The G.O.A.T. test. Mr. Brotch's deadpan narration of each question is priceless.
"Oh, no. You've been exposed to radiation, and a mutated hand has grown out of your stomach. What's the best course of treatment?"
Also from the G.O.A.T. is a hilarious case of Never Mess with Granny. "Your grandma invites you over for tea, but you are surprised when she hands you a pistol and asks you to kill another resident. Do you...?"
"A crazed vault scientist runs up to you and yells "I'm going to stick my quantum harmonizer in your photonic resonation chamber!" How do you respond?
"Yeah? Up yours too, buddy!"
All of the answers to the last question are "The Overseer". The funny part is that one student is still stuck on this question even after everyone else is finished and remains stuck until you leave the room.
"What did you put in the last question? I'm stuck between 'The Overseer' and 'The Overseer'."
The GOAT results are decided by the corresponding skills each answer has. To get the job most associated with caring for children, (Little League Coach) the Lone Wanderer must select a majority of "Unarmed" choices, which are usually the most physically violent on the test. What's more, there's a baseball-related question, and the "Unarmed" answer is "You wish the vault had a soccer team."
If you specialized in Big Guns, the job assigned to you is "Laundry Cannon Operator". Mr. Brotch has to take a moment before deciding dumber things have happened.
Once you're done with the test, you can actually stay in the classroom and overhear what the other classmates got as results. Butch DeLoria is a hairdresser. Paul is to be an Engineer. Wally says he doesn't need to hear his result since it was easy to crack that "joke of a test" (and Mr. Brotch laments that he didn't think of that when he was 16). A girl got stuck in the Maintenance department when she wanted the Science one. The best one has to be Freddy Gomez, since he gets stuck in the last question (the one where all answers are the same). Mr Brotch's reactions are great.
Mr. Brotch, annoyed: I don't have all day Freddy, the Overseer is waiting for these. Freddy, do you understand what "pencils down" means? Freddy, it's multiple choice. You can't still be thinking about it.
Dogmeat opening doors, apparently with his face, or running up objects at a 90-degree angle.
Some of the glitches. Characters standing ten feet up in the air and enemies' bodies stretching and flying across the screen, to name a few. One happens to James. Before the G.O.A.T. his fingers might glitch to be long and curved, like Deathclaw hands. This while he's giving his test-anxious child a checkup.
Another might happen when talking to Tom Holden during the Vault 101 escape.
"Now's our chance! I'm getting out of here!" (Phases slowly through the floor)
You can give Tenpenny an explosive migraine if you use the Mesmetron while he's on his seat. What makes this a special case is that he vibrates on his chair before his head pops like a balloon.
During the trip through the metro line in Broken Steel you will deal with a lot of Feral Ghoul Reavers. What makes them special in this case? There's a high chance they'll be vibrating from the torso above, making it impossible to shoot them in the head, and when they die they are flung at blinding speeds in a direction.
Andy: Miss Beatrice suffered a rather nasty sprain in her left toe - the big one, so I naturally had no choice but to amputate. The leg.
And he ended up amputating the wrong leg!
When you ask him to heal you, he reveals that he got fired and reassigned to cleanup duty. His first task? Cleaning the clinic. Even Andy notes the irony.
At one point, he begins listing the medical skills he can perform with his programming, including a hysterectomy. However, the way the voice actor delivers the line makes it sound like he's shocked when he says it ("hysterectomy?!"), which gives the impression that even he's shocked someone thought programming him to do that was a good idea.
Chiding Dr. Lesko with a high Science skill. The explanation for killing the Fire Ant Queen (as opposed to the Speech option, which tells him not to play God) is something along the lines of "You flagrantly violated the scientific method. I had no choice."
"This is Three Dog, coming to ya live from my fortified bunker in the middle of the D.C. hellhole! Ain't life grand?"
"Hey nifty America, it's me, your President John Hen— Hahaa, gotcha! Three Dog here, how's everyone doin'?"
"And now, I hear another person's crawled out of that hole! What's going on down there? Revolution? Vacation? Somebody fart?"
