Sherlock Holmes (novel)/Funny

• Main
• Characters
• Laconic
• Trivia
• YMMV
• Fridge
• Headscratchers
• Ho Yay
• Source
  • A Case of Identity
  • A Scandal in Bohemia
  • A Study in Scarlet
  • His Last Bow
  • Silver Blaze
  • The 'Gloria Scott'
  • The Adventure of Black Peter
  • The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton
  • The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge
  • The Adventure of the ''Gloria Scott''
  • The Adventure of the Abbey Grange
  • The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet
  • The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle
  • The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans
  • The Adventure of the Cardboard Box
  • The Adventure of the Copper Beeches
  • The Adventure of the Crooked Man
  • The Adventure of the Dancing Men
  • The Adventure of the Devil's Foot
  • The Adventure of the Dying Detective
  • The Adventure of the Empty House
  • The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb
  • The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez
  • The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter
  • The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter
  • The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual
  • The Adventure of the Naval Treaty
  • The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor
  • The Adventure of the Norwood Builder
  • The Adventure of the Priory School
  • The Adventure of the Red Circle
  • The Adventure of the Red-Headed League
  • The Adventure of the Reigate Squire
  • The Adventure of the Resident Patient
  • The Adventure of the Second Stain
  • The Adventure of the Six Napoleons
  • The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist
  • The Adventure of the Speckled Band
  • The Adventure of the Stockbroker's Clerk
  • The Adventure of the Three Students
  • The Adventure of the Yellow Face
  • The Boscombe Valley Mystery
  • The Crooked Man
  • The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax
  • The Final Problem
  • The Five Orange Pips
  • The Greek Interpreter
  • The Hound of the Baskervilles
  • The Man with the Twisted Lip
  • The Musgrave Ritual
  • The Naval Treaty
  • The Red-headed League
  • The Reigate Puzzle
  • The Resident Patient
  • The Sign of the Four
    • Chapter 1
    • Chapter 10
    • Chapter 11
    • Chapter 12
    • Chapter 2
    • Chapter 3
    • Chapter 4
    • Chapter 5
    • Chapter 6
    • Chapter 7
    • Chapter 8
    • Chapter 9
  • The Stock-broker's Clerk
  • The Valley of Fear
  • The Yellow Face
• WMG
• Crowners
  • Awesome
  • Funny
  • Heartwarming
  • Nightmare Fuel
• Wikipedia
• All Subpages
• Create New

• A Study In Scarlet: Watson meets Sherlock Holmes for the first time, in a college medical lab as the latter is squeeing over, apparently, inventing luminol.
  • The list Watson makes entitled "Sherlock Holmes: His Limits".
  • Watson finds out that Holmes doesn't know that the earth travels around the sun. Holmes proceeds to act patronizing and give him the memorable "brain attic" speech. The response is classic Watson:

"But the Solar System!” I protested.

• "The Case of Charles Augustus Milverton:" Lestrade comes and gives Holmes a description of one of the men seen fleeing Milverton's residence the night he was murdered. Holmes laughs at the vagueness of the description and declines to take the case. "Why, that might even be a description of Watson..."
• The Case of the Red-Headed League features an in-story example; a combination of Jabez Wilson's twist of luck where the League suddenly closes on him, his showing of the sign informing of said closure to Holmes and Watson, and his absolute dead-serious face when retelling the tale proves too much for both to bear, and cause Holmes and Watson proceed to break out in rapturous laughter.
• This exchange from "A Scandal in Bohemia" is funny enough, but I found it absolutely hilarious upon reading the story after seeing the Guy Ritchie film because it sounds exactly like the kind of thing the Robert Downey, Jr. version of Holmes would say:

Holmes: If this young person [Irene Adler] should produce her letters for blackmailing or other purposes, how is she to prove their authenticity? Grand Duke of Cassel-Felstein: There is the writing. Holmes: Pooh, pooh! Forgery. Grand Duke: My private notepaper. Holmes: Stolen. Grand Duke: My own seal. Holmes: Imitated. Grand Duke: My photograph. Holmes: Bought. Grand Duke: We were both in the photograph. Holmes: Oh, dear! That is very bad!

