A Tramp Abroad (1878)

If you only read one Twain travel book for laughs, make it this 1880 "walking tour" of Germany, Switzerland and Italy, which keeps turning into train rides and a raft trip down the Neckar, with his companion Harris suffering alongside him. It also holds two of his most quoted pieces: Jim Baker's yarn about the blue jay who tries to fill a house with acorns through a knothole, and "The Awful German Language," an appendix that takes German grammar apart, compound words and genders included, with the exasperation of every struggling learner.