Image via Complex Original
Larry David's made a career out of finding humor in the awkward, but he's never been as awkward as the the most uncomfortable moments on Breaking Bad. And yet showrunner Vince Gilligan and his writers and directors manage to find the jokes in that dark territory. In the aftermath of a plane crash where many are killed and even more traumatized? Breaking Bad's got a joke for that. An agonizingly tense dinner between two couples who couldn't be more at odds, who are practically ready to go to war? Bring on the table-side guac.
These are but a few examples of the stunning tonal shifts AMC's hit drama pulls off with aplomb. For a show with such a brutal body count, it's damn funny. Of course, even the funniest of moments on the show feel bittersweet now. This Sunday it all ends. After 10:15 p.m. on September 29th, there will be no more new Breaking Bad. We will have finished the tale of Walter White.
As we approach the climax, it's the perfect time to look at Breaking Bad's Funniest Moments.
RELATED: The Most Badass Uses of Science on Breaking Bad
RELATED: The 10 Best Breaking Bad Episodes (So Far)
The Challenger Explosion
Episode: "Problem Dog" (Season 4, Episode 7)
For once, Walter White does something for poor Walt Jr.—it's desperate and transparent ploy to earn his son's trust, sure, but it's still thoughtful. Who wouldn't want their father to buy them a sweet red 2009 Dodge Challenger? Especially if you're then allowed to ride it around town in one of those stylized, cool-guy montages Breaking Bad does so well. Sadly for Flynn, though, mama isn't having it and makes Walt return the Challenger.
But why do that when you're Heisenberg? Getting your money back is just so, well, beneath that. Basically saying, "Screw the money," Walt instead drives the Challenger to an empty parking lot, where he rides around like Jeff Gordon after a post-Grand Prix vodka bender, burning excessive amounts of rubber and leaving doughnuts in the asphalt. Then, just for the hell of it, he sets the car on fire and watches it explode, seated Indian style. After admiring his work, he calls for a taxi, as if nothing's happened.
Why be an Indian giver when you can just stick it to your wife with an automotive bonfire? —Matt Barone
Roof Pizza
Episode: "Caballo Sin Nombre" (Season 3, Episode 2)
When your marriage turns to shit, all bets are off, including the ones you made to yourself about never again leaving pizzas in inappropriate places. (If only you had made promises about never cooking meth and lying to your partner at every turn.)
In "Caballo Sin Nombre," karma rains down on Walter White like the wreckage of those crashed airplanes. He gets pepper-sprayed by a cop, he can't see his kids, and the Cousins are trying to kill him. Of all the stressors in his life, though, he really hates the pizza he brings as a peace offering to Skyler. Returning Junior to the family home after an unexpected visit at Walt's condo, he picks up a pizza. Skyler, thinking of his deceptions and lies, bars the door, pizza be damned. So Walt throws it on the roof. Just like this:
It's not delivery, it's your marriage falling apart. —Ross Scarano
Fly Swatters
Episode: "Fly" (Season 3, Episode 10)
"Fly" is one of the best episodes of Breaking Bad ever, and will remain so after the finale. This bottle episode focuses on the show's most important relationship, the uneasy partnership of Walt and Jesse. All the talk of the episode's impressive formalism and nuanced probing of the bond between the leads tends to come at the expense of the episode's humor.
Jesse and Walt hiting each other with improvised fly swatters while trying to kill the insect plaguing the lab makes for great physical comedy. Things turn dark after Jesse drug's Walt to end his Ahab-like quest to kill the buzzing nuisance. But those moments before, when Walt smacks Jesse and then the fly landing on Walter's dome offers the chance at revenge—that's gold. —Ross Scarano
A Bomb in a Hospital
Episode: "Face Off" (Season 4, Episode 13)
When Jesse Pinkman questions your intelligence, you know you did something exceedingly stupid. Typically cunning and calculating, Walt is all blind fear after failing to kill Gus Fring with a car bomb in a hospital parking lot. Thinking only of how his homicidal former employer could have known his plan and where and when there will be another opportunity to save himself by assassinating Gus, he pulls a Heath Ledger Joker, toting the explosive device to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit in a diaper bag to question Jesse, much to his formerly drug-addled and mush-brained pupil's head-shaking, OMG-ing astonishment. Not a smart move, but comedic genius.
