"I've never taken to the taste of tears / they always bring up those impossible years"

Somehow I managed to get through 44 years on this earth not realizing that Virginia Woolf's Orlando is not only gorgeously written but laugh-out-loud funny. As in funnier than Lolita. Especially how the narrator mocks the main character's Gary-to-Mary-Sue tendencies. While it would be au courant to humorously blame the world and/or the internets for this failing, in this case I needs must cop to being uncultured, or at least insufficiently cultured.

What "classics" surprised you by being funnier or otherwise somehow better than you expected?

---L.