boundaries. Harry Thompson, who also led Captain Scott XI, wrote about it. (What was so special about this team of 1980s Oxford undergraduates who just happened to have two comic writers on their rolls?). Thompson went a step further, to tell the story of the club's attempt to play in every continent.

It is those around him who suffer. Never Marry a Cricketer by Eileen Hollands. The title is self-explanatory.

The genre-bender. Only the truly obsessed could have written, as the Guardian's David Hopps does in We're Right Behind You, Captain!, this marvellous paragraph which brings together international and club cricket:

"I saw few reasons why [Michael] Atherton should resign... any normal man would have long sickened of the criticism. His resignation would have been a thematically satisfying conclusion, especially as I had just resigned at village level. I told him as much at the Cricket Writers' dinner in London... "

The book, subtitled The Alternative Story of an Ashes Year, alternates between stories of the England team on tour and the fortunes of Hopps' club. In the foreword Matthew Engel asks: "War correspondents don't stage mock battles on their day off; political correspondents do not spend the weekend at Council meetings. Why on earth would anyone who spends his working week watching professionals play cricket want to play it himself at the weekend?"

The answer to that question tells us why only the truly obsessed have the necessary detachment to write humorously about the game.