But the real revelation is Vic Reeves's cartoons, which make up most of the book, and are very funny. I was going to try to draw parallels with the late John Glashan or B Kliban to give you an idea of what to expect. That I can't reveals what a good and original cartoonist Vic is.As usual, if you intend to give a loved one the great gift of laughter this Christmas, stick to cartoons. After last year's wonderful Diary of an Amateur Photographer, the excellent Graham Rawle returns with Return of Lost Consonants (Boxtree pounds 6.99), taking the twin disciplines of the pun and the photomontage further than we dared imagine possible. Likewise, the equally excellent Steven Appleby offers us yet another funny exploration of human relations in The Truth About Love (Bloomsbury pounds 12.99), with sections like "Choosing between more than one Suitor: Set them a quest", wherein a Princess says to her beaux: "I'll marry the one who can find my clitoris," while they respond "Gasp! But princess! That quest is impossible!"Also from Bloomsbury are three more books by Edward Gorey, published in Britain, unbelievably enough, for the first time.

The Epileptic Bicycle (pounds 5.99), The Haunted Tea-Cosy: A Dispirited and Distasteful Diversion for Christmas (pounds 8.99), and The Curious Sofa: a pornographic work by Ogdred Weary (pounds 5.99) all offer further proof of the morbid, deadpan genius of this master of American Gothic.There are, however, still funny books in Britain with neither stupid cartoons nor flecks of TV publicists' spittle all over them. Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years (Michael Joseph pounds 14.99) made me laugh very loudly on public transport, which is about the only real criterion for funny writing there is. Craig Brown, whom I sometimes suspect of being a sweatshop filled with chained-up Filipino parodists, offers us two books this year, Hug Me While I Weep, For I Weep For The World in his persona as Bel Littlejohn (Abacus pounds 8.99) and The Craig Brown Omnibus (Private Eye pounds 11.99). I find Bel Littlejohn so accurate a parody of the New Labour mindset as to be too unsettling to be entirely enjoyable.The Craig Brown Omnibus, (Private Eye pounds 14.99) meanwhile, quotes me on the dust jacket as saying he's a genius. For perversity's sake I could say that Brown is a talentless, tin-eared hack who sneeringly and spitefully savages the real achievers and empowerers in this, y'know, new, young country of ours, but I think I'll stick with the previous encomium.Finally, Christopher Matthew's Now We Are Sixty (John Murray pounds 9.99) is a throwback to a previous age. These parodies of A A Milne's Now We Are Six are exactly the kind of thing which used to appear in Punch in the 1950s, an era whose styles and mores have been held in contempt for 40 years by succeeding generations of smug young TV comedians, from the sainted Peter Cook, John the Baptist to the Holy Python onwards. Given that among the other things which that generation of Punch writers gave us was Nigel Molesworth, now recognised as a classic of 20th-century humour, and that Matthew's little book is wise, perceptive and very funny, maybe it's time we turned off the telly altogether and engaged in a little bit of rehabilitation..

The best art book this Christmas is Megan Holmes's Fra Filippo Lippi (Yale pounds 45), a beautifully designed and illustrated account of the Florentine master. Colour printing is terrifically good these days, but whatever the technical advances it's still the case that artists from Florence are better served by publishers than artists from Venice. The Florentine clear line, air of innocence and lucid colour are especially beguiling in such a volume as this. Furthermore, one suspects that Megan Holmes has been influenced by the Florentine environment in which she tracked down the documents that relate to Lippi.

She makes us feel how his painting was a part of the general life and culture of the city. Both her prose and her formidable scholarly apparatus are light and precise. The core subject of her book is Lippi's response to being a member of the Carmelite order Holmes, as it were, brings Christianity within sight. Another book about the meaning of Christian art within a secular world is Painting the Word (Yale pounds 14.95) by John Drury, who is the Dean of Christ Church, Oxford.

Some of his chapters, he tells us, began as attempts to make his sermons more interesting. Other parts of his book are meditations on his favourite paintings in the National Gallery. But why does Drury so often sound uneasy? It must be because renaissance art, which he so obviously likes, is full of worldly temptation. Three National Gallery curators, Jill Dunkerton, Susan Foister and Nicholas Penny, show a total command of the paintings they describe in Durer to Veronese (Yale pounds 45), an expert, only occasionally forbidding guide to the NG's 16th-century paintings. The book isn't too hefty to carry the next time that you can spend a few hours in the gallery. Special thanks are due to Dunkerton, who is in the NG's conservation department at Trafalgar Square. It's not often that scientific studies of ancient painting techniques are explained in such a friendly fashion.Tom Nichols's Tintoretto: Tradition and Identity (Reaktion Books pounds 45) is a bold account of a painter whose awesome imagination tends to inhibit cautious historians.