Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality/Funny
- Harry's meeting with Draco in Madam Malkins.
Harry could predict where this conversation was about to go, and he decided in a split second of frustration that enough was enough. |
- Even better...
[McGonagall]: I am going there, (points to a bar) and buying a drink, which I desperately need. |
- The result of Harry's experiment with the Time Turner in Chapter 17. DO NOT MESS WITH TIME
- Draco's reaction when he learns Muggles landed on the moon.
- Fred and George singing an improvised "Who you gonna call? Harry Potter!" song to the Ghostbusters melody during Harry's sorting in chapter 9.
- When Harry meets Crabbe and Goyle for the first time.
Harry: Draco? What are you doing in--oh my god you have minions! |
- Chapter 21 ends with a letter home describing Harry's (eventful) first week:
Dear Mum and Dad: |
- "You have lost the game", for the wrong reason.
- "Yes, I'm very angry!" said Harry. "Grrr!" Harry's Internal Critic promptly awarded him the All-Time Award for the Worst Acting in the History of Ever.
- Harry is suffering a Heroic BSOD, retreating into his Dark Side persona after Dementor exposure sucks away everything else. In between loudly threatening the murder of everything that slightly annoys him, the nurse shovels chocolate in his mouth;
YOU SHOULD DIMMMPHL. |
- And of course, what the thing that cures Harry ends up being.
Dumbledore: Well done, Miss Granger. Honestly, I would never have expected that to work. |
- Professor McGonagall: "You're having another 'you turned into a cat' moment, aren't you, Mr. Potter. You probably don't want to hear this, but it's quite endearingly cute."
- The exchange at the end of Chapter 47:
Draco: You're a Parselmouth, you can speak Parseltongue, it's the language of all snakes everywhere. You can understand any snake when it talks, and they can understand when you talk to them... Harry, you can't possibly believe you were Sorted into Ravenclaw! You're the Heir of Slytherin! |
Harry: "That's why when Ron came over to me as I was sitting down at the Ravenclaw table, and told me to stay away from you, I held my hand out over the floor and said, 'You see how high I'm holding my hand? Your intelligence has to be at least this high to talk to me.' Then he accused me of, quote, sucking you into the darkness, unquote, so I pursed my lips and went schluuuuurp, and after that his mouth was still making those talking noises so I put up a Quieting Charm. I don't think he'll be trying his lectures on me again." |
- "Oh, I'm a Sorting Hat and I'm okay, I sleep all year, I work one day..."
- What Harry does with the last three cans of Comed-Tea in chap. 46
- The scene with Dumbledore's phoenix:
Harry:"Professor McGonagall the Headmaster set fire to a chicken!"
Professor McGonagall: "He wha-" |
- Harry's Pet Rock died, nuff said...
- "Tell me," said General Granger, "is there anyone in my army who isn't a spy?"
- Harry's speech to his soldiers in chapter 30:
Harry: "Everything is at stake here. Literally everything. If we lose, the whole universe just blinks out like a light bulb. And now I realize that most of you don't know what a light bulb is. Well, take it from me, it's bad." |
- Hermione's absolute glee at beating Harry hollow (academically) in ch. 21 makes this troper grin along with her:
Before she'd met Harry Potter she hadn't had anyone she'd wanted to crush. If someone wasn't doing as well as her in class, it was her job to help them, not rub it in. That was what it meant to be Good. |
- Absolutely anything in any of the battles.
Don't be frightened, don't be sad, |
- Chapter sixty-three consists of various character's reactions to the escape of Bellatrix Lestrange. And then there's this.
"You doing anything interesting today?" said Tracey. |
- The omake chapter 11, with all the various possibilities the Sorting Hat could have yelled out about which house Harry belonged to...
- Achoo!
"Well!" Dumbledore cried jovially. "It seems Harry Potter has been sorted into the new House of Achoo! McGonagall, you can serve as the Head of House Achoo. You'd better hurry up on making arrangements for Achoo's curriculum and classes, tomorrow is the first day!" |
- Pancakes!
- Representatives!
- ELF!
- Atreides!
- KHAAAAANNNN!
- This troper was reduced to a puddle of laughing tears after imagining the Sorting Hat screaming after being placed on Harry's mind, bouncing away, and bursting into flame.
- And of course what it actually said: SLYTHERIN! Just kidding, RAVENCLAW!
- Another "Harry gets Draco pregnant" joke.
Hat: "Oh, dear. This has never happened before..." |
- "Headmaster!" called the Sorting Hat.
At the Head Table, Dumbledore rose, his face puzzled. "Yes?" he addressed the Hat. "What is it?" |
- "When you try to find the Great Hall, you will get lost." Penelope stated this in the tones of a flat, unarguable fact. "As soon as you do, ask a portrait how to get to the first floor. Ask another portrait the instant you suspect you might be lost again. Especially if it seems like you're going up higher and higher. If you are higher than the whole castle ought to be, stop and wait for search parties. Otherwise we shall see you again three months later and you will be two years older and dressed in a loincloth and covered in snow and that's if you stay inside the castle."
- Draco knows the right way to deal with incompetence:
"And everyone with secret orders, make sure you carry them out to the letter," said Draco. |
- Harry is not modest.
Hermione: I'm getting tired of hearing people talk about the Boy-Who-Lived like you're - like you're some kind of god or something. |
- Dumbledore backpedals:
Quirrel: Mr. Potter will ask his account manager at Gringotts to recommend a neutral instructor. With respect, Headmaster Dumbledore, after the events of this morning I must protest you or your friends having access to Mr. Potter's mind. I must also insist that the instructor have taken an Unbreakable Vow to reveal nothing, and that he agree to be Obliviated of each session immediately afterward. |
- The exact moment when poor Professor McGonagall realises she's been played in chapter sixty-nine.
