I don’t know that they are the “world’s funniest…” in absolute terms, but they are quite funny.
Annual English Teachers’ awards for best student metaphors/analogies found in actual student papers:
His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like
underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 James Ament When I finished Margaret Atwood’s, The Handmaid’s Tale (1986), yesterday morning, I had this thought: “Okay. This is about a despotic Christian theocracy that’s taken over the country. She never uses “right wing” but most readers, I think, would conclude that…as though right and left were on a line with varying degrees of rightness and leftness spreading across the line toward the extremes. But it’s not like that. It’s more like a circle with the patriarchal right on the right, the matriarchal left on the left, anarchy at the top, and totalitarianism at the bottom. When the right and left move up or down—mostly down—to the polar ends, they end up at the same place. Their self-justifications—their intentions—hardly matter. Or better: An idea from Adam Michnik, the Polish dissident, found in Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001) by Christopher Hitchens—an idea that the anti-theist journalist Hitchens said changed his life—that it isn’t about left vs. right…that the real difference is between those that do, and those that do not, think that the citizen is, or should be, the property of the state. Hitchens, that brilliant Trotskyite now dying of cancer, said it had an echo of Thomas Paine’s attack on slavery—“Man has no property in man.” Atwood’s book is full of how the state treats people as “property.” It’s a metaphor for the whole Michnik concept.
I loved the book—I couldn’t put it down.
At Mullholland Books is an article titled, B. Traven: The Writer Who Wasn’t There, or A Case for His Works. For those that may not recall, B. Traven wrote The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a good read and an excellent John Huston directed 1948 movie with Humphrey Bogart. The author of the article, Cortright McMeel, believes Traven has been neglected as one of the great adventure novelists of the 20th Century and asks, “Why?” He says,
“Perhaps because the author who wrote such adventure masterpieces as 
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Death Ship, and General from the Jungle is a mystery himself. He might have been Otto Feige, the son of a Polish potter. He also could have been the anarchist actor Ret Marut, who ended up in a London prison before traveling to Mexico. Two contradictory biographies present each case with compelling fact and argument. Whoever B. Traven was will no doubt always be shrouded in secrecy because that is the way the reclusive author wanted it.”
He then gives a pretty good case for including him with the greats (found at the above link).
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