Funny / Buffy the Vampire Slayer

"I wear the cheese. It does not wear me."

— The Cheese Man, "Restless"

The series known for epitomizing Buffy Speak and showcasing some truly zany Monster of the Week plots is naturally bound to feature some hilarious episodes of television.

WARNING: Spoilers are unmarked.

---

• Season 1

• Season 2

• Season 3

• Season 4

• Season 5

• Season 6

• Season 7

• Comics

The Movie

• Amilyn's arm has just been accidentally sheared off at the shoulder. He glances at it, then frowns at the sidekick. "You ruined my new jacket!" He then looks at his vampire henchmen and orders "Kill him a lot!"
• Amilyn's death scene near the end of the movie. An exceptionally hammy Paul Reubens milks it for all it's worth.
  Amilyn: We're immortal, Buffy! We can do anything we want!
  Buffy: Oh, yeah? Clap!
  • Then his hammy death:
    Amilyn: Ooooh... aaaaaah.... oooooohhhh.... aaaaaahhhh.... [steals a glance at Buffy] Oooooh.... aaaaah....
    • He continues to die over the end credits.
• This exchange:
  Buffy: You were my friend!
  Grueller: [now a vampire] Now I'm a god!
  [Buffy kicks Grueller in the face, knocking him right back into Pike, who promptly stabs him through the heart with a slab of wood.]
  Pike: And now you're a coat rack!
• A TV news reporter notes that eyewitnesses have compared a vampire victim's neck bite to "a really gross hickey."
• When being attacked by a vamp:
  Pike: Look! Air!
• The principal walking around and dropping detention slips on all the dead vampires on the gym floor.
  • Pretty much any scene with the principal, really.

Animated Adaptation pilot

• Note that all of these are adapted in the Season 8 issue "After These Messages... We'll Be Right Back!".
• Buffy twirling her stake and hitting herself in the head.
• Giles calls Willow and Buffy to talk to them.
  Willow: Giles sounded all scowly, Buffy. Do you know what's up?
  Buffy: Willow, short of the apocalypse, nothing's gonna keep us from that party tonight.
  Giles: Ah, Buffy. Good. We're having an apocalypse.
• Giles goes from explaining about the apocalypse to despairing about the lack of attention without missing a beat.
  "Morgala's exact nature eludes us but we have narrowed it down to not listening to a word I'm saying."
• Buffy, Willow, and Xander are all talking about the party.
  Willow: Of course, Cordelia already made me insecure about what to wear...
  Buffy: You should wear that red skirt.
  Giles: Ooh! But gosh! What'll happen if you and Cordelia are wearing the same color? It'll be, you know... a thing!
  Xander: ...I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that you're making fun of us, Giles.
• This bit:
  Buffy: It's okay, Giles, don't go all coronary on us. We'll find the followers of Morgan Freeman...
  Giles: Morgala...

Video Games

• Buffy sees a control panel of some sort which is obviously malfunctioning, electricity shorting out and everything. So she tries to use it anyway, only to be thrown back twenty feet and through a window.
• In Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds, Faith admits she uses stakes as sex toys. Funny on its own but it pays off big time in the comics.
• "Right. Let's give this a whirl. Oh eternal and all powerful Lord, to whom the darkness itself bows down, from whom flows the damnation of humankind... who writes this dross?"
• Xander remarks on Buffy saying that "maybe now we can start enjoying our evening." He's not even finished lampshading her statement being a cue for the gods of irony when the vampires break into the Bronze.
• Cordelia's utter disdain for Angel's Heel–Face Revolving Door tendencies, after the Master's ghost hijacked his body.
  Cordelia: Oh, whine, whine, whine. You wanna know what it's like to be used? Date a quarterback.
• This exchange before Buffy heads off to Angel's mansion.
  Cordelia: That's right! Trot off to the lair of your broody Jekyll and Hyde demon lover in the middle of a crisis. Hmph. Talk about priorities.
  Buffy: The last time demons attacked the library, you and Xander were busy canoodling on Giles's desk while the rest of us tried to avoid decapitation!
  Giles: Good lord, can we PLEASE stay out of the librarian's office? And what happened to my antique letter opener? I had assumed one of the Fraxis demons took it, but...perhaps I don’t want to know.

