Honor Harrington/Funny

• The scene in The Short Victorious War, where Honor is floating in a pool, and Nimitz starts bombing her with tennis balls. Her warning "Throw it and you're bedroom shoes!" and subsequent retaliation (treecats like water about as much as do the Earth felines for which they're named), is a fun little lighthearted moment. Especially given what happens later.
  • Leads to a Brick Joke a dozen books later when Honor's Black Best Friend Mike is shown to have been given fluffy slippers by Honor, slippers styled to look like purple treecats.
• The scene where Mike is trying to teach Honor how to use make-up, and Honor's abysmal ignorance of the topic. When Mike is pointing out that she can't just borrow Mike's cosmetics and needs to buy a different shade...

Mike: Our coloring is just a bit different, you know.^[1]
Honor: Does that matter?
Mike: *facepalm*

• Nimitz (he shows up a lot here, doesn't he?) keeping in hunting practice via counting coup. Poor chipmunk...
• Alfred and Allison Harrington in some scenes in At All Costs.

Alfred: I think someone needs a spanking. And not our daughter.
Allison: Oooooh, promise?

• • Later on the same scene, Allison jokingly starts waxing poetic about her excellent qualities.

Alfred: (deadpan) "Definitely a spanking."

• Allison is a barrel of laughs, essentially a Pretty Lech. Like one time, on meeting Honor's new executive officer, she tells Honor how gorgeous the guy is. And how Honor needs to tap that, pronto.
  • Extra points for doing so while standing directly in front of him.
• On Grayson, Honor freaks out over a bunch of similarly dressed hooligans (clearly a gang) armed with large sticks advancing menacingly upon her position, and no one notices or sees what she sees, even though they have a live feed and people are with her... They're a bunch of guys heading for the ballpark to play baseball. Clearly Cricket won out over the millenia.
  • Nah, The Beautiful Game did. On Manticore at least.
• Nimitz's telepathic picture show showing treecat-Honor (a brown-eyed treecat, wearing an eyepatch, a naval beret, and Commodore's shoulderboards) chasing down a chipmunk with a face patterned after a particularly obstructive admiral. It makes Honor laugh uproariously, and then chide him for his low sense of humor.
• An advisor informs Queen Elizabeth of an urgent matter which demands her attention - presumably, more important than the card game she is losing against the Prince Consort and the Crown Prince (read: her husband and son). The Royal Family proceeds to engage in a light-hearted session of tinfoil hattery, accusing each other of devious machinations and high treason, all over a Pinochle game.

Prince Consort Justin: As I say, I find this sudden urgent affair of state just a tad suspicious, Beth. Don't you, Roger?
Crown Prince Roger: I don't know, Dad. It could be a genuine matter of state, I suppose. They do happen from time to time, or so I've been told. But the timing is just a little suspicious.
Princess Joanna: Oh come on, Roger! I'll admit Mom has all the sneaky Winton genes. And I'll admit she doesn't like to lose. I'll even admit the Opposition may have a point when they accuse her of being 'devious.' But even granting all that, how could she have known ahead of time that she'd need an interruption to save her? I mean, she'd have to be psychic to know Dad was going to be dealt a double run this hand!
Prince Consort Justin: Ha! You're forgetting the security systems, Jo. Do you really think someone as underhanded as your mother would fail to have the systems on-line during a crucial operation like a pinochle game? She's probably wearing an earbug right now so that her sinister minion in the PGS can use the security cameras to read Roger's and my cards to her! And no doubt those same sinister minions commed the Prime Minister and told him to hurry right over before I trounced her.
Queen Elizabeth: That, my dear, is carrying paranoia and suspicion of those in power entirely too far. Besides, if it were that important to me to win—which, of course, it isn't, the drive to win in all ways and at all costs being foreign to my sweet and compliant nature—I wouldn't use Allen to get me out of the game. I'd simply have you arrested for high treason or some other trumped-up charge and flung into the Citadel to languish miserably in some cold, dark, dank cell.
Prince Consort Justin: I don't think so! First, the Citadel is climate controlled; it doesn't have any cold, dark, dank cells. And second, even if it did, we live under a Constitution, we do, and it specifically limits what tyrannical monarchs can do to their subjects on a whim!
Queen Elizabeth: Of course it does. The problem, oh feckless one, is that before your lawyer can apply for a writ of habeas corpus and protest my tyrannical ways, said lawyer has to know you're in prison in the first place. And for all the skill with which we Wintons have played the benevolent, law-abiding monarchs for so long, there have actually been whole generations of secretly held prisoners, victims of our evil autocracy, who lingered wretchedly until their miserable deaths, forgotten and alone in the unhallowed cells of our tyrannical rule.
Prince Consort Justin: That was very good, Beth! But I doubt you could get it all out in order again.

