< Black Books

Black Books/Funny


  • Bernard: "Well, to be honest, after years of smoking and drinking, you do sometimes look at yourself and think. You know, just sometimes in between the first cigarette with coffee in the morning to that 400th glass of cornershop piss at 3AM, you do sometimes look at yourself and think: 'This is fantastic. I'm in heaven.'"
  • Manny describes the mess of the shop: "Right now, I'm eating scrambled eggs, with a comb, from a shoe!"
  • For perfectly well-arranged reasons, Manny ends up playing a hunchbacked, slavering Igor to Bernard's wine-making Mad Scientist.
    • Who ends up thrashing him with a branch on the doorstep of a gothic house in a lightning storm.
  • Manny and the shiatsu machine:

Manny: Look, Bernard. Bernard, look. Bernard! Look! Hey, Bernard, look! Look! Hey, Bernard! Look! Look! Bernard, Bernard! Look! Look! Hey, Bernard!

Bernard: WHAT?!

Manny: I'm a prostitute robot from the future!

  • Bernard: (very drunk) Well the pay's not great but the work is hard.
  • From "A Nice Change"

Manny: Yes, it'll be a long time before I want to sacrifice another monkey.

Bernard: WE SAID WE WOULDN'T TALK ABOUT CANADA!

    • The Bilingual Bonus immediately before it had this Irish troper in stitches.
  • From "Fever":

Bernard: Oh, I don't know. Walls, thermometers - it's an impossible choice. I'll just have to hope that when I flip the coin that it somehow EXPLODES and kills me.

    • And from the episode, Bernard's "lollipop". (A bottle of wine that Bernard has frozen, then smashes against the wall to break the glass bottle and starts eating the rest like an icy pole.)
  • Manny runs away from home, only to experience an escalating series of calamities.

Fran: Well, where is he? How can I find him?
Bernard: Well, you could become a terrible event and happen to him.

  • Any interaction between Bernard and a customer.

Customer: Look, there's no other way to say this, but I didn't come in here to be insulted.
Bernard: Well, I didn't ask for the job of insulting you. In another life, we could have been brothers. Running a small, quirky taveria in Sicily. Maybe we would have married the local twins instead of wasting each other's time here in this dump. But it was not to be. So hop it.

  • Bernard trying to persuade three skinheads to beat him up in the first episode. "Have you heard this chant? Millwall, Millwall, you're really dreadful, and all your girlfriends are unfulfilled and alienated..."
    • PUNCH!!!!
    • "Perfect! Skinheads!"

Bernard: Which one of you bitches wants to dance? Hey, you know when you're doing your usual threesome thing you do on a weekend, and the moonlight's bouncing off your heads and your arses and everything, does that not get a bit confusing?

  • Bernard: DON'T YOU DARE USE THE WORD 'PARTY' AS A VERB IN THIS SHOP!!!
  • In the premiere episode, Fran buys an allotment of bizarre spherical objects, but can't figure out what they are supposed to do. Then in the last moment of the show, the oblivious Manny casually reveals they are cigarette lighters, and Fran issues this perfect little scream of rage and surprise.
  • The entirety of "Hello Sun", but this part in particular:

Bernard: What are you doing, Manny?
Manny: Stripping the chicken.

  • I also like this exchange between Bernard and Fran

Fran: Do you know that in Tibet when they want something they give something away?
Bernard: Do they? That must be why they're such a dominant global power.

Bernard: Did I ever tell you about the old country, Jim? Ah, the old country! The songs! They'd melt your face!

    • The deleted scenes have several alternate lines for this, all hilarious, culminating in the Ad-Libbing Dylan Moran cracking himself up.

Cows in the morning, cows in the morning, one two three.
Up and at them, up and at them with a pick.

Ireland will never be free until
I'm... can marry my brother.

I live... by the river... with my mother... in a house.
She washes,... I cook... and we never go out.

  • Bernard's response to Manny's claim that they're not quitters:

Bernard:I am a Quitter. I come from a long line of Quitters. It's amazing I'm here at all.

  • Pretty much the entirety of Blood's last act, with the frantic preparation of ridiculous meals, including luxury pie (The food of kings: truffles; saffron; caviar, and champagne!) and culminating in Manny, trying to reach Bernard's impossible standards, constructing a tower of soup. Bernard's response:

Bernard: What's this? Where are the turrets? It's rubbish, man!!

    • In the outtakes, when the '"tower" has fallen down.

"That's a log!"
"It fell over!"

  • In "Manny Come Home", where Bernard and Manny put aside their episode-long enmity to team up against Fran.

Bernard: It’s never going to be like it was, Fran.
Manny: Never, I agree.
Bernard: We agree. Manny and I are opposed on every point.
Manny: [Politely] Well put.
Bernard: Thank you.
Manny: My pleasure.

  • Fran's drunken attempt at an Irish folk song.

Oh Eamonn, Danny dear,
I miss the Galway Bay,
And I'll sing for all I got!
With a riddle-diddle Dublin,
And a riddle-diddle Donegal,
The English are all bollocks.

Bill Bailey: I had white pudding once.
Tamsin Greig: What's that made from?
Dylan Moran: [Suddenly and without missing a beat] Pigs' vaginas.

  • The ending of the very first episode, and the reaction of the missionaries when Manny opens the door. The entire episode was a beautiful set-up for the whole thing.
  • The little man in my hair is getting very very angry."
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