Novels

• In Halloween Rain, Willow recognizes that two people Xander is chatting up at a costume party are vampires and tries to drop subtle hints before giving up and whispering "They're dead, you moron."
• In the short story collection How I Survived My Summer Vacation:
  • When Giles and Jenny try to tell Angel apart from a doppelgänger, Jenny is shocked to find out that Giles and Angel didn't figure out a signal they could make to prove their identity in the event of such a scenario when they first learned about the shapeshifter's presence.
  Giles: (defensively) My title is Watcher, not Planner.
  • In "The Show Must Go On", Giles sneaks up behind a vampire in a theater prop room, grabs a dagger lying on a table, and tries to stab him. This fails because like most theater props, the dagger is made of rubber.
• In Bad Bargain:
  • Cordelia lectures Harmony (who has locked herself in a bathroom stall) not to care so much about how a curse is temporarily affecting her appearance while remaining oblivious to how another curse is having an even worse affect on her own appearance. Buffy decides not to tell Cordelia just then but feels some amusement when she hears Cordelia’s horrified scream a few minutes later, noting that her frenemy must have finally glanced into a mirror.
  • The book is set in season 2 and has a humorous Call-Forward when Snyder is unhappy with the fundraising rummage sale and thinks that selling candy next year will go more smoothly.
• In Night of the Living Rerun, a pair of Occult Detectives offer their services to the heroes and are asked if they have ever failed to protect anyone before. They defensively say that their past failures are barely worth mentioning and it would be unfair to hold them responsible for the time a lake had a killer shark living in it.
• In Portal Through Time:
  • A time-traveling assassin is reluctant to kill a three-year-old Buffy because someone of his stature killing someone so young would sound embarassing at the next meeting of his Assassins Club.
  • After one mission to try to change history, one vampire looks around "as if he expected a banner to be strung across the wall declaring, THE MASTER ROSE. ALL WENT WELL. WISH YOU WERE HERE."
  • Buffy wonders if a quiz on a book by Thomas Hardy is related to The Hardy Boys.
  • When the Scooby Gang travel back in time to the same year where the body of an archeological find known as the Lindow Man died, Xander starts getting paranoid that he'll end up becoming the doomed Lindow Man and/or a Human Sacrifice.
• In Carnival of Souls:
  • After ruining an outfit, Buffy laments about the unfairness in how the Watchers' Council won't give her a clothing budget.
  • Harmony is in charge of coming up with fundraising ideas and demonstrates her usual level of (in)competence at it. Her first idea is a blood drive and she is shocked to learn that blood is donated rather than sold. Then she dismisses Willow's book fair idea and gets a Sarcasm-Blind moment of agreeing with Buffy’s joke that no one buys books when they can buy shoes.
  • Snyder refuses to punish two bullying football players because they have the potential to give the team a winning season, as long as no more team members die this year.
  • After being cursed with gluttony, Xander even has some of the food intended for Giles' cats.
  • When Willow announces that Snyder has disappeared and a local woman has been murdered, Xander says that's great news, then quickly clarifies he meant Snyder vanishing and not the murder.
  • When Cordelia comes out of an enchantment that made her rob a clothing store and attack a clerk, she's horrified that she may never get to shop there again.
• One Thing or Your Mother is one of the darker books in the franchise, but does have a couple of the franchise's trademark funny moments.
  • Spike watches an episode of the Soap Opera Sunset Beach and vents about how the plot drives him crazy and he hopes a Love Triangle will be resolved with an ax murder.
  • The demon that used to be Snyder's abusive mother (whom Mayor Wilkins banished to a Hell dimension to gain influence over Snyder in the first place) rants about how the worst thing about the place that she was sent was the lack of detergent and bed-making.
• In Out of the Madhouse, Xander and Willow discuss how their group is called the Scooby Gang. Xander says that Willow is like Velma, Buffy and Angel are Shaggy and Scooby, Giles is Fred, and Cordelia is Daphne. When Willow asks about him and Oz, Xander says they are only secondary members and, regretably he is Scrappy-Doo, before making a hammy cry of "puppy power." This is arguably even funnier given a certain trope name and how Character Perception Evolution is making Xander less popular with modern fans.
• In Doomsday Deck:
  • Near the end of the book, Buffy mourns several murder victims from across the first three seasons whose deaths particularly affected her: Jenny Calendar, Stephen Platt. Dr. Gregory, Debby Foley, Principal Flutie, and l Herbert the pig. The doomed school mascot from episode 6 being the last name on that list manages to be cute, sad, and a humorous bit of Mood Whiplash all at once.
  • When Willow finds out that Villain of the Week Justine (a sorcerer and painter) is helping a God of Evil try to take over the universe in exchange for a one-woman show at a premier art gallery, she is Disappointed by the Motive.
