Question of the week: your favourite TV comedy moment

20th July 2011 Rob Buckley UK TV, US TV 16 Comments

Quite a simple question this week. So everyone may have a favourite comedy show, but sometimes individual moments from shows might be even funnier than the show itself. So this week’s question is:

What’s your favourite TV comedy moment?

Mine is from episode two of Community: it’s Pierce’s and Jeff’s presentation to the Spanish class, not just because it’s funny in its own right, but because of all the foreshadowing earlier in the episode. It’s not just clever, it’s funny and it has just the right ending.

For the uninitiated, the story is that Jeff and Pierce have to present a dialogue of five Spanish phrases to the class. However, they have a fight while writing them because Jeff just wants the easy option and Pierce wants to write something more complicated – which Jeff describes as over long, focusing too much on the Israeli Palestinian conflict and, most importantly, not featuring any of the five set phrases.

Although I do have to love the idea of a clips show montage from episodes that were never made.

Answers below or on your own blog, please




  • Of all time, I’d have to say it would be Les Nessman’s description of the turkeys plummeting to earth in a Thanksgiving promotion gone bad on ‘WKRP In Cincinnatti’.

  • Del Boy falling through the bar:


  • I knew someone would say that. You win a fat cigar!

  • I was going to go for Del Boy as well, but other than that, I think it’s Joanna Clore hiding in the cupboard saying It’s all gone dwarf in Green Wing. That makes me HOWL with laughter. And pretty much anything involving Statham…

  • “I knew someone would say that. You win a fat cigar!”
    He was vertical and then he became horizontal!
    And then Trigger made a face.

  • SK

    I think it might have to be Ted explaining to Dougal about the difference between cows that are small, and ones that are far away.
    Or maybe Ted shouting behind the window with the weirdly square mark on it…
    No, the cows, I think.

  • My wife and I still quote that one to each other. It is a cracker

  • Robin Parker

    UK: Just thinking of the One Foot in the Grave scene when Victor discovers a young child’s gnome obsession – his father looks exactly like one – reduces my wife and I to tears.
    US: The ‘Godzilla’ moment in Arrested Development – Rob please stick with the show for so many reasons, but particularly for this – its in s2. If you’re a fan of concurrent plots suddenly coming together at the end of an episode, it doesn’t get much better than this.

  • SK

    Actually in Green Wing terms, Sue White’s scrolling digital display is a contender.

  • Any Sue White moment is a contender. I particularly like the bonkers giving birth to a lion/Circle of Life scene. Crackers. But brilliantly so. God, had forgotten how much I LOVE Green Wing. Must rewatch.

  • TemplarJ

    On reflection, it would have to be Chandler in Friends -‘My whole life is a lesbian wedding’.

  • Mark Carroll

    “The ‘Godzilla’ moment in Arrested Development” — absolutely.

  • bob

    I think I have an odd sense of humour. I like Red Dwarf when they find a crashed space craft inhabited by one lone mechanoid, Kryten, who is the robotic butler to three long-dead women. These three women are skeletons and yet Kryten continues to put on their lipstick, do their hair and feed them. When the Red Dwarf crew arrive, he introduces them to the dead women and then pops off. He comes back and they tell him “they’re dead”. Kryten replies, “I was only gone two minutes.”
    Yes, I am strange for thinking that the best joke ever… Ah well.
    As for Father Ted, how about Speed 3’s boxes
    In Community, I find there is one joke that just keeps on giving. In an episode where the students of Greendale are using props from the drama department to stage a murder scene, the campus security says, “Fact: In 100% of all fake gun shootings, the victim is always the one with the fake gun”. Which is hilarious to me in its absolute logic. (That is a really poor description of the events in the episode of course but it’s a rather convoluted tale for a show that is only just over 20 minutes long…).

  • SK

    I mentioned this to a friend, and he said his favourite line was from Red Dwarf too: ‘I’m you from the future, and I’ve come to warn you: in three million years, you’ll be dead!’

  • Mike leading the A-Team nightclub dancing in Spaced… Still has me falling about laughing just thinking about it. In fact I still pretty much love Spaced.
    “There was a man in his hair!” – the whole episode where Bernard Black gets locked out of the shop when Bill Bailey demonstrates the new security door. Fran listening to the Shipping Forecast. Black himself avoiding the rain and (temporarily) ‘working’ in a fast food joint – looking like a disgruntled gnome in a red and yellow fast food serving outfit. Near perfect stuff.
    And way too many bits from Green Wing to count.

  • Electric Dragon

    Father Ted: My Lovely Horse. “Like a train in the night” … “We have to lose that sax solo!” (Dougal nods, as if he’s been sharing the exact same nightmare as Ted)