Choosing Fawkes to input the Purifier codes. Right before the radiation blinds everyone, he kicks the console.
In Megaton Jericho will tell the Lone Wanderer he hates "Vault/Wasteland Assholes" (depending on the clothes they're wearing) and doesn't want to talk much. When ending the conversation however he will say, "Come back if you need something" as if he was programmed at that point to talk like the few other friendly people in Megaton.
If you decide to kill Mister Burke with a Mini-Nuke. At the very least, it's ironic.
"You know, I think I'll put that on a sign. The Brass Lantern: Cleaner, safer, and less likely to contain piss in the drinks!"
Asking Uncle Roe about investing in Crazy Wolfgang's junk caravan starts this dialogue:
Uncle Roe: "As he says, he's 'overjoyed to assist those who have a deep need for his......junk.' He's just like that. Says it catches people's attention." Lone Wanderer: "He should offer even more junk."
Glitching can cause moments of comedy. In one case, it was a trip into the Ant Queen's lair to raid everything there, but knowing she wouldn't be easy to kill. Loaded up on Magnum rounds, 10mm, Shotgun shells, Stimpaks and prepped for a long and bloody war, the trip down to the caves can be nerve-wracking, especially with the corpses of her guards. Getting to the chamber...she was stuck in the ceiling. You can only either laugh or grumble...or freak out when she suddenly appears in front of you.
Tenpenny Tower, due to its height, is a fun area to try doing stupid things such as jumping off the tower, shooting things from a distance, and messing with Tenpenny. Planting mines in front of Tenpenny is a favorite. In one case, someone decided to try and quickscope Tenpenny. He missed his head and hit him in the chest. Tenpenny immediately rose from his chair and suddenly got flung off of the tower, and fell to his assumed death. Amazingly after the game is unpaused and the sniper scope is used to find his body, you can find him running around screaming at his guards. The good (?) Mr. Tenpenny simply seems to be Made of Iron. As long as he is sitting down, you can try and shoot him and he will shake it off. You can also push him off the top of the tower and he'll survive. You can actually head back down through the tower with no problems, but as soon as you try to exit, you are greeted with the old man's cries of "Assault! Assault!" and a huge contingent of guards.
Of course, having access to the console commands on the PC version opens up a wealth of possibilities...like, say, equipping the experimental MIRV, turning on god mode, and firing into Tenpenny point blank. When the screen finally clears, Mr. Tenpenny simply isn't there anymore.
If Mr. Tenpenny is killed and everything on him looted, the player can don his flashy red suit and stroll back down through the tower with no one seeming to care. The residents' AI wasn't programmed to care about outfits, unlike New Vegas, but it's still hilariously and entertainingly brazen.
The mole rat part gets funnier when in New Vegas you run into a mole rat farm and one being kept as Sloan's town pet (fangs and all).
Doing research for Moira just hands you chances to be a Deadpan Snarker. When she asks you what it feels like to have extreme radiation poisoning, one of the possible responses is along the lines of "Too... tired... to be... snide.". When she's writing up the "research" on you being injured (and optionally having a crippled limb), she asks you to describe the pain and how to block it out, giving you the option of using this gem:
Lone Wanderer: The adrenaline helps. So does the fear of death. There's a lot of both.
Another good one is a similar dialog choice that goes something like this:
Lone Wanderer: My only solace is thinking about inflicting this pain on people like you. Moira: Ah... you don't really mean that... do you? I think I better leave you alone for a while...
Here is another one for that part:
Lone Wanderer: I'm going to hate myself for this, but what do you mean about handling injury?
Or this gem from taking too much radiation, if Moira's been turned into a Ghoul:
In the "surviving ridiculous amounts of radiation" part of the question, if you have high enough perception, you can give this answer when Moira asks how you're feeling:
If I listen closely, I can hear my genes crying.
If you choose to blow up Megaton and talk to Moira afterwards (who has become a ghoul), you are given this dialogue option:
Lone Wanderer: Moira, don't take this the wrong way, but you got real ugly real fast.
Several dialog options with Sierra. For example, when you first meet her you can make it abundantly clear that you are not interested in taking her Nuka Cola tour. She doesn't get the hint.
