Jonathon Swift - Gulliver's Travels ..for some reason.
It has a lot of embedded satire, some of which may have been related to current issues, and therefore meaningless to us.
However, about twenty years ago, some friends of mine, who also worked in R&D, rediscovered his "University of Lagado" section and began sending xeroxes of it to each other, and we we all laughed till we cried..People were calling each other on the phone and reading it to each other and breaking up laughing so hard we could not finish sentences.
Excert from http://library.ucsc.edu/exhibits/gulliver.html
: The English visitor also describes:
a project for "extracting Sun-Beams out of Cucumbers...to warm the Air in raw inclement Summers;" "an Operation to reduce human Excrement to its original Food;"
replacing silkworms with spiders ("because they understood weave as well as spin);"
"softening Marble for Pillows and Pincushions;" and, a method to "prevent the Growth of Wool upon two young Lambs" in order to "propagate the Breed of naked Sheep."
The visitor goes on to describe projects conducted in the part of the Academy devoted to "speculative Learning" (or the Arts and Social Sciences).
Memorable among these is the "Literary Engine," a device designed to produce random strings of words, so that "the most ignorant Person...may write Books in Philosophy, Poetry, Politicks, Law, Mathematicks and Theology, without the least Assistance from Genius or Study."
I suspect that after one has spent a few decades writing white papers and grant applications, progress reports, and summary reports, etc. this satire becomes side-splitting.