- Daphne Greengrass, Sparkly Unicorn Princess of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Sparklypoo.
- Establishing the traitor-armies arc, you get four viewpoint sections from the perspectives of Professor McGonagall, Hermione, Draco and Harry. The first three begin, quote, "The terrifying part was how fast the whole thing had spiraled out of control." Harry's begins, "The awesome thing was how fast he'd been able to escalate the chaos once he started doing it deliberately."
- Dumbledore being equal-opportunity insa- inscrutable to Susan in chapter 70.
- The end of Chapter 18.
At the Gryffindor table, where a cake waited with fifty-one unlit candles, Fred whispered, "I think we may be out of our league here, George." And from that day onward, no matter what Hermione tried to tell anyone, it would be an accepted legend of Hogwarts that Harry Potter could make absolutely anything happen by snapping his fingers." |
- After Lesath Lestrange profusely thanking him for getting his mother out of Azkaban
And some unbelievably tactless part of him thought, Yay, we completed a quest and got a minion. |
- While reflecting on his jaunt to Azkaban:
My working hypothesis is that you're stupid, said Hufflepuff. |
- After Hermione talking to Dumbledore deciding to become a hero:
"Oh, I know," said Hermione. She ate another bite of toast. "That reminds me, Dumbledore refused to be my mysterious old wizard, is there someplace I can write to get another one?" |
- Severus Snape has plans in motion such that if Voldemort comes back, he might be under the permanent effects of LSD.
- Even though that probably isn't even the right grave.
- Draco's reaction to Harry still wanting to be friends with him in Chapter 24, after Draco put a torture hex on him.
And Draco realized with a note of horror and despair, that although it was a terrifying fate indeed to be Harry's friend, Harry now had so many different avenues for threatening Draco that being his enemy would be even worse. |
- Harry's conversation with Quirrel and Dumbledore after killing a dementor.
"But," said the Headmaster. "But, but what am I to tell the Ministry? You can't just lose a Dementor!" |
- McGonagall's reaction to Harry's long sorting.
McGonagall clenched the podium in a white-knuckled grip, knowing that Harry Potter's contagious chaos had somehow infected the Sorting Hat itself and the Hat was about to, to demand that a whole new House of Doom be created just to accomodate Harry Potter or something, and Dumbledore would make her do it... |
- Hermione having second thoughts about SPHEW in Chapter 70.
But she had to carry on, because that was what heroes did, they carried on, and also because it had seemed infinitely too awful to tell everyone she was calling it off. Hermione wondered how much heroism had gone on for reasons like that. Most books didn't say "And then they refused to give up, no matter how sensible it would have been, because that would've been too embarrassing"; but a great deal of history made a lot more sense that way. |
- The first offered explanation for Susan's dramatic power increase in chapter 73, proving that not all houses can be as cool as Slytherin:
"Yeah," said Parvati, voice only slightly shaky as she stood up and started to brush off her red-trimmed robes, "it turns out that Susan Bones is the Heir of Hufflepuff and she's opened up the long-lost entrance to Helga Hufflepuff's Chamber of Hard Work and Practice." |
- Harry and Quirell discussing the aftereffects of a prank ritual, involving some Warhammer 40,000 Chaos gods, a Buffy the Vampire Slayer demon and an Old One:
"I... see," said Harry, as he trod through the halls of Hogwarts after Professor Quirrell, following him toward the Defense Professor's office. "So my chant, the way I wrote it, implies that the Outer God, Yog-Sothoth -" |
- The others aftereffects of this particular prank:
Pansy turned, and stretched out a begging hand toward Draco Malfoy's desk. "Draco!" she said pleadingly. "Mr. Malfoy! Please, make Tracey give me back my soul!" |
- In addition to the line itself, the fact that this line makes sense in context should get one:
Harry: So, after weighing the expected outcomes as best I could with my boundedly rational intellect, I thought it would be wisest to strip the bullies naked and glue them to the ceiling. |
- Hermione's imagination when she contemplates the fate of those who are about to become heroes...
A Quibbler headline proclaiming 'HERMIONE GRANGER GETS DRACO MALFOY PREGNANT!' |
- In chapter seventy-five, the Ravenclaw boys telling Harry that nice boys get girls, and Dark wizards get girls, but nice boys suspected of secretly being Dark wizards get more girls than you can imagine...all while the Ravenclaw girls are telling Hermione how romantic Harry's actions were (she's not buying it).
Harry: I. Am. Not. Her. Boyfriend! |
- Harry and Hermione have The Maiden Name Debate...and then immediately stop talking when they realize they're having the maiden name debate.
- Harry scaring a Dementor away by saying, "BOO!". Doubles as a Crowning Moment of Awesome.
Harry: I make you this one offer. I never learn that you've been interfering with me or any of mine. And you never find out why the unkillable soul-eating monster is scared of me. Now sit down and shut up. |
- "Enough, Mr. Potter," said Professor McGonagall. "We shall be late for afternoon Transfiguration as it is. And do come back here, you're still terrifying that poor Dementor."
- A very serious talk in Chapter 84 in which Harry comforts Hermione about everyone thinking she tried to murder Draco Malfoy, ends with this:
Harry:Oh, and Ron Weasley came up to me, looking very serious, and told me that if I saw you first, I should tell you that he's sorry for having thought badly of you, and he'll never speak ill of you again. |