Lone Wanderer: I'd rather smack myself upside the head with a blunt instrument. Sierra: What an odd way to make music, I'll have to try that sometime.
If you use console commands at the very beginning of the game to simply unlock the door to your room during the sequence where you're a baby, you'll find out you can access the normal Vault map as in a state of emergency in "Escape!" And (with a few more unlock commands on doors) you can walk right out of the Vault and begin the game as normal, though unable to access the Pip-Boy and thus equip or use items, or to even raise your fists so you can't fight at all. Aside from the hilarity of walking around taking items and talking to people as a baby, you can sit on a chair for a temporary third-person view, revealing what you look like as a baby. A scaled-down model of your grown-up character, complete with Pip-Boy and underclothes.
From Mothership Zeta: "Cows? WE GOT COWS!"
If you have the Mysterious Stranger perk, then you can tell Somah that "a friend" might show up to help "if we're lucky" after she explains her plan to escape from alien imprisonment. Her reaction makes it clear she thinks you went to nut-o land for a moment.
Throughout Mothership Zeta you can find archives of recordings made by prisoners. Some are too dumb to realize what's going on, some are meekly compliant to avoid being harmed, some are defiant and hostile. And then you come to Recording 24...which has a brahmin mooing over and over as an alien yells at it. There's also Recording 19, where an escaped captive leaves a message for anyone who finds it telling them the aliens are reliant on technology and without its aid they're as fragile as humans, and he reckons a comparatively small band of well-armed and trained humans could take the ship. A few hours later, the player will confirm his theory.
One hilarious bit of Black Comedy comes from a woman detained on her way to meet a friend, who remains cheerfully oblivious to the aliens' intentions to probe or dissect her, and signs off happily saying they're about to show her something.
The extremely bizarre fascination/obsession the aliens have with the Giddyup-Buttercup toys. To the point where they have entire rooms filled up with them.
Holding The Line in the Hangar using a bunch of giant electrical pylons. Half the time you'll have alien bodies comically flying all over the place, some of them even smacking right into the platform you're standing on.
Also in Mothership Zeta, you can press a button to wipe out a part of Canada. While this may be considered a dick move, considering that you might have wiped out a thriving civilization, but because of the players' tendency to just press buttons, and the fact that the only sign you get is pretty vague, the player most likely did it by accident.
During Operation: Anchorage, if you talk about the simulation after Vault 112, you have the option of saying "Oh, great. Let me guess, more psychotic little girls..." To which Protector McGraw will respond with "Umm.... Noooo...." He then continues explaining the simulation as though you hadn't said that.
A moment of unintentional hilarity, the dev team apparently didn't code the super mutant behemoth at Galaxy News Radio to be allied with the normal super mutants. In the normal questline, you and the Brotherhood wipe out the normal mutants before the behemoth arrives. If you skip that part of the main quest and come to the area later, the normal Brotherhood sentries at GNR are fighting the mutants and the behemoth runs out immediately...then as a result of the mentioned problem with alliances, turns its attention to swatting aside its brethren. The super mutants will likely defend themselves in turn, resulting in an Enemy Mine as the mutants and the Brotherhood gang up on the behemoth, all thanks to a programming oversight.
Listening to Three Dog mimicking President Eden while standing right in front of the big man himself.
This conversation with Dad over intercom:
Lone Wanderer: "Where do I go from here?" Dad: "I can't really say, since I don't know where you are." Lone Wanderer: "Where am I?" Dad: "You're in the security level."
The situation where it happens is anything but funny, but Colonel Autumn collapses from the purifier radiation spike and his legs go into wild spasms as if he’s running. It’s Truth in Television, since the body’s nerves still work for a while after death, but it’s still at least a bit amusing. This also happens when some NPCS die.
You can encounter a Mister Gutsy-turned-medic in the Citadel, but he actually hurts you when you first ask for his services. If you tell him to run diagnostics, he'll begin playing elevator music while he does so. Even the subtitles mention it!
From Broken Steel, pretty much everything that comes out of Scribe Bigsley's mouth. And his log entries.