• • Even funnier if taken in modern context, since modern readers will expect Holmes to reply to the last one with this:

Grand Duke: We were both in the photograph. Holmes: Photoshop.

• • • They better put this in the second season of the BBC miniseries.
    • Update: they didn't.
      • But this exchange was used in an abridged version of the story! A Scandal in Bohemia Abridged.
  • Holmes himself thinks it magnificently funny that while trailing Irene Adler he got conscripted into being an official witness for her marriage. He spends several minutes laughing before he can tell Watson about it.

"Well, really!" he cried, and then he choked and laughed again until he was obliged to lie back, limp and helpless, in the chair.

• • Holmes gets a lovely little bit of snark in against the King of Bohemia later in the story, after the King declares (of Irene Adler), "Is it not a pity she is not on my level?" "Indeed, from what I have seen she is on a very different level from your Majesty."
• Holmes' Last-Second Word Swap in The Adventure of the Norwood Builder. "Arrest you! This really is most grati—most interesting. On what charge to you expect to be arrested?" Even funnier when you try to picture the look on his face (it isn't described so you've got free reign here)...
• Holmes' snark is legendary for a reason. Case in point, in The Boscombe Valley Mystery:

"We have got to the deductions and the inferences," said Lestrade, winking at me. "I find it hard enough to tackle facts, Holmes, without flying away after theories and fancies." "You are right," said Holmes demurely; "you do find it very hard to tackle the facts."

• Shoscombe Old Place gives us this memorable line: "a boxer, an athlete, a plunger on the turf, a lover of fair ladies, and, by all account, so far down Queer Street that he may never find his way back again." Ah, were we ever *that* innocent?
  • It should be noted that being "down Queer Street" was a euphemism for being deeply in debt, and was unrelated to either the original meaning (strange, peculiar, etc.) or the modern meaning (homosexual) of the word Queer.
  • And "a plunger on the turf" was a euphemism for recklessly gambling on horse races, which explained why he was deeply in debt.
• At the end of "The Copper Beeches" Watson writes a throwaway line in which he expresses his disappointment at Holmes losing interest in Miss Violet Hunter "...once she had ceased to be the centre of one of his problems". Ladies, gentlemen, I give you Watson the Matchmaker!
• This troper couldn't help but bust out laughing at reading Watson saying, "...and I shot its brains out" when talking about shooting a dog (don't worry, the dog was attacking a human).
• At one point Holmes and Watson are heading to a concert -- or "off to violin-land," as Holmes puts it.
• The opening paragraphs of "The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual," where Watson describes how Holmes lives, saying that he himself is no neat freak, but

when I find a man who keeps his cigars in the coal-scuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack-knife into the very centre of his wooden mantelpiece, then I begin to give myself virtuous airs. I have always held, too, that pistol practice should distinctly be an open-air pastime; and when Holmes in one of his queer humours would sit in an arm-chair, with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V.R. done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.

• The bit in The Hound of the Baskervilles where Watson finds Holmes and immediately notices that he's managed to "contrive" a Perma-Shave while hiding out on a moor.
  • How about the realization that Holmes was essentially stalking Watson across the moor? This troper had to close her book, she was laughing so hard.
• In The Valley of Fear, after finding only one dumbbell in the victim’s home, Holmes is "alarmed."

“One dumb-bell, Watson! Consider an athlete with one dumb-bell! Picture to yourself the unilateral development, the imminent danger of a spinal curvature. Shocking, Watson, shocking!”

• The end of "The Dying Detective." After the villain confessed, thinking Holmes was dying anyway, he is arrested, but claims that it's his word again Holmes's. Unbeknownst to the villain, Watson has been hiding in the room the entire time.

Sherlock: Good heavens! I had totally forgotten him. My dear Watson, I owe you a thousand apologies. To think that I should have overlooked you!

• A lovely Spoonerism in The Sign of Four: Mary Morstan claims that during a tense wait, Watson told her a thrilling tale of how a musket peered into his tent in the dead of night and he fired a double-barreled tiger cub at it.