Many of the messages Lina is assigned to play, and/or the responses to them, have some good humor. Most notably, Lina's former Stern Teacher has a Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness tongue-lashing to give to someone over unspecified "disreputable activities" the other woman engaged in. It takes Lina a while to memorize it, causing her to joke about how if she was still one of Mrs. Polster's students, she'd have gotten a "red dot" for that. Mrs. Polster is not amused.
Doon reads a book called Mysterious Words from the Past which discusses the meaning of sayings that the people of Ember have forgotten, or where the context to understand the sayings has been lost. For instance, it speculates that "batting a thousand" refers to swatting bugs.
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Lina's messages from the book are omitted, but there's a humorous new message when the elderly vegetable merchant wants to express his dissatisfaction with a shriveled potato that greenhouse keeper Clary (a close friend of Lina's) sent him.
Lina: (apologetically reciting the message) If this is a potato, then I'm sixteen and sexy.
When Mrs. Murdo recites her Cargo Cult beliefs, even two-year-old Poppy looks incredulous for a moment.
When the mayor is fleeing for his storeroom, he trips and falls face first into the new portrait of himself, obscuring his features in the portrait and smearing himself with wet paint.
