The Zen of Comparison Shopping : CRASH DIET: Stories, <i> By Jill McCorkle Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill $16.95; 253 pp.</i>

“What was the last book that made you laugh out loud?” someone at a writing conference recently asked the panel. I didn’t have to think back very far. It had been that morning, in the Atlanta airport, waiting for my connecting 6:47 a.m. flight, reading Jill McCorkle’s “Crash Diet.” I had laughed so hard and so suddenly that 11 dark-suited business men all looked up from their laptops simultaneously, and then, after looking hard at me for long enough to decide that I came from some other planet where things could be funny at 6:47 a.m., they all simultaneously looked back down. “Wait,” I wanted to say to them, “listen to this.”

Line by line, paragraph by paragraph, Jill McCorkle’s stories are relentlessly funny. “I have always loved the concept of infinity,” the wry, feisty narrator of “Man Watcher” announces, “it makes me feel good.” In “Sleeping Beauty, Revised,” the narrator introduces her aunt Lenora as “someone who got more education (one course here, another course there) than she could find room for in her head and has spent her whole adult life deleting whatever doesn’t match her own opinion.” And in the rollicking title story, the rapidly slenderizing narrator says about her friend Martha that “she is one of those people who, her whole life, has been told she has a pretty face. And she does, but it makes her mad for people to say it because she knows what they mean is that she’s fat.”

There is no denying the fact that humor dominates these stories, but what I admire about them even more is the way they use humor to earn a much wider range of emotion. Wisecrackers every one, McCorkle’s narrators are also capable of bitterness, vulnerability, desperation and even a quiet poetic joy. As readers, we are willing to experience those emotions right along with the narrators because they’ve gotten us laughing first.

Norlina in “Comparison Shopping” may be the funniest of all of McCorkle’s funny women. She has split up with Byron, a radical environmentalist who “used to periodically take a vow of silence out of respect for the trees,” but the story becomes a lot more than just funny when Jack comes over for dinner and Norlina realizes, “I am begging a man to accept me. I am begging a man I can only tolerate by taking fantasy trips half way around the world to accept me. I’ve done this before.”

In a similarly heartbreaking moment, a clear-thinking Luci, the determined narrator of “Man Watcher,” remembers meeting her now-estranged second husband. “I was convinced that I had snapped to, but my snapping to was like a dream inside of a dream, a hallway of doors where with every slam I woke up all over again. I had barely begun to snap to.”

In the haunting, beautifully crafted “Departures,” the overwhelming emotion is sorrow, as Anna, a recent widow who spends her days at airports and shopping malls so that she can be surrounded by people, recalls the days immediately following her husband’s death. “Their bedroom was just as she had left it that morning where the sun streamed through the window, and she was so sorry she had not waited to wash, so terribly sorry that she did not have his pajamas and sheets left on the bed from the day before.”

McCorkle’s women narrators haven’t had an easy time. They have been lied to, cheated on, abandoned, misunderstood and used. (“Yes Lord,” says the narrator of “Words Gone Bad,” “I like the sound of African-American, but I’ve been called so much you better be ready to give me more than two words.”) But what we love about them is their tenacity, their unfailing ability to bounce back. If there is a flaw in this collection, it is that these women bounce back sometimes too well, too easily and too often in the same way, and thereby belie the complexity of their individual situation. For that reason, “Gold Mine,” with its surprising and image-rich ending, is my favorite of the 11 stories. Taking the biggest risk in the book, “Gold Mine” allows the abandoned Ruthie to find her strength not through determination and independence, but through acceptance and forgiveness; and we are reminded of the power women have always found in the rich, glowing heart of compromise.

“If ever I need feel even better about my life,” “Man Watcher’s” narrator says, “I take ‘The Sound of Music’ test, which assures me that my emotions are in working order.” But this generous, warm and honest book succeeds in generating far more complicated and difficult emotions than “The Sound of Music” ever dreamed of. It makes us feel “even better,” and it lets us laugh out loud.