• In Power of Persuasion:
  • The Lethal Chef cooking of the cook at the Greek restaurant warrants some jokes, such as Buffy amending a statement that she ate there to clarify that she went there.
  • Cordelia loses a beauty contest and the Hawaiian vacation first prize. Willow earnestly tells her at least she got a good Second Prize, a stack of encycolpedias, and Cordelia sourly stomps out of the room.
• In The Deathless:
  • After most of the Sunnydale seniors are brainwashed with enchanted class rings, there is an amusing montage of Fantastically Indifferent reactions to this occurrence once they’re freed but have no memories of the day. Dumb Jocks Percy and Hogan debate about whether someone stole the sun or they just lost a day of time. Then they express concern about how Hogan’s dad will react to his car disappearing during that missing time.
  • When Buffy fills her previously brainwashed friends in on what happened, Cordelia initially thinks the culprit is a shoe eating demon since she lost a heel while she was brainwashed. Cordelia then becomes outraged to learn that in order for the spell to have affected her, her graduation ring must be gold-plated and not solid gold like she paid for. Xander is just mad that he spent so much time at a busy after-school job to afford the ring and got cursed for his troubles.
• In The Sunnydale Yearbook:
  • Snyder's quote at the beginning is basically a Jerk with a Heart of Jerk speech about how he hates the class of '99 and will be happy to see them gone.
  • In a good bit of Dramatic Irony, Snyder writes in Buffy's yearbook that he finds comfort in the knowledge that the school will still stand long after she leaves it, not knowing that the high school will get blown up as part of the battle with the Mayor.
  • There's a humorous contrast in the description of the escorts of the joint Homecoming Queens Dance when the yearbook notes that one is about to leave for Harvard and another is preparing to start work at a putt-putt golf course (although he does plan to go to college eventually).
  • The yearbook mentions the band candy fiasco, has a picture of Giles in his Ripper bad boy persona and t-shirt, and wonders if he is trying out for Grease.
  • The addictive, mental age-reverting candy bars that Mr. Trick and Ethan made sold so well that the band uniform fundraiser got $600,000 (more than enough to build a new building and still buy new uniforms) instead of the projected $1,500. The band director is grateful, but not quite sure what happened.
  • There is a picture of Wesley in the faculty section, although the captioning admits the yearbook staff have no idea who he is or what he does at the school.
  • Every single person who signed Buffy's yearbook just writes "Have a nice summer", just like what Marcie Ross experienced before going insane.
  • Xander writes "Who is this handsome lad?" next to his own picture.
  • In the class personalities section, Buffy is "Most Likely to Be Imprisoned" (along with one of the Pack) and, as a possible Stealth Insult, Harmony is the female "Biggest Attitude" winner.
  • The lunch lady who tried to poison the food is briefly mentioned and was fired because higher levels of rat poison than acceptable were found in the stew. The fact that Sunnydale High would consider some level of rat poison in the food to be acceptable is both amusing and disturbing.
• In The Unseen Trilogy: The Burning, Willow asks if a fake fur jacket she is trying on fits her style. Buffy awkwardly relies "It could be you, I guess. If you were, you know, someone else. Who isn’t you."
• One of the comedic highlights of Little Things is the notoriously miserly Anya initially being unworried about ants infesting the house she and Xander just moved into. This complacency vanishes in Large Ham style the second Xander tells her that the infestation will cost them money.
• In Mortal Fear:
  • The first chapter has an arrogant vampire named Hugo monologuing about how stupid the vampires who stay in Sunnydale are, given how there is a whole world of less risky places to hunt in. His sort-of friend Billy Bob keeps telling him that he's interrupting the show they're watching and also asks why Hugo is mocking vampires who stay in the Slayer's backyard when he himself came back to Sunnydale after just two years away. None of these comments have any effect on Hugo.
  • Three of Billy Bob and Hugo's packmates are a Girl Posse of former cheerleaders who haven't matured much since becoming vampires. 2/3rd of their dialogue consists of one of them telling another that "Your ankles are fat" and her friend "smartly" replying "Are not."
• In Blackout, Nikki Wood's status as the Slayer is an open secret among the Muggles of her neighborhood, leading to moments like an old Marine veteran repeatedly asking her if she's ever killed communist vampires.
• In one scene of Spike & Dru: Pretty Maids All in a Row, prominent Watcher Sir Nigel keeps losing chess games to one of his colleagues, then asks another to be his new opponent and replies "Precisely the point, my dear." when she says she doesn't play the game often.
• In the Bad Future of The Lost Slayer novels, when Spike and Drusilla menacingly tell Buffy that they know what to do with kitties like her, Harmony thinks that he means actual kittens and is briefly horrified at the idea of killing them. Even Drusilla agrees that would be too much, unless she was hungry.
