Warhammer 40,000/Funny

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Though a bleak and horrifying future, Warhammer 40,000 is not without humor. Usually of the gallows kind.

• The entirety of the Ciaphas Cain series.
  • Also a bit of a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming, because it shows that even a Crapsack World with everything trying to kill you can be funny.
• The Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer. If only for the illustrations.
  • Or the captions under the illustrations. "Ork weapons are extremely crude and prone to misfires or jamming." "Tyranid weapons are formed of living tissues, they often fall apart." "Eldar technology is antiquated, Eldar craftsmanship is inferior to our own." "Beware the tau - they'll sacrifice your babies to their gods!"
  • "...Try to manoeuvre around behind [the sentry], using cover as explained in Section 9. Recite the Litany of Stealth (refer to Emperor's Benedictions) to decrease your chances of being heard. Creep up behind him..."
  • "Looking around corner. Only head exposed".
  • The section on hull breaches in space vessels. A picture captioned "Emergency procedure if blasted into space" shows a drifting Guardsman trying to hold off the vacuum by covering his nose and mouth with his hand. Better than nothing?
  • Remember, the tau are frightened by fire. And water. And thunder. And unnerved by hairy people. They are also derived from bovines and chew cud and have udders. They have terrible eyesight so that their hearing overcompensates, allowing you to scare them off with loud shouting. And those guns they're carrying require sustained streams to injure a healthy, armored human. It's all there in the manual.
    • The eyesight part is true-ish.
  • "Orks are stupid, brittle-boned and feeble, eldar are cowardly, cynical and sport archaic and ineffective weaponry, tyranids are mindless, half blind and confused by sudden movements."
  • The lower half of Page 56 is a blank square with the words "KEEP THIS SPACE CLEAR. DO NOT DEFACE. ON PAIN OF DEATH"
    • This is especially amusing when you realise that there is a mark printed on every single copy, that would be the punchline. Even more amusing is that a friend of this troper has a copy that mis-printed the mark on the opposite page, so his space is not defaced.
  • "Pull the grenade's pin and recite this hymn".
  • "Genestealers are slow and sluggish."
  • In order to keep the horrors of the warp secret from normal soldiers only the major edition has a page on them and is cleverly hidden in case troopers do manage to get ahold of the book-it's printed upside down.
  • "If you allow yourself to be killed and ingested, your soul is forfeited."
  • Note that the Guard are well aware of how useless this "information" is; in the novel Fifteen Hours they are shown noting that the only thing that the primer is good for is as toilet paper!
    • And in Ciaphas Cain, Guardsmen on the way to a combat drop are mentioned to be "reading their primers for inspiration or amusement".
  • This book also contains the punchline from brick joke started in one of Dan Abbnets Gaunts Ghosts series where a soldier refers to the manual for help in his current situation to find the advice it gives is "If in doubt, move forward."
  • "When bayonetting an oncoming foe, thrust firmly into the throat or chest. To ensure the foe is dead repeat the procedure several times."
    • Considering some of the things that Guardsmen have to fight, this is actually sound advice.
  • The two sections that have been updated by taping the errata over the old text so that a bit of it is still readable:
    • Sanctioned psykers are a necessary evil that should be treated with equal respect and suspicion, where the previous advice ends "...feel no pity! Exterminate without remorse!"
    • "There is no such thing as an honest alien breed, but the tau are more dishonourable than any other." ("...potentially intelligent species.") [Paragraph about the tau using propaganda] "Remember: the tau lie and have no words for 'honour' and 'truth'." ("...could be negotiated with.")
• The Night Lords Novel Soul Hunter has First Claw marine Cyrion is a Deadpan Snarker of such magnificent quality. During a deployment to besiege a Forge City, the squad leader Talos suffers a seizure and psychic vision and they abort their drop til he recovers. When the Exalted demands that they go into battle, Cyrion sarcastically comments that the Squad Gunship is still available and the Exalted can use that if he wants a closer look.
• From the Dark Eldar 5th Edition Codex: "Asdrubael Vect tricks his would-be rival Archon Kelithresh into opening a casket that has ostensibly been presented as a tithe. Held precariously in the collapsing field of the casket is the unstable essence of a black hole. Kelithresh's entire realm is plunged into a yawning, howling, vortex."
  • Pretty much any way Vect gets rid of his enemies. The death of High Archon Kraillath, killed by a "stray blast from a dark lance". "Stray" blast from a dark lance.
• No mention of the Orks yet? The comic relief army of the universe is rife with hilarity. This tropers favourite being the description of the Ork Pulsa Rokkit from the Apocalypse Reload expansion, which describes the warhead as a device that "generates and unstable forcefield bordering on contradictory physics"..."The orks like to encourage [its] destabilistation by loading it into a missile and firing it at the enemy"