The Wire/Funny

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


There are plenty of these on The Wire, some are here divided by seasons.

First Season

  • "Boy Wonder, why don't you suck my Bat-dick!"
  • D'Angelo after Wallace gets paid with fake money.

"This look like money to you? Money be GREEN!"

  • "Hey McNulty! Something here needs kissin'!"
  • Lester Freamon's dismay at none of the MCU members ever serving in the Military.

"A bunch of draft-dodgin' peace-freaks!"

  • Sydnor's first attempt to go undercover as a dope fiend, and Bubbles tearing him down bit by bit.

Sydnor: Detective Sydnor is modelling the latest in West Side Project wear. Torn cammies by Versace, stained sweatshirt by Ralph Lauren...
Later, after Bubbles has had his say
McNulty: He hurt your feelings?
Sydnor: A little bit.

  • McNulty gets a phone call in the middle of the night. It's a strange woman, calling to tell him that Bunk is at her house and has set off her fire alarm multiple times because, after they drunkenly slept together, he decided to burn his clothes so his wife wouldn't be able to see the "secondary evidence".
    • Hell, just the image of Bunk sitting on the toilet asleep, with a pink bathrobe exposing his chest and a blue tie, with a cigar still in his mouth is awesome.

Bunk: First she gives me the pussy, then she takes my shoes. That shit ain't right.

    • Later, we find that he's taken Bunk back to his place (still wearing the woman's robe) and asks him, incredulously, "What were you planning to wear home?". Somehow, the looks they give each other are hilarious.
  • McNulty thanking Bunk for fucking him gently.

Bunk: It was your first time, I wanted that shit to be special.
McNulty: It was, man. It fucking was.

  • The entire scene where McNulty and Bunk re-create the Deirdre murder. Essentially five straight minutes of absolutely nothing but gratuitous use of the word "fuck" and variations thereof. *And it still makes sense!*
  • Rawls sweeps the wrong desk.
  • At the start of "Old Cases", Herc is trying to move a desk through a doorway. Carver comes in and helps from the other side. Sydnor and McNulty come in and help from Herc's and Carver's side respectively, but they make no progress. Herc mutters "At this rate we're never gonna get it in." Cue a hilarious Oh Crap look from McNulty and Carver. "In?!"
    • And the whole time, Freamon is watching and clearly knows exactly what's going on, but wants to enjoy the show a bit longer.
    • Daniels' reaction is likewise hilarious: "I'm embarrassed for you all."
  • Towards the end of "The Hunt," D'Angelo and Wee-Bey pay a visit to Bey's house. Bey is really insistent in getting D'Angelo into the house, leading D'Angelo to think that he's about to get whacked. As Bey goes over to turn on the lights, D is standing in the darkness, sobbing, thinking that he's about to die... and then Bey turns on the lights, revealing several aquariums, full of fish. Cue Bey grinning and bragging about his fish, before telling D'Angelo how to feed them.
  • Carver and Herc trying the Good Cop, Bad Cop routine on Bodie, who instantly sees through it (1:00 -3:16)
  • Herc and Carver drive to juvenille detention to talk to Bodie...and drive right past him as he's hitchhiking, having immediately escaped after waking up in there.
  • Herc and Carver listening to Poot have phone sex over the wiretap.
  • Omar calls Tyrell's bluff, and they throw a bag of drugs at him so he'll leave them alone.
  • When two police officers stand next to Brandon's mutilated body on the car's hood, one of them remarks: "This is the worst case of suicide I've ever seen"

Second Season

  • "GODDAMNIT ZIGGY, YOU'RE NOT TAKING YOUR DICK OUT IN HERE AGAIN!"
  • In what could be his defining moment, McNulty sticking his former commander with 14 open homicides, and his ensuing celebration.

"Stop, you're giving me an erection!"

    • And when the secretary begins adding the Jane Does to the whiteboard, you can see the souls of the entire homicide department being crushed. And it is absolutely hilarious. Jay Landsman is looking at that whiteboard with the kind of face you'd normally reserve for a young boy having been told his puppy had died.
      • Even better, when the 14 Jane Does are pushed onto Bunk and Fremon, when Port Authority Officer Beadie asks them if they know McNulty.

Bunk: (deadpan) He's dead to us.

  • Freamon and The Bunk's interviewing of foreign sailors who allegedly don't speak English.

Freamon: English Motherfucker!