• The whole opening scene of Sweet Sixteen, when Buffy drops by a convenience store to buy a Twinkie and encounters a group of dangerous (albeit kitten-loving) demons threatening the clerk for not letting them pay for cat food with coins with their demonic lord's face embroidered on it (the clerk thinks they're Canadian quarters). The demons also describe how they are on a mission to complete another demon's Babe Ruth baseball card collection.
  Lead demon: We are in the blessed mini-van, on a quest with many of his greatest cards to trade at the great festival of cards and games in San Diego.
• In Crossings:
  • Xander drags Anya to a Star Trek movie marathon after giving her a crash course in the franchise. Anya points out that the security guards are dressed as Redshirts and asks if that means that they're going to die. Xander has barely finished saying no before the guards end up the first victims of a Demonic Possession victim.
  • The scene where Willow and the ghost of a local boy the Big Bad killed visit Not-So-Phony Psychic Derek Traynor.
    • They walk in on Traynor while he's asleep and naked, and he calls Willow a peeping tom who hangs out with dead people. She protests both labels, then recalls her friendships with Spike and Angel and acknowledges that, but insists she's still not a peeping tom.
    • Traynor rants about how ghosts keep making odd requests of him, and one told him to tell his wife there was an insurance policy hidden in their house, only to later confide in Traynor that he lied because his wife killed him (without leaving behind any evidence) and he wanted to get her stressed out looking for the nonexistent policy.
• In Slayer, the Watcher trainee/Slayer narrator tells a teenaged sorcerer acquaintance about The End of Magic from the season 8 comics and asks how it is that he never figured this out for himself. He says that he thought his magic was experiencing the equivalent of a bad wi-fi signal and that the accompanying cataclysms were the result of global warming.
• In the Tales of the Slayer short stories:
  • "The Ghosts of Slayers Past" is a Whole-Plot Reference to A Christmas Carol. The cold-hearted Watcher doesn't start appreciating his Slayer (whom he views as not being a proper lady) because of a Heel Realization but because Buffy (who fulfills the role of the Ghost of Christmas Future) lets him see that however scandalous he may find his current charge, any subsequent Slayers he ends up with in the future could give him an even worse case of Culture Clash.
  • In "Undeadsville", Zoe the current Slayer notes that an unintentionally annoying coworker has her heart in the right place. Zoe notes that she of all people knows where the heart should be.
• In Big Bad (which is set in one Alternate Universe and also briefly features others):
  • Darla and Angelus argue about whose fault their estrangement is. She says she offered to let him keep living with her and he reminds his ex-lover/sire that she actually invited him to be Just Friends with her and her new husband (The Master).
  • Jonathan's diary reveals that he thought Mayor Wilkins blocking out the sun to make Sunnydale a Monster Town was a campaign stunt. He also goes off on a tangent, comparing the scenario to The Simpsons episode "Who Shot Mr. Burns?"
  • Anya explodes in rage and leaves Jonathan and Andrew quaking in fear after they let it slip they paid for a wish with counterfeit money.
  • Buffy has a You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me! reaction to everything in the Jonathan Levinson Presidential Museum and all its geeky glory.
  • After Angelus gets teased over how his main universe counterpart dated Buffy, he complains that "I am not responsible for anything some ensouled vegetarian does with my face."
  • Anya has a brief rush of excitement after she learns that the vainglorious Glory is having an affair with the god of cubicles. She then bemoans how Buffy just killed most of the people she’d enjoy gossiping with over that tidbit.
  • After D'Hoffryn is reduced to a sentient disembodied head by Buffy, Jonathan and Andrew offer him a robot body. He doesn’t mind having his head stuck on a female Sex Bot, but requests they modify the robot to shoot lightning from its fingers.
• In Bloody Fool for Love: A Spike Prequel:
  • Darla breaks into 10 Downing Street to give a message to British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury and gets into a fight with two Creature-Hunter Organization members with a Those Two Guys vibe. The less effective of the pair thinks that roses weaken vampires the same way garlic does. He also accuses Darla of trying to hypnotize him into being attracted to her during the middle of a fight, but his partner tells him to just accept that he has the hots for strong women. Then, after Darla barely escapes from their reinforcements, it later turns out that Salisbury wasn't even living there at the time.
  • Darla reads Dracula and complains about all of his brides' good quirks that got left out of the book (like how one knits and another collects antiques).
  • The demon Edith (the namesake of Drusilla's doll) has a lot of humorous British Stuffiness moments, like insisting on leaving a strategy meeting to have afternoon tea.