And can we get a “Yeah, bitch! Magnets!” for Walt having to pry the bomb from the metal elevator door? Yeah, bitch. Magnets. —Justin Monroe
Badger's Arrow
Episode: "Gray Matter" (Season 1, Episode 5)
Badger, that loveable dope and gifted guitar player, is a great sign twirler. One of the best to ever do it, like he was born into a family of circus performers who treated signs like awesomely sized batons that could also convey important information about unbelievable furniture deals and cheap foot-long sandwiches.
The first time you meet Badger, he's dressed like flying money, the offspring of Hermes and a rack, and he's spinning a red arrow that reads, "THIS WAY TO SAVINGS!" with zest. He's hustling for the realty firm Jesse applies for a job with. Only Jesse thinks he's going to be a realtor, not the big green.
You sympathize with Jesse, who can't catch a break. You laugh with Badger, too absurd for words. —Ross Scarano
Table-side Guac
Episode: "Confessions" (Season 5, Episode 11)
After countless family dinners where Walt and Skyler fed Hank and Marie three courses of bullshit, in “Confessions” the four of them share a table for the first time with Walt’s meth dealing known to all. The tension is palpable from the second the Schraders enter Garduño's Mexican restaurant. They've accepted the Whites' invitation to talk but say nothing. Clearly betrayed and disgusted by his duplicitous brother-in-law, DEA agent Hank stares him down like it's an Old West duel. Marie is too upset to even look at her sister.
It's Walt who finally breaks the silence, and right as he's about to launch into a spiel about how any pursuit of him will devastate Flynn and tear their family apart, a peppy voice interjects with even more pressing matters: "Welcome to Garduño's! My name's Trent. I'll be taking care of you today. Can I start anybody off with some beverages? Margarita? How about some table-side guacamole?"
Now that, friends, is what show biz types refer to as Gallagher-level comedic timing. How the foursome forges ahead with its conversation, and without any guac, we'll never know. —Justin Monroe
DJ Qualls
Episode: "Better Call Saul" (Season 2, Episode 8)
"Come on, don't be like that," Badger says in the soft tone of someone convincing their partner to not go to bed angry. Only he's talking to a sullen dude trying to cop (DJ Qualls, the conspiculously twiggy supporting player from Road Trip). The scrawny specimen of a junkie is bothered because Badger assumes he's the fuzz. Our portly hero points out a flower van and laughs about how obvious the whole thing is. Qualls's character is about to walk away when Badger (lonely Badger?) implores him to stay.
"Prove your not a cop," Badger says, initiating a little game to pass the time. "Punch that guy in the face," he tells the string bean of a man, who obviously doesn't take the bait. The situation becomes battle of wits, with nothing less than the American constitution at stake. Badger loses; the guy is a cop. He's arrested, but by getting his ass of the bench, his salvation appears: Saul Goodman. He's the man to call. —Ross Scarano
"Fuck you and your eyebrows!"
Episode: "Pilot" (Season 1, Episode 1)
If teaching the periodic table to disinterested high schoolers is beneath a former chemistry rock star like Walter White, being forced off the A1A Car Wash cash register and onto his knees to wipe down whips at his second job is like licking dog shit out of the waffle sole of one of his students' Nikes. Before he collapses—while moving heavy barrels of chemicals for his boss Bogdan like some simpleminded grunt—the underachieving genius begrudgingly cleans cars. But after he learns he has terminal cancer and reflects on how little he's done with his life that a peon can push him around? Naaah, it's time to take this job and shove it, in Walter White's first act of rebellion on Breaking Bad.
"Fuck you and your eyebrows!" is possibly the least intelligent thing to ever come out of Walter White's mouth, but the rage- and frustration-fueled snap is arguably the funniest, narrowly beating out the subsequent "Wipe this down!" while he grabs his bozack. Bogdan's thick black Romanian eyebrows are like plump ferrets napping on his face and you know Walt has wanted to slap them off for a long time. It's not like Bogdan lives in a time before the invention of electric razors or, you know, scissors, so they're one more affront to the great Walter White. So yeah, fuck them. —Justin Monroe
"Yeah, bitch! Magnets!"
Episode: "Live Free or Die" (Season 5, Episode 1)
You normally wouldn't expect such outside-the-box genius from a foul-mouthed delinquent like Jesse Pinkman. No, you'd expect it from the brilliant chemistry teacher turned meth kingpin Walter White, or from the worldly, seasoned veteran of the criminal world Mike Ehrmantraut. Anyone but Pinkman. Of course, you'd be underestimating him just as much as Walt and Mike are in the early stages of the season five opener, "Live Free or Die."
