A Dark and Funny Night

It was a dark night. Exactly what you would expect night to be. But then you add some stormy to that, and you've got a hook for a book. And one of the greatest opening lines to a Snoopy comic ever...

There is a contest that is named the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. From the website’s ABOUT page:

Founded in 1982 at San Jose State University in California, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest challenges entrants to compose opening sentences to the worst of all possible novels. 

The BLFC was the misbegotten brainchild of Professor Scott Rice. Sentenced to write a seminar paper on a minor Victorian novelist, he chose the man with the funny hyphenated name, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton. Best known for The Last Days of Pompeii, his novel Paul Clifford began with the famous opener that has been plagiarized repeatedly by the cartoon beagle, Snoopy.

Later, Rice was to discover that the line had been around for donkey’s years before Lytton decided to have fun with it but the damage had been done. The BLFC had calumniated Lytton’s memory and rendered his name synonymous with bad writing, an author more widely read in his time than Charles Dickens.

Some of the funniest sentences I’ve ever read. Like this one:

Norman gazed searchingly into Susan's mesmerizing Windex-colored eyes, observing that her left eye was quite lighter than her right, more like a watered-down generic glass cleaner, probably at a dilution ratio of 1:3 which Norman predicted would definitely leave some streaks.

and:

Gwendolyn, a world-class mountaineer, summoned the last of her strength for
one more heroic haul on the nylon strap (for she was, after so many failed
attempts, dangerously close to exhaustion) and looked heavenward with
resolve, aware that, in spite of her fatigue and anguish, she must breach the
crevice in one well-coordinated movement, somehow cleave the smooth fissure
with the flimsy synthetic strand even though she was chaffed raw by her
repeated efforts, or more sensibly, just give the heave-ho to this new-fangled
(and painfully small) Victoria's Secret thong and slip into her well-worn - and
infinitely more roomy - knickers.

and:

Through the gathering gloom of a late-October afternoon, along the greasy, cracked paving-stones slick from the sputum of the sky, Stanley Ruddlethorp wearily trudged up the hill from the cemetery where his wife, sister, brother, and three children were all buried, and forced open the door of his decaying house, blissfully unaware of the catastrophe that was soon to devastate his life.

and this:

The graphic crime-scene photo that stared up at homicide Inspector Chuck Venturi from the center of his desk was not a pretty picture, though it could have been, Chuck mused, had it only been shot in soft focus with a shutter speed of 1/125 second at 5.6 or so."

and:

Theirs was a love that transcended time, ran roughshod over moral dogmas, guffawed in the face of adversity, rent asunder the shackles of social convention and took a sledgehammer to the crumbling walls of religious doctrine: a passionate love, a tender love, a selfless love, an undying love: not bad for two gerbils born on opposite sides of the glass partition.

and:

The countdown had stalled at T minus 69 seconds when Desiree, the first female ape to go up in space, winked at me slyly and pouted her thick, rubbery lips unmistakably – the first of many such advances during what would prove to be the longest, and most memorable, space voyage of my career.

more…

As Snow White met with her new, cheaper, replacement dwarfs for the first time, shaking hands in turn with the likes of Sweaty, Greasy, and Flabby, aptly named identical twins Grabby and Gropy, and proud owner-of-a-joy-buzzer Scabby, she found herself wondering if the savings would prove to be worth it, and she was about to learn why the others were so afraid of the seventh new dwarf, the oddly named Uzi.

…

Officer Meyer Briggs burst into the bedroom and saw Professor Rorschach standing over the body of his mother, bloody knife in hand; "I swear it’s not what it looks like!" Rorschach exclaimed.

…

Half of Rome was ablaze, but the emperor Nero reclined in his palace, plinking out a disconsolate tune on his lyre, when the door flew open, and in charged his favorite mistress (barking mad but delightfully zaftig) with a knife in each hand, and evidently set on regime change, forcing Nero to leap to his feet and snarl "Come on, baby, fight my lyre!" 

and:

He wasn't superficial; in fact, he couldn't even swim.

Here is the link to thousands more of these, the best from every year since 1983.
The Winning Entries
Come back and leave your favorite in the comments if you’d like. Thanks!