• Another one happens much earlier in the novel dealing with a character coming back from the dead and finding a 12 meter statue of themselves. After multiple escalating objections fail to get it removed, they cap their rant by threatening to have a commando team come in and blow it up with explosives. To then be politely informed that the statue is fully insured and the sculptor has already offered to cast a replacement at cost if need be. The character gives up in despair.
• "Thank you for your cooperation and excellent response time, but this concludes our unscheduled exercise."
• At All Costs features the literary version of a Funny Background Event where during some playful banter and conversation, Emily Alexander gives her husband Hamish (at this point, First Lord of the Navy and one of the highest ranking people in the Kingdom of Manticore) a Dope Slap.
• In "Fanatic" from Service of the Sword. Victor Cachat has spent the last few months terrorizing, beating, and torturing the naval staff of a Havenite sector headquarters so that he could neutralize and dismantle the State Sec keeping an eye on them. This includes nearly beating the local commander and his Number Two to death, more than once. When Ginny Usher (Cachat's boss's wife and Cachat's Cool Big Sis) shows up, Victor tells her he's very tired and "just wants to leave." In what the narration describes as proof that there is no justice in the universe...

Ginny: "Victor Cachat is the sweetest kid in the world! And you— You dirty rotten bastards! You were mean to him."

• Ties in with CMoA, but in Ashes of Victory, the discussion about the San Martin government. San Martin had recently been liberated, and was having massive difficulty electing a new leader. After two years, with no progress, Commodore Jesus Ramirez, the believed-to-be-dead war hero who led the doomed final defense of the planet and nephew of the last President of San Martin, returns. Instantly every candidate (except one, and even that one seems to be in it just to have an opposition) drops out of the race. Ramirez wins with 86% of the vote.

Narrator: "Jesus was drafted, almost without being consulted..."

• Toward the end of Mission of Honor, a lowly ensign has the watch as Admiral Harrington's ship comes docking back in with her flagship, and he begins going through the usual motions. Only to stop as the Queen herself follows Honor out of the ship. Cue centuries (and a dozen books) worth of military tradition coming to a sudden, abrupt halt at the unexpected arrival. Despite the gravity of the situation, it's easily the funniest thing in the book.
  • Not the poor ensign's fault. Naval tradition re: small craft is that the seniormost person boards last and leaves first (so that they don't have to sit in the boat waiting for anyone else to enter or exit). If proper procedure had been followed the Queen should have preceded Honor out of the hatch, precisely to avoid this kind of problem.
• A bit earlier in the book, Eloise Pritchart is trying to decide what to do about a pair of troublesome members of her own delegation. She starts to fantasize about just having Honor strangle them, noting that Harrington could probably do it without breaking a sweat, and afterward she could just give her a presidential pardon. Then she realizes, hey, Honor has diplomatic immunity anyway!
• In A Rising Thunder, Emily gives Honor a Dope Slap.
  • Albrecht Detweiler, during his epic Oh Crap while Benjamin runs down just how badly recent developments have screwed them over stops to point out that they actually weren't responsible for Arnold Giancola.

Benjamin: In fact, they're busy telling the Manty Parliament -- and, I'm sure, the Havenite Congress and all the rest of the fucking galaxy! -- all about the Mesan plan to conquer the known universe. In fact, you'll be astonished to know that Secretary of State Arnold Giancola was in the nefarious Alignment's pay when he deliberately maneuvered Haven back into shooting at the Manties!
Albrecht: What? (blinks in surprise) We didn't have anything to do with that!

• • • And then, just to top it all off, Albrecht sums up the situation with all the prose and eloqution one expects of a Chessmaster such as himself:

Albrecht: Aw shit.

• Meanwhile, back on Old Terra, a group of conspirators are poking around in one small part of the Navy Archives... which includes countless filing cabinets full of decades old paper documents, despite the distant-future setting. One of them, a Marine Intel officer, demands to know if the Navy ever throws anything out at all.
  • Another one of them, a Gendarmerie officer, has the basics of the plot the League finds itself in outlined for her, along with the request that she help investigate and find evidence of it...

Colonel Okiku: You are so going to get all of us killed.

• One of the security measures Manticore takes in response to the Mesan threat is to pair up critical personnel with volunteer treecats to gain advance warning against stealth assassinations. Admiral Lester Tourville's assigned minder pointedly objects to his habit of lighting cigars at dramatic moments by sealing up his space suit as soon as a cigar is unwrapped.
• It's also Dark Humor given the circumstances, but the scene where Commodore Terekhov is busy explaining to an incredulous Solarian Gendarmerie officer in Shadow of Freedom exactly how screwed is screwed.

Commodore Terekhov: Let’s do some math here, Brigadier. If two of our ships can kill seventy of yours, and we’ve got five hundred of them, that means we can kill every superdreadnought in Battle Fleet, including the Reserve, about three times each.

• In A Rising Thunder, Chairman Benton-Ramirez of the Board of Directors of Beowulf and Protector Benjamin of Grayson both decide to drop in to pay a completely unannounced state visit to Manticore on the same weekend -- and this shortly after President Pritchart's own dramatically unscheduled arrival from Haven. By the time of the latest arrival, the Crown has gone from being shocked to flabbergasted to wearily amused.

Queen Elizabeth: You know, just the other day I was saying to Willie, 'Willie,' I said, ‘we need to get some regularization into this business of visiting heads of state.' Somehow I suspect we’re still behind the curve on that.

1. ↑ Honor is half-Asian, half-Caucasian, and very pale. Mike is, as previously mentioned, as black as the ace of spades.