Rudyard Kipling/Funny

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  • Precisely where the Crowning Moment of Funny falls in 'A Code of Morals' depends on the reader.
    • "The General swore. Was ever General Officer addressed as 'dear' before?"
    • And a Crowning Moment of Awesome for General Bangs, who never took revenge on the heliographing Jones (the general decided, even though Jones was slandering his character, it'd been meant as a private conversation between man and wife: "I think we've tapped a private line.")

All honour unto Bangs, for ne'er did Jones thereafter know
By word or act official who read off that helio.
But the tale is on the Frontier, and from Michni to Mooltan
They know the worthy General as "that most immoral man."

  • In "The Ballad of Boh Da Thone":
    • A Hindu bureaucrat describes his killing the title character as "by High Education brought pressure to bear." In fact, the obese clerk accidentally fell on top of the poor bandit prince:

And twenty stone from a height discharged
Are bad for a Boh with a spleen enlarged.

    • "So you kept that jade earring!"
  • "Municipal" is a bureaucrat explaining that the death rate in his district is lower than others because he makes sure the sewer system is in good order. He became interested in sewers after an elephant freaked out and chased him into one ... and he found it was clogged, so he couldn't get as far away from the beast as he'd like. After having "been a periwinkle shrinking coyly up a sewer" for "twenty reeking minutes" with "the trunk feeling blindly for a purchase on my toes," not to mention an earlier moment when he felt "the brute's proboscis fingering my terror-stiffened hair," he'd developed something of a complex on the subject of blocked drains.
  • The story "His Wedded Wife". Especially just after the joke is revealed.