Funny / Ramona Quimby

Beezus and Ramona

• Beezus finds Ramona in the basement with a box of apples. She's taking one bite out of each apple and then tossing them aside. Beezus orders her to stop and says, "You can't eat one bite and then throw the rest away." Ramona simply says, "But the first bite tastes best," and picks up another apple. Even more amusingly, Beezus can't respond because she agrees with the point.
• Ramona is disappointed that her name has no "dots and lines" and writes her signature as "itttiitti". When Beezus tries to teach her the proper way to write "Ramona", Ramona thinks it looks boring.
• Beezus is told to use her imagination, and ends up drawing a dragon with lollipops down its back.
• After Ramona ruins a cake by shoving a doll in it (pretending to be Gretel from "Hansel and Gretel"), her mother pulls the mess out of the oven and Ramona asks "Is the witch done yet?"
• Ramona starts riding her tricycle around the house singing "I'm going to have a party!" Beezus and Mrs. Quimby assume this is just her being silly, but then Beezus sees a couple of Ramona's classmates being dropped off outside the house...
  Beezus: Mom! Ramona wasn't pretending!
  • There's a very funny illustration of the children parading around, but Ramona is mad that nobody is paying attention to her so she's very angrily marching in the parade.
• Everything about the Scoopy the steam shovel book that Ramona loves. Ramona knows the story so well that she gets mad when Beezus leaves out a word when she makes her read it to her. And the fact that Robert hates it so much he refuses to read it to Ramona and bans Beezus and Dorothy from reading it to her when he's around.
• When Ramona is given a chance to paint a picture of her imaginary lizard pet Ralph, she leaves the page blank except for Ralph's footprints and the sky, and explains she can't paint him because he's imaginary.

Ramona the Pest

• After being rescued from a mud puddle by Henry, Ramona's teacher tries to prompt her to thank Henry by saying "What do you say, Ramona?" Ramona's response is "My boots! My boots are still in the mud!"
  • This incident also prompts Ramona to declare she's going to marry Henry, using a worm as an engagement ring. Henry naturally finds this gross on many levels.
• When she's first learning to write, she spells her name as "Ranoma".
• The teacher reads the kindergarten class a story about a construction worker named Mike Mulligan. Ramona then wonders how Mike went to the bathroom if he worked all day, which strikes up a great debate among the students. The teacher says that it isn't important, to which the students disagree because "knowing where to go to the bathroom is important!".
• Ramona is told to sit at her desk "for the present". She then wonders why she isn't getting a present.

Ramona the Brave

• The whole "Jesus Beezus" thing. Basically, Ramona and Beezus go home from the park and Beezus is sulking. The parents ask why and she replies that it was because bullies were taunting her with the phrases "Jesus Beezus!" and "Beezus? Jesus!", then Ramona embarrassed her by "preaching a sermon" to the bullies. Ramona then reveals that what she said was not to take God's name in vain, then later, when she's apologising, she says, "Sorry for preaching a sermon."
• Ramona's idea of a bad word is "guts".

Ramona and Her Father

• The girls have been trying to convince Mr. Quimby to quit smoking because they read it turns your lungs black. He then disappears for a while and Ramona is worried that he has run away because he's mad at his daughters for wanting him to quit smoking. Ramona says that she doesn't want Mr. Quimby to run away because she loves him "black lungs and all".
• Some of Ramona's efforts to convince her father to quit smoking are funny in and of themselves. The first thing she does is make a "No Smoking" sign, but because she makes the letters to big, it reads "NO SMO-KING," with the "...KING" below the first two syllables. After Mr. Quimby sees it, he asks "Say, who is this Mr. King?" and when Ramona asks him who he means, he replies "Nosmo King."
• Later in the book, Mr. Quimby playfully parodies Ramona's nagging (which included a handmade sign that said "Smoking is Hazardous to Your Health") by putting a sign in her room that says "A Messy Room is Hazardous to Your Health."

Ramona and Her Mother

• Ramona wastes an entire tube of toothpaste by pouring it all out into the sink to make a cake. The entire situation is surprisingly amusing.
• Willa Jean's explanation for why she cut off her teddy bear's leg with scissors:
  Willa Jean: (crying) "I only wanted to see if Woger had bones!"
• Ramona often writes the wrong word when she's first learning to spell, e.g. "lick" for "like" and "muck" for "much".
• When Ramona writes, "book", she draws little frowny faces in the "O"s, then when the teacher is marking the work, she hopes the teacher "ignores the frowning 'O's".

Ramona Quimby, Age 8

• Ramona is away from school for a few days due to stomach flu and watches an ad for indigestion pills that involves a man saying, "I can't believe I ate the whole thing!". She then gets better and, when giving her oral report about a book called The Left-Behind Cat, she forgets her line and says:
  Ramona: "The Left-Behind Cat has cats, dogs, people... cats, dogs, people... And I can't believe I read the whole thing!"

Ramona Forever

• This conversation:
  Uncle Hobart: "I used to lie in bed listening to the wolves howl-"
  Howie: "I don't think there are wolves in Saudi Arabia."
  Uncle Hobart: "Okay then, listening to camels howl."
  Howie: "I don't think camels howl. I think they sort of spit."
  • And later, when everyone's preparing for the wedding:
    Howie: "You never told me what noise a camel makes."
• When Mrs. Quimby is having a baby and they are referring to the unborn sibling as "it", Mr. Quimby jokes about what would happen if they named the baby It.
  Mr. Quimby: "Enough of It. No child of ours is going to be called It Quimby. Think how everyone would laugh when the teacher called the roll. How would you feel introducing your new brother or sister by saying, 'This is It'? And every time anyone said 'I don't like it' about bread pudding or stupid TV programs, It's feelings would be hurt."
  • On the subject of Mrs. Quimby's pregnancy, when Beezus is first speculating that Mrs. Quimby might be pregnant before it's confirmed but Ramona is dubious, Beezus points out that Mrs. Quimby threw up a while back. Ramona's response is "That's nothing! I've thrown up heaps of times!".
• When Ramona forgets what Saudi Arabia is called and she calls it Narnia, Never-Never Land, and Gaudy Arabia.
• When Ramona's reading the list of ice cream flavours, she says this at one point.
  Ramona: "...avocado (avocado ice cream?)..."
• Willa Jean is given an accordion and is mad that she is too small to play it. Her solution? Extend the accordion to its fullest, then sit on it. The result is a terrible noise and a broken accordion.

Ramona's World