    • And then you can tell that Bunk's lost it when he starts talking to one of the foreign guys, and this "language" includes the phrase "yabba-dabba-doo."
  • A very darkly funny scene features Bodie purchasing flowers for D'Angelo's funeral. The flower dealer figures out fairly quickly that Bodie's a drug dealer, and assumes that he's searching for flowers for one of his friends. He leads him into the back, where we see a variety of flowers arrangements made to look like weapons and hood ornaments. Eventually, he gets an arrangement made to look like Tower 221, where he and the deceased worked the drug trade.
  • One episode begins with McNulty driving drunk and singing along to a Pogues song. He crashes into a concrete pillar, gets out, examines the path if the crash, gets back in, backs the way he came from and recreates the crash, hurting himself in the process. McNulty then heads to an all night diner where, still drunk, he manages to pick up the waitress and the scene cuts to them having sex in her apartment. Funnier than it sounds.
  • McNulty 'sealing the deal' during a sting operation on a brothel.
  • Landsman's description of Det. Freamon's "brash, tweedy impertinence." and Bunk's "lawyerly affectations". While he's offering fashion advice to Port Authority officer Beadie Russel, namely 'pantsuits in muted tones' to best counterpart the aformentioned appearance of Freamon and El Bunk.
  • Judge Phelan sets Bird's sentencing. "Mr. Hilton, are you the second coming of our savior?"

Bird: Um...

  • Bunk and McNulty on the subject of the Greeks:

Bunk: His name is Vondos- Vondopolis. Man these Greeks have some weird names.
McNulty: Hey, lay off the Greeks, they invented civilization.
Bunk: Yeah, ass-fucking too.

  • The detectives staring down the FBI members when they enter their office to set up shop, complete with Bunk opening his coat to show his sidearm.

Bunk: Freamon, you take the two on the left. I got the one on the right.
FBI Agent: * grins* Fucking assholes!

McNulty: You know what they call a guy who pays that much attention to his clothes, don't you?
Bunk: A grown-up.

  • Bodie and Shamrock lose the hip hop station while driving to Philly, look for a new one, and happen upon A Prairie Home Companion. The crowner comes later when we see Bodie is still listening to it.
  • Prop Joe talking about his nephews; "Ain't like I can pop a cap in their ass and not hear about it Thanksgiving time."
  • Herc and Carver's whole adventure trying to investigate on their own after being stuck with all the crappy mundane tasks, where they end up destroying an expensive listening device. "His name is Head. Dick Head."
    • And in the season's final episode, they end up Locked Out of the Loop about Nick turning himself in and spend the entire night watching his house. Their faces as they realize this are priceless.
  • Ziggy walking into the local bar wearing blind man shades and a "seeing-eye-duck" wearing a diamond collar. He then says it's his attorney, he and the rest of the bar proceed to give the damn thing scotch, which only succeeds in killing it.

Ziggy: Now, I may not be able to see through all the bullshit, but my feathery friend here can.

  • "Love child, wasn't meant to be"
  • "ZIGGY GET YOUR DICK OUT OF MY COMPUTER"
  • The Running Gag about Valchek's valuable district surveillance van, which the Dockworker Union steals right out from under his nose and ship from port to port, sending him photographs from each destination. And even better, even after Sobotka dies, Valchek gets another photograph of the van in a new locale, and even seems kind of impressed that Sobotka is still fucking with him from beyond the grave.
  • The wordless montage of Cedric and Kima eating dinner while their respective spouses react angrily to them both taking up the new case.
  • Blind Butchie: "My dog, my dog," and "Shit was unseemly, man!"

Third Season

  • Bodie and Poot reminisce as the Franklin Terrace towers come down. Well. Poot tries to reminisce. Bodie just mocks him.
  • Stringer attempts to run the drug gang according to Robert's Rules Of Order.

Stringer: Motherfucker, what is that?
Shamrock: Robert Rules say we gotta have minutes for a meeting, right? These the minutes.
Stringer: Nigger, is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?

Herc: He's a complicated man, and no one understands him but his woman.
Carver: Seek therapy.

