Tales Designed to Thrizzle by Michael Kupperman - there are two collected volumes, but they're each self-contained (consisting of short humor pieces.) The first volume is the better of the two.
Battle Lines: A Graphic History of the Civil War by Ari Kelman and Jonathan Fetter-Vorm - Short stories about different aspects of the civil war, with chapters structured around different objects (a bullet, a mosquito, a pair of opera-glasses... there's a particularly great chapter about staging a post-battle photograph). The author is an academic historian but this clearly has a general audience in mind.
Uncle Scrooge: Only a Poor Old Man by Carl Barks
Really any volume of the Carl Barks (Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge) Library will do - they all have multiple self-contained stories - but this one is my favorite. Ducktales captures the boys-adventure feel of these but doesn't really do justice to the social/political commentary/satire (and I mean satire in "your" sense).
I Killed Adolph Hitler, by Jason. An original take on the time-travel genre with some surprisingly poignant twists and anthropomorphized animals. This fits your criteria of self-contained in one volume, high-concept cleverness, and relative lightness.
Uzumaki - Weird horror with an absurd sense of humor, good draughtsmanship, and there's a recent one-volume collection. Has some gore and might have some nudity.
Elektra: Assassin by Frank Miller and Bill Scienkiewicz - Not sure how widely available this is but it's my favorite Frank Miller comic. Definitely up there with Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns for 80s superhero stuff.
Nausicaa is great but I don't think there's a single volume edition and it's pretty long (I think around a thousand pages).