Funny / Iron Maiden

• It's a poor idea to have Iron Maiden go on a show like Top of the Pops and ask them to mime along to playback. This is what happened.
• In a concert at Brazil, a banner reading "Play 'Alexander the Great'" was thrown at the stage. Bruce's response? This. Hard to pick what's funnier: an Epic Rocking song played on the kazoo, or the crowd showing they don't know the lyrics.
  • Speaking of shows in Brazil. During their gig at the city of Belém, Pará, Bruce Dickinson told the tale of how he almost didn't make it to the show because he suffered from some kind of "poisoning" after drinking caipirinha (horribly pronounced as "caiparinha") earlier that day, and saying "Heineken - shit beer! Drink Brazilian beer! It's much better!"
  • And caipirinhas seem to be a Running Gag with Bruce and Brazil since that gig- at the 2013 gig at Rock in Rio, Bruce tells the crowd that he only knows 4 Portugese words, one of them being "caipirinha", which results in a hilarious mixed reaction from the audience. During his usual pyro banter during "Phantom of the Opera", one of the things he shouts is "too many caipirinhas!!!".
• Bruce's introduction of "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" from Live After Death:
  "And the moral of the story is what not to do if a bird shits on you."
• Nicko trying to sing "Age of Innocence".
  • For that matter, many of the "Listen With Nicko" tracks of the singles collection "The First Ten Years".
• The video for "Holy Smoke" is a So Bad, It's Good masterpiece: Bruce monkeying around wearing a pink shirt, Steve riding a tractor, Janick playing a toy guitar in a pool, producer Martin Birch in BDSM gear...
• "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" is often played at the end of their shows.
• OOOOOOOOH HERE COMES 4 G AND WE'RE GOING INTO ORBIT!!!!!!
• A Spinal Tap-like B-side filled with Vulgar Humor, "Nodding Donkey Blues".
• And while we're on B-sides, "Pass the Jam".
  • Likewise, "More Tea Vicar", in which Bruce attempts to rap.
• The end of their otherwise straight cover of Montrose's "Space Station No. 5":
  Bruce: It's getting faster lads! Hurry up! Here comes Metallica in the rear-view mirror!
  And it's also leads by electric... (the song speeds up, and Bruce also starts narrating faster to the point on unintelligibility)
  At the finish there... It's... At the finish it's... It's prick... It's...
  (the song ends) And at the finish it's prick followed by the wanker, followed by, ah, cunt with arsehole finishing a close fourth.
  Someone at the background (probably Steve): Why did you say that?
  (Bruce laughs)
• Imagine you going on a trip by airplane and hear the pilot say: "Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain Bruce Dickinson speaking." Yes, Bruce Dickinson is a licensed pilot.
• Any time Bruce calls out a dickhead on stage. His endless swearing is priceless.
• "Mission from 'Arry". All of it. Especially the end when Steve Harris notices the tape recorder and says "Some cunt's recording this!" before turning it off, while the cunt in question is right there in the room with him. Doubling the hilarity is the Live After Death documentary, where Bruce, Steve and Nicko all describe how, once they found the tape, they listened to it in the studio and laughed their arses off, leading Steve to suggest that it should be made the B-side to "2 Minutes to Midnight".
• Nicko getting all rage fueled when talking about Bruce in a 1995 interview.
• The cheese shop incident, a concert at which Bruce sang altered lyrics for 22 Acacia Avenue and Run To The Hills, making them both about cheese.
• In 2013, a fan in Italy was apparently too used to Bruce performing wearing his beanie hat, and made a sign to bring to the Milan concert which read "Bruce, please give me your cap". This ensued.
  • The sign, for anyone interested...◊
• The Graz 2013 show had a moment where people kept throwing hats onstage, and Bruce, during Phantom of the Opera, took two of them and asked the crowd which looked better on Janick. Watch the hilarity here.
  "Scream for Janick's hat?"
  • Hat-related, in a 1992 concert in Mexico Bruce took a sombrero from the audience and wore it during part of "From Here to Eternity".
• The entire Belgrade 2009 gig was riddled with hilarious bloopers. But without a doubt, the funniest comes from before "The Trooper", when Adrian accidentally played the first few bars of "Wasted Years".
  Bruce: Wrong. Get your eyes fucking checked.
• At their 2014 Nova Rock Festival appearance in Austria, Bruce spent the entire encore in a Team England onesie.
• In 2016, the government of China allowed the band to play "Powerslave"... under the condition that the title wasn't sung. Bruce came up with a rather unexpected replacement.
• Four words: Climb like a monkey.
• Eddie driving the car at the end of "The Wicker Man"'s music video.
• The old version of Derek Riggs' portfolio of Eddies (the current one removed the commentary). Along with the actual info on the art, there's many a Double Entendre title ("Eddie with his big chopper out"), Self-Deprecation (when I finished this I sat back and thought "that is going to make me rich and famous" so I didn't get rich but I got moderatly famous, so one half out of two ain't bad I suppose.), Do Not Try This at Home warnings, much Writer Revolt, and weird asides.
• The intro to "Still Life" is completely unrelated to the song, featuring some backmasked talking. When it is reversed, instead of subliminal satanic messages you find one drunken flat-nosed drummer impersonating Idi Amin.
• During the concert in Birmingham on 4 July 2023, Bruce accidentally began to introduce "Can I Play With Madness" instead of "Death of the Celts".
• In his memoir, Bruce revealed that Steve writes songs by whistling into a tape recorder and transposing it later. He claims the whistling version of "The Trooper" sounded like, "A cheerful postman walking up the garden path to deliver the mail."