  • Darla finds Spike and Drusilla meeting a werewolf mercenary, to discuss a heist she forbade them from getting involved with, and they come up with the Embarrassing Cover Up that they were about to have a threesome.
  • Right after Harry assures Rieka that Spike and Drusilla are surely two steps ahead of their adversary, a Gilligan Cut shows that the two are really about to get caught completely off-guard.
• In The Official Grimoire: The Magickal History of Sunnydale:
  • Xander and Spike write notes insulting each other’s nicknames after Amy Madison calls Xander "the Xandman" while writing about the love spell debacle, with Xander also sorely telling Spike to "go fall on something spiky."
  • The largely cringeworthy history paper Willow's tutoring student Percy wrote about Theodore Roosevelt during the episode where her Wishverse vampire doppelganger visited Sunnydale is included. He thinks that the nickname "Teddy" came from Roosevelt turning into a teddy bear at night, and that the Rough Riders and Bull Moose Party were street gangs. He also says he forgot the word count for the paper but was too scared to ask Willow about it because he was afraid she would be in her dark goth phase (meaning Wishverse Willow) again before nervously adding that said goth phase is a perfectly acceptable lifestyle choice he has no problem with. The history teacher scribbles on the paper that there are a few actual facts about Roosevelt buried in the paper, so he'll let Percy graduate.
  • A newspaper report about the events of the season 3 finale (with Sunnydale Syndrome making it sound like an accidental explosion) quotes a graduate going from saying that there was a giant snake there to wondering if he can get back the deposit on his burnt gown.
  • The diary entry after Willow learned Professor Walsh is head of the Initiative has her comment that she is unsure whether that makes it more or less justifiable that Walsh has still failed to grade her midterm paper.
  • Willow includes the wedding invitations and seating plans for when Buffy and Spike were enchanted into almost getting married. Buffy apparently wanted to burn it all, but they felt it is a good cautionary experience to remember.
    • In a moment that is both funny and heartwarming, on the invitations, Buffy has Giles’ name next to her mother’s in parentheses and with a question mark while naming the parents of the bride who will be hosting the reception. Giles has since scribbled a message on the invitation saying he is touched, but never would have attended or paid for the wedding due to his dislike of Spike.
    • The wedding venue is said to be a TBD venue free of crucifixes or holy water, although Buffy draws the line at it being a crypt or cemetery.
    • The seating chart has all of Spike’s friends, including another Initative prisoner whose name he doesn’t even remember and Buffy's hated enemy Drusilla. There is an annotation from Buffy saying she doesn’t know most of them, with Spike saying that is because she would slay them and promising to have each of them eat something (or rather, someone) right before the wedding so they will behave.
  • Willow is reluctant to say that she was initially losing her battle with Adam, but does concede that she was somewhere to the "left of winning."
• In In Every Generation:
  • Spike is accused of being the worst Watcher ever and he takes offense at that … because he insists that title should go to Wesley.
  • When Frankie quips that she is about to be killed by Kiefer Sutherland (or rather a vampire who resemble his character from The Lost Boys) it turns out the guy was deliberately going for that look and impressed that someone finally got it. When Frankie asks if that makes him fifty, he defensively says he isn’t that old and is just a newer vampire with retro tastes.
  • On her first patrol as a Slayer, Frankie fails to chase down a vampire who was previously a track runner, trips, and stakes herself in the leg.
  • The Hunter of Thrace mentions that, millennia ago, the Gossip Evolution about him said he had rams' horns, and he had to wear a fake pair of them every time he was summoned, or no one would believe it was really him.
• In One Girl in All the World:
  • Vi initially tries to deny that she ever gave her favorite vampire-slaying stake a name, but then admits that she called it Spot to make up for never having a dog.
  • Frankie and her Scooby Gang 2.0 run into a gang of Laughably Evil new vampires at the New Sunnydale graveyard. One is a Dumb Blonde who is trying to do her makeup while being unable to see her reflection in her compact anymore. Another is a punk rock groupie who gets teased for calling Spike "William the Bloody" while having a bloody nose himself after Spike hit him. A third is a skater kid who ends up acting as a sympathetic sounding board for Frankie about her problems while she is beating him up and preparing to stake him as a form of In-Universe Catharsis and is cool with it when she apologizes that this is Nothing Personal.
  Hacky Sack Vampire: She insulted your mom? Whoa.
  • Spike insults a group of renegade Slayers who are calling themselves The Darkness and suggests they come up with an alternate name that actually has the word Slayer in it and makes some Fun with Acronyms suggestions which they dislike: SASS and ASS.

---