The one liners are good but they work within context, which is the sign of the best humourous writing. Wilde's one-liners are marvellous and quotable out of context, but they don't work that well within the work. Whereas Pratchett's trip you up as you're reading and lay you out before you know it. "There was a ho-ho, which is like a ha-ha only deeper" had me fish-floundering for a good minute last night, partly from its sheer Python lunatic logic, partly because of a famous dinnertime conversation in my childhood where my father wondered just what a ha-ha *was* anyway, and had us go fetch our big dictionary (literally big- you bought it in half inch installments and assembled it at home and at that point it was about eight inches thick), the relevant volume of the Enc.Brit (onion skin edition in suede covers that, natch, *couldn't* stand upright on the shelves, and had to be pulled from a stack of other flaccid resisting suede-covered 9x12" quartos) and the H volume of Murray's Dictionary, the early predecessor to the Oxford, a folio volume big as two table mats laid together.

The Murray's? Kept pretty well- pure rag content paper, thick borad binding. We gave it to the Art Gallery after Dad died, because no one has room for folio-volumed dictionaries. The big thick one didn't last: cheap paper cheaply held together. What fell apart was the suede binding of the Enc.brit: shed all over the place. (My own copy of the Enc.brit, present from an aged neighbour twenty years ago, is now doing the same with its regular leather binding. The onionskin however is perfectly happy.)