  • "Cocaine, nigga!"
  • Bunny Colvin goes for a drive through his district, in-uniform, in an unmarked but obvious police car. Some dumbass kid still tries to sell him drugs. He's so stunned initially that he just responds "What?". The kid asks again, so Colvin turns up his police radio. The kid asks again, so he puts on his uniform hat, at which point the kid finally figures it out and his friends start howling with laughter.
  • Freamon and McNulty having a vicious verbal fight about wasting time on other cases instead of focusing on Stringer - Freamon doesn't mind, Jimmy is furious. McNulty tells Lester how Stringer is probably laughing his ass off, since the police doesn't have a clue what happened to all the real estate he owned. They both storm out furiously after a What the Hell, Hero? speech from Freamon. Cue Lester coming back and telling Prez quietly to check that real estate.
  • McNulty picks up Theresa D'Agostino during a school presentation with his ex-wife. Halfway through, it turns out it's McNulty that got picked up. He only realizes it after they screw each other, where she tells him to leave. The look on his face is priceless.
  • McNulty acts like a racist, believing it will make a small town cop more amenable to helping him. Except that cop has a black girlfriend. Luckily McNulty also brought Greggs along and lets her take over the negotiation, after which the other cop comments that McNulty is "Kind of an asshole."
  • Bubbles and Sherrod pushing a cart full of scrap metal down the street when they accidentally scratch a dealer's car. After being threatened they promise to come back with money to repair it. Cut to Bubbles pushing the cart down the street with no pants on, since the dealer took them, and Bubbles mentions that they need to go to K-mart on the way back. And then the guy at the scrap metal place asks Bubbles if he's aware that he's not wearing pants.

Fourth Season

  • Snoop buys a nail gun.
  • Omar Little being woken up one morning to the sounds of garbage men outside his window, realizing his boyfriend has eaten the last of his Honey Nut Cheerios, and going down the street in his blue satin pajamas and robe, unarmed, to buy more. He stops to light a cigarette on the way home and a group of drug dealers in a room upstairs drop him a bag of heroin to make him go away. He gets home, drops the heroin and Cheerios on the table, and his boyfriend... asks him why he bought regular Cheerios instead of Honey Nut.
  • Proposition Joe imitates a white man. "Yes, hello, this is Sidney Handjerker with Handjerker, Cohen and Bromberg..."
  • Omar and his crew rip off the entire Baltimore drug supply. And then Omar sells his share of the drugs back to Proposition Joe for 20 cents on the dollar. Not to mention Cheese's assessment of what happened.

Cheese: He had this one ho pullin' guns out her pussy! Shit was unseemly, man.

    • Even funnier when Joe offers to sell Marlo back his share, and without comment claims Omar was charging 30 cents on the dollar.
  • "The Bunk is strictly a suit-and-tie motherfucker."
  • Randy "pissing" himself.

Fifth Season

  • A call back to season 2 when Dozerman asked Mcnulty about rumor he heard of him in a threesome during a whorehouse sting.
  • "Liar!...Black liar!"
  • Bunk and Landsman using a printer as a lie detector to break a perp in the opening minutes of the season.
    • Made even better by the fact that, like most things on the Wire, this actually happened.
    • It also delivered probably the most important line of that season.

Bunk: The bigger the lie, the more they believe.

  • McNulty takes the bus to a murder crime scene.

"Well now I've seen everything."

  • After McNulty fabricates all kinds of evidence to point to there being a serial killer in Baltimore to raise the police budget, he and Kima go to the FBI to hear the profile they've put together on the killer. Said profile is a perfect description of McNulty himself, leaving him with an awesome expression somewhere between awe at their skills, hoping that Kima doesn't figure it out, and embarrassment at hearing his entire personality laid bare.
  • In the final episode, Cheese moronically implicates himself in the murder of his uncle, Prop Joe, while delivering a rant about how it is now "his time" as head of the Co-Op, which is then quickly cut off by Slim Charles putting a bullet through his head. Murder has never been so funny.
    • "This sentimental motherfucker just cost us money".
  • Mcnulty's entire fake wake/retirement with Landsman's fake eulogy.

Landsman: Jimmy, I say this seriously. If I was laying there dead on some Baltimore street corner, I'd want you standing over me, catching the case. Because, brother, when you were good, you were the best we had.
Bunk: Shit, if you were lying there dead on some corner, it probably was Jimmy that done ya.

Unsorted by Season, or in Related Media

  • Special mention must be given to David Simon himself, for not only producing a brilliant prank on actors Dominic West (McNulty) and Wendell Pierce (Bunk) by making them believe that yet another scene had been written up for them deep in the final season, but for making this fake scene so utterly hilarious. To read the whole thing, grab Truth Be Told, a companion book to The Wire. For now, I give you but one line:

Bunk: We a drunkass pair of meta motherfuckers right now.

  • And then, of course. Clay Davis.
    • SHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEIIIIIIIIIIIITTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT
  • The short showing Omar as a kid, specifically the end.
    • "Anthony man, your brother not cut out for this here shit."
  • The whole Running Gag of McNulty not realizing that "What the fuck did I do?" has become his Catch Phrase.
  • This bit from the bloopers

Daniels: Anything else you care to tell me?
Freamon: Yes, I love you. All the years I was working in the pawn shop, I was hoping it'd be the porn shop.
Daniels: I'm only into white woman.

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