The Brotherhood will not let you into the Citadel - until Doctor Li punches the intercom and yells "Lyons! I know you're in there, I know you can hear me! You open this goddamn door right now!"...and it opens.
Better is that, if you're fast enough, you can ask the guard very politely if you can enter. When the gate opens, you can ask him if you can enter now. He isn't pleased.
In downtown D.C. (In Seward Square) there's a guy with a megaphone who rigged an alleyway to explode if anyone comes near it who shouts his insane ramblings at anyone who passes by.
"I'll do it! I'll blow us all to hell! You...me...the wooorm...!"
Even better, you can convince a bystander to try and talk the guy down. If you get him to go through with it, better start running.
Insulting Dave's son gets you this hilariously unfunny gem:
"Oh. Yeah. Well! ''Your face!""
Yeah, well, your face is unfunny!
Also, relating to Dave, when he tells you that his father was a monarch one of possible responses you can give him is:
"Your father was a monarch? You mean like the butterfly?"
Broken Steel has a good one. During the mission where you investigate a ghoul in Underworld selling Aqua Cura, you have to make a trip to his secret bottling plant. Once there you'll fight a few ghoul guards, including one wearing a wig like the ghoul who is selling the Aqua Cura. On the guard's body is a note containing bottling instructions and a request that all of the ghouls there not put on any of their boss' wigs. Guess he couldn't resist.
You can't help but crack up laughing at the Protectrons you encounter in the Nuka-Cola plant. Why? Every time they say "Nuka-Cola", their voice suddenly shifts from their monotone voice to a clip from an advertisement. It's hard not to laugh at those things, more so the first time you fight them because it comes out of left field.
When roaming the wasteland, flip on GNR...and promptly get blown halfway across DC while "Let's Go Sunning" is playing.
Literally 15 minutes after leaving Vault 101 (assuming you're a High-Karma player), you can encounter the Talon Company mercs. Somebody really had it out for the Lone Wanderer!
The Liberty Prime sequence may be the most hilariously outrageous example of Eagle Land ever written, with a giant robot blowing away members of the Enclave while reminding them (LOUDLY) that they must EMBRACE FREEDOM OR FACE ERADICATION.
Liberty Prime: COMMUNISM IS THE VERY DEFINITION OF FAILURE! Liberty Prime: DEMOCRACY IS NON-NEGOTIABLE!
Perhaps one of Liberty Prime's best lines is when it encounters an Enclave forcefield during the final story quest: "OBSTRUCTION DETECTED. COMPOSITION: TITANIUM ALLOY SUPPLEMENTED BY PHOTONIC RESONANCE BARRIER. PROBABILITY OF MISSION HINDRANCE: ZERO PERCENT!"
There's another bit of gold in Broken Steel
Liberty Prime: STRUCTURAL WEAKNESS DETECTED. EXPLOITING... *nukes building open*
Keep in mind that the Enclave are the presumed de facto remnants of the pre-War U.S. Government and Liberty Prime erroneously labels them as Communist Chinese Soldiers invading the nation formerly known as the U.S., even though the Enclave themselves are actually the American equivalent of Those Wacky Nazis.
Snowflake, the ghoul barber in Underworld. The only ghoul in the game with a full head of hair.
"Of course, a ghoul with a barbershop is like a screen door on a submarine, so... fuck it."
The same goes for Talon Company, once you've outclassed them: "Talon Compa—!"*BOOM!*
The pinnacle of this may occur when you have the Winterized T-51b armor. It's quite hilarious to see a raider screaming at you as he tries to beat you with a metal pipe, and accomplishes absolutely nothing while your character just stares at him like he's an idiot.
A humorous glitch happens in Bethesda Ruins. The above area is a raider camp while the Underworks is full of feral ghouls. If you enter the Underworks while hidden or wearing the Ghoul Mask all the ghouls will run outside and fight the raiders. Every 3 days afterwards the raiders will respawn and more ghouls will spawn at the gate to the Underworks, leading to an eternal war between them.
