Who is the funniest author?

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938)

There’s a side-story in Scoop where a journalist is dispatched by train to cover a revolution in the Balkan states. He falls asleep and wakes in the wrong country and, oblivious to his mistake, heads straight for a hotel where he "[cables] off a thousand-word story about barricades in the streets, flaming churches, machine guns answering the rattle of his typewriter". Despite it being totally made up, his story spurs a Fleet Street feeding frenzy for his phantom revolution, sparking a real one in its place. "There," Waugh concludes, "is the power of the press for you."

You won’t read a more astute satire of Her Majesty’s Press than Scoop, in which a newspaper mistakenly dispatches its mild-mannered nature columnist to cover a war (because he shares a surname with the paper’s star-reporter) and accidentally lands the scoop of the year. Full of technicolour characters and pinpoint persiflage, it lampoons the absurdity of 20th century journalism of what is widely acknowledged as the unrivalled masterpiece of Fleet Street takedowns.

i have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

i do not think they will sing to me

i agree definitely that