Funny / The Truth

• This gem:
  Mr. Tulip: It's not a ——ing harpsichord, it's a ——ing virginal! One ——ing string to a note instead of two! So called because it was an instrument for ——ing young ladies!
  Chair: My word, was it? I thought it was just a sort of early piano!
• Terry Pratchett waits until after this exchange to let the readers know that Mr. Tulip isn't cursing like a sailor and does it with a single line of puzzled dialogue from one of the anti-Vetinari conspirators.
  "Uh, why does your colleague keep saying 'ing?'"
• Otto von Chriek, vampire and 'iconography' enthusiast, has a minor problem: every time the flash goes off, it's bright enough to bring on his traditional vampiric reaction to sunlight. He sometimes has to be swept up and carried home in a dustpan.
  • William buys some steak to use as a blood source for Otto's resurrection. Then tells him its intended use.
  "Dog food?"
  "You did say it was the finest steak."
• A small but hilarious one: the only Guilds that refuse to vote to impeach Vetinari are the four run by women (specifically the Beggars, the Seamstresses, the Launderers and the Exotic Dancers), prompting William to observe, very dryly, that the man must have led a very interesting life (although given what we know from other books it's more likely that it's due to him promoting equal employment protections for women and helping the Seamstresses become a formal guild).
  • This is also a Fandom Nod, since Vetinari is acknowledged as having a strictly female fan club.
• Vetinari, clearly remembering the events from Sourcery, Moving Pictures, Soul Music, and the Noodle Incident involving Mr. Hong's Three Jolly Luck Take-Away Fish Shop, attempts to determine whether allowing the printing press in the city is going to bring on another Eldritch Abomination crisis. It's nice to see that even Vetinari is Wrong Genre Savvy once in a great while:
  Vetinari: Possibly on this very site a strange cult once engaged in eldritch rites, the very essence of which permeated the neighborhood, and which seeks only the rite, ahaha, circumstances to once again arise and walk about eating people?
  William: They made rocking horses here.
  Vetinari: I've always thought there was something slightly sinister about rocking horses.
• The clacks from the King of Lancre clarifying that women of Lancre are not in the habit of giving birth to snakes. ALL PLUS ARMS LEGS MINUS SCALES FANGS. With a bonus Call-Back to the Carter family's notion that if girls are named after virtues then boys should be named after vices—one of the kids is "Catastrophe Carter".
• The Running Gag of Gaspode doing the talking for other people through ventriloquism. "Gottle o' geer, gottle o' geer."
• Mr. Tulip putting his own spin on a classic line:
  Mr. Tulip: An' then...then I'm gonna get medieval on his arse.
  Mr. Pin: How, exactly?
  Mr. Tulip: I thought maybe a maypole. An' then a display of country dancing, land tillage under the three-field system, several plagues, and, if my hand ain't too tired, the invention of the —-ing horse collar.
• Vetinari, trying to make a point about the industriousness of the city, asks the man he's talking to to look outside. Unfortunately, that man is one of the famously Literal-Minded Ridcully brothers, who answers "Fog." Later, Hughnon gets stuck on Vetinari's metaphor about c-commerce and sending prawns by clacks.
  • And later suggests that Vetinari has gone mad because he's been talking about making lobsters fly. After Vimes and Carrot discuss how Vetinari's possible replacement "wants a return to the values and traditions that made the city great", Vimes says he'd "rather take a chance on the lobsters".
• There is something quite amusing in the fact that Vetinari essentially uses his period of incarceration, while under suspicion of attempted murder, to have an extended sleep-in of the sort that he doesn't usually get.
• The mayor of Quirm got hit by a meteor again — funny enough. That it was waiting for him in an alleyway is even funnier, but the fact that there is such a thing as a Department of Vindictive Astronomy at Unseen University takes the cake.
• The scene with everyone trying to get a reward for the dog. "No, it's a cow. It's a badger. (He's been ill!) It's a parrot! You've trained it to bark and you've painted "DoG" on it but it's still a parrot!" Then Saccharissa passive-aggressively informs William "Some complete muffin offered a reward! In Ankh-Morpork! Do you know what I've been dealing with all day? There's ferrets out there!"
  • Made all the funnier a few books later, when the "DoG" parrot makes a cameo appearance in one of the illustrations for The Last Hero.
• Death gets one when he goes to collect Mr. Pin, whose spirit runs up to him, and, for the first time in Death's experience, looks back.
• When searching the recently deceased Mr. Pin's body, William finds a certain object:
  William: What? A personal Dis-organizer? A killer with a personal Dis-organizer?
  Boddony: The Things To Do Today section is going to be interesting, then.
• Saccharissa and the Dwarves talking down a relapsing Otto using a blood sausage and singing hymns.
• Death wonders who knows what evils lurk inside people's hearts.
  Death of Rats: Squeak.
  Death: Well, yes, obviously me. I just wondered if there was anyone else.
• William suffering a moment of similarity just after confronting the Big Bad - his father.
  William: Of all the bone-headed, stubborn, self-centred, arrogant-
  Otto: But you make up for it in other vays.
• The longer-than-usual footnote dedicated to all those horrible, smug little gits who, just at the end of a meeting have to bring up the minutes of the last meeting, making everyone stay at least another hour when they just want to get out. You get the inescapable feeling Sir Pterry might've been venting some personal feelings on the matter.
• Vimes knows his people; on hearing the Watch has a bet on how long it'll be 'till someone kills William, orders Angua to investigate who's running it, and, when she's found out it's Nobby, to stop him.

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