As the episode begins, Walt's this close to being the man—after all, he's just killed Gustavo Fring. But there's just one problem: The laptop that has all of the footage of him and Jesse cooking that blue is locked up inside Albuquerque Police Department's evidence locker, and neither Walt or Mike can think of a plan crazy enough to get them into the locker and their hands on the computer.
Jesse, however, has a bright idea: use a giant magnet to wipe the laptop's memory clean. They test out their newly rigged mondo magnet at the local junkyard, and when it works, much to their collective surprise and awe, Jesse can't contain his euphoric pride. "Yeah, bitch! Magnets!" he shouts, jumping in the air, his arms raised triumphantly.
It's Jesse's funniest use of the B-word in the history of Breaking Bad. It's a rare moment of joy in the drug-addicted, constantly manipulated walking tragedy's life. And it's the last time he's ever going to unconditionally smile. But, hey, you can still...bitch. —Matt Barone
The Gymnasium Speech
Episode: "No Más" (Season 3, Episode 1)
Public speaking is difficult. Public speaking in the wake of a massive local tragedy is especially hard. When faced with such a task, it’s best to focus on what you’d like your speech to accomplish. Perhaps you’d like to negotiate the most advantageous deal for you and your fellow traumatized citizens. Perhaps you’d like to scare the ever-living shit out of your fellow traumatized citizens (even if you don’t realize that’s what you’re trying to do!). Perhaps you’d like to provide some measure of comforting solace to your fellow traumatized citizens by pointing out that, while, yes, two airplanes have collided above your city, the catastrophe was relatively minor compared to other air disasters, and that, in the grand scheme of things, maybe you all ought to consider yourselves lucky.
Season three opens with Albuquerque coping with the aftermath of the plane crash orchestrated by the grief-stricken Donald Margolis. At an assembly held in the gymnasium of J.P. Wynne High, students are encouraged to talk out their feelings. One enterprising and forward-thinking young man suggests the school be given automatic As, like college students whose roommates commit suicide. Another student triggers a school-wide case of the “goddamn we didn’t feel that bad until you started talking”s by describing her nighttime horrors. Cue well-intentioned, ham-fisted (is there a better metaphor for his early series character than this?) chemistry teacher Walter White, who, in a statistically sound but tone-deaf-as-a-doorknob soliloquy, points out that the horror visited upon the ABQ is small potatoes compared to other in-flight tragedies: “What you’re left with, casualty-wise, is just the 50th worst air disaster.” And we’re surprised this dude turned into a cold-blooded killer? —Jack Erwin
The Talking Pillow
Episode: "Gray Matter" (Season 1, Episode 5)
When staging an intervention to convince a loved one with terminal cancer to undergo intense, likely fruitless chemotherapy treatments, it is wise to use a talking pillow to designate who should speak and when, as opposed to other “talking” objects (say, the talking conch shell from Lord of the Flies) because, as you can well imagine, at an intervention to convince a loved one with terminal cancer to undergo intense, likely fruitless chemotherapy treatments, shit can get really fucking real. There’s no place for hard objects with sharp edges in a situation like that. And needless to say, it’s all the better if the pillow has “Find Joy in the Little Things” embroidered on its front.
The “Talking Pillow” scene was the moment that signalled Breaking Bad would be a truly complex show. Its 10 excruciating, heartbreaking minutes contain more mood shifts than many dramas pull off in an entire season. It works because it’s so thoroughly real, and no small part of that realness comes the scene’s humor.
Conversations about cancer can be awkward (ya think?), and awkward is one of the handmaids of comedy (she’s the one with the massive mole on her cheek). How do you convince a man to put himself through chemo when he doesn’t want to? If it’s your brother-in-law and you’re thinking on your feet, you might suggest a gambling metaphor, or better yet, a bottom-of-the-9th baseball scenario. Now, we wouldn’t suggest actually doing that, that’s probably the last thing a man staring down cancer wants to hear, but if you do, it will be very funny to watch (equally hilarious will be your wife’s withering glances and stupefied stares as she watches you tumble into that rhetorical minefield). And the best/worst/most darkly humorous part of real life? You get to change your mind! If your wife says something you agree with (like, your brother-in-law should be allowed to shuffle off this mortal piece of space junk on his own terms if he so pleases), you will be able to chime in again. Just make sure you’re holding the talking pillow. —Jack Erwin