The powdered wig on the head of Protectron!Button Gwinnet is just so hilariously unfitting. Then there's his delusional mannerisms that come into play before and after you meet him, thanks to a memory malfunction that corrupted his parameters and turned him into RP-ing the historical character he's based on, according to his control terminal found in the maintenance chamber just to the left of his office.
Even more hilarious if you manage to convince him that you are Thomas Jefferson. Additional points if you happen to be a black woman while bluffing.
A great example of how much of a Deadpan Snarker you can be becomes apparent the minute you enter Megaton. A possible response when Lucas Simms welcomes you to the town.
Spoony's Vlog of the game, despite being a serious review (As opposed to his regular humorous ones) he does give a good Fridge Logic moment that is kind of funny simply because it's true. Detailing that he could fight with his bare hands like a badass, except that with every monster in the game, a sane person would never actually want to touch them with their bare hands.
Spoony: Seriously! Why would I touch these things with my bare hands!? They're disgusting!
A cute in-joke that may be easy to miss, that Butch's assigned job is a hair stylist but prefers the term "barber", while Snowflake in the Underworld is a barber but prefers the term "hair stylist".
The Presidential Transit control computer in Broken Steel is in the narrow valley between 'just a computer' and 'conscious', which makes her The Comically Serious.
Wanderer: Do you know anything about the war that broke out 200 years ago? "Margot": I was aware that something had happened to shut down my surface terminals. Thank you for the information. Wanderer: So you realize there is nothing left on the surface? "Margot": That would be compatible with the information you have already provided.
Using the console to force the camera into third-person when your character is still young would reveal that the developers didn't bother giving you a separate model for this point in the game, so you just use a scaled-down version of your adult model.
When Charon kills Ahzrukhal after you buy his contract.
Charon: Ahzrukhal. I've been told I'm no longer in your service. Ahzrukhal: That's right Charon, have you come to say goodbye? Charon: Yes. Boom, Headshot! Charon: Alright, let's go.
There's a small shelter under a bridge on the outskirts of the D.C. ruins. Inside is a single feral ghoul and what can only be described as a monument to sheer boredom. When you first open the door, you see a small tower made from a tin can balanced on a soda bottle balanced on a book balanced on four pencils. Down the hall, there's the massive head of a statue decorated with party streamers. In the main room, there's a garden gnome, a mannequin and at least 40 plungers stuck everywhere. Even better, some of those plungers form a line up the wall and onto the ceiling, interspersed with hand prints.
If you sneak up on a group of super mutants, you may get treated to some hilarious dialogue:
Mutant 1: What? Mutant 2: I was thinking. And it hurt! Hurt my head! But I remembered things. From before... I think I knew...a woman. Or maybe, I...was a woman... Aagh! It hurts! Mutant 1: Ha! You talk a lot! Sound funny when you talk, like a stupid human. Ha ha ha ha ha!
Mutant 1: What do you want? Mutant 2: I have a joke for you. Ready? Knock knock. Mutant 1: Who [sic] there? Mutant 2: Humans? Mutant 1: Humans who? Mutant 2: Kill the humans! Kill them all! Aggghhh! Mutant 1: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Oh... oh... ha ha ha ha ha... that a good one! Ha ha ha ha ha!
In Megaton, a number of improvised roadsigns point the player in the direction of important locales. The sign pointing to the church of the Children of the Atom reads simply 'Local Cult'.
"Chucky won't shut up about [the mole rat] he kept as a pet getting eaten by the others. I think I'll shoot him."
He keeps hackin' and whackin' and smackin'! He keeps hackin' and whackin' and smackin'!
— Roy Brown, "Butcher Pete (Part 1)"
Even after finding James in Vault 112, you can keep saying, "Good doggie!" and he doesn't react....at least not that the Lone Wanderer can understand.
Missing all 95% shots in V.A.T.S. because the enemy managed to slip behind an obstacle at the right time? Frustrating. Seeing the Mysterious Stranger immediately bust a cap in them afterward? Hysterical.
Even better: Missing all 95% shots because the RNG felt like so against an Enclave in the open and about fifteen feet from you, and then the Mysterious Stranger pops them down, right as you are about to get shot back.
