Funny / Atomic Robo

• Upon breaking into Helsingard's lair for the first time, Robo reads out his arrest warrant. He promptly wonders how on earth Helsingard even had time to sleep between all the crimes he committed, and isn't even sure what one of his crimes even is.
• Stephen Hawking traps Robo on a year-long flight to Mars, with nothing to do or read, and Robo doesn't have a sleep mode. He retaliates by arranging countless martian rocks to proclaim 'Stephen Hawking is a bastard' in letters big enough to be seen from space.
• Atomic Robo and Dr. Dinosaur squabble over grammar:
  Dr. Dinosaur: That is for me to know and for you to die!
  Robo: That's not even a sentence.
  Dr. Dinosaur: The simple mammalian subject and predicate were both represented! I challenge your claim.
• In the companion story Why Atomic Robo Hates Dr.Dinosaur, Dr. Dinosaur surrendered to Atomic Robo and gave him his crystals he was going to use for time travel... which was actually a cooler full of grenades that Dr. Dinosaur took the pins from. The silent look of pure hate on Robo's face and the look of smug superiority on Dr. Dinosaur is hilarious.
• The entirety of "Science Fair:"
  • The first appearance:
    Dr. Dinosaur: I knew you would be here, Atomic Hobo! Witness how I have deconstructed your name into an insult.
  • Another couple brilliant ones from the 2011 Free Comic Book Day story:
    Dr. Dinosaur: Shut up! I hacked your mainframe and downloaded your itinerary. Yes! All of your computerized scheduling secrets are now mine!
    Atomic Robo: You joined our newsletter!
    Dr. Dinosaur: You can't prove that!
  • After Robo questions how Dr. Dinosaur got guns it flashes back to...
    [One Week Ago...]
    Alonso: [of "Alonso's Gun Hut"] 'Fraid I'm going to have to see some I.D.
    [Beat]
    Dr. Dinosaur: [holds up a book labeled "Big Book of Dinosaurs", flips it open to a page showing his species]
    Alonso: Awright, let's ring y'up.
    [end flashback]
    Dr. Dinosaur: In a perfectly legal manner is how!
    Atomic Robo: Moreover, how'd you get to America?
    Dr. Dinosaur: Bah! I can travel in both time and relative dimensions in space!
    Emma: That's the TARDIS!
    Atomic Robo: Who're you?
    Emma: Emma. He stole my science fair project and now he's doing Doctor Who references at you!
    Dr. Dinosaur: It is only a coincidence! I do not even know who Tom Baker is!
  • Best of all. Dr Dinosaur is one of the few "Villains" that keep outsmarting Robo and his team (several times including Jenkins) in every encounter, leaving the Team either stranded or beaten. It infuriates and shames Robo to no end.
    Dr.Dinosaur: BEHOLD! AN ORDINARY MOTORIST!.
  • The exchange about the very obvious wall plug.
    Dr. Dinosaur: Plugged in to CRYSTALS!
• From one of the "Real Science Adventures" stories:
  Dr. Dinosaur: From Hell's heart I spam at thee!
• In "Why Dr. Dinosaur hates Atomic Robo", Dr. Dinosaur keeps Robo contained in an glowing, blue electromagnetic field. Turns out that the glow is just for ambience, he can turn that part of without deactivating the field.
• In the RPG, a lot of parts are written as though Tesladyne has an employee game session...and Dr. Dinosaur has just turned up out of nowhere and refuses to go away.
  Robo: For an Action Scientist, violence is a last resort.
  Dr. Dinosaur: This shoebox full of C4 says different.
• The 2015 FCBD strip has Dr Dinosaur taking Robo to court. His opening gambit is to wave papers all over the place and tell everyone they are dazzled by his array of legal documents, before stating that he's calling a Surprise Witness who is most definitely not a genetically engineered killing machine. It's a genetically engineered killing machine.
  Dr Dinosaur: The very crystals that make him so powerful are known to cause violent insanity. But that was only in one test subject. Also the only test subject. Anyway, it's been DAYS since I felt insane.
• In issue 3 of The Shadow from Beyond Time, after Atomic Robo managed to cage the beast and is waiting until morning, Robo goes to read a book of Temporal Mechanics... until four panels later where he switches to a Conan The Barbarian comic. Made funnier because he is complaining about a wizard, a character that he professed to detest.
• Carl Sagan's Oh, Crap! response to the Eldritch Abomination.
  Carl Sagan: Robo, I think I'm insane now.
• Much to the exasperation of his future selves, 1926!Robo has a bit of trouble getting to grips with the idea that the same event is happening only once, but from different perspectives:
  1926!Robo: What if we do something we didn't do before?
  1957!Robo: It's not like that. This is only happening once, we're just witnessing it from different points in our life.
  1926!Robo: Banana oil.
  2009!Robo: Yeah, that's the third time I've heard you say that, not counting the time I was you when I said it, and every time I say this: shut up and listen, the adults are talking.
• In the first volume, we get this gem:
  Vik: Robo, there's a pyramid in Egypt!
  [beat]
  Robo: Yes, Vik. That's super. Thank you.
• From the same story we get this:
  Robo: I didn't found this crazy organization to not nuke things!
  Jenkins: They didn't have nukes when you started this company.
  Robo: Yes, but shut up.
• At the beginning of the issue the above quote is from:
  Robo: You're exhausted, I can read your brainwaves with my fancy robot eyes.
  Vik: Really?
  Robo: Of course not. The mere fact that you'd believe that tells me you're in no shape for field work right now.
• During Robo's first fight against the Eldritch Abomination, he gets a call from Tesla and has to pretend that the fighting noises are just from a radio show he's listening to. Hilarity Ensues.
  Robo: Hey, out of curiosity, can lightning guns kill a transteleporting thing from outer space? It, uh, that's what Dirk is fighting this week.
  Tesla: Tell me you're not planning to write them about their scientific accuracy again.
  Robo: Oh, the hack responsible for the mole men episode had it coming.
  Tesla: Leave those poor people alone. They only wish to entertain.
• Prior to that, H. P. Lovecraft's extensive rant about Robo being clearly a pygmy from Darkest Africa wearing a mask to mimic primordial faceless gods, before demanding to see "Magic Thunder Man" Tesla. Robo immediately concludes that Lovecraft is plastered, and waits for the end of the speech with the closest his face can get to sarcastic disdain.
  Robo: Go home and sleep it off, fellas.
  • From the same story, It'd be easier to say "every word that comes out of Charles Fort's mouth", but here's a few highlights. The man is a Roaring Twenties Egon Spengler.
    Charles Fort: I am Charles Fort. My partner is Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Unusual facts find me and unusual things find him.
    Charles Fort: Don't talk to me about the impossible. Ten thousand impossible things happen every day.
    Charles Fort: My research indicates that it probably doesn't discern much detail from its position in the exoverse.
    Robo: One, no such thing. Two, why not?
    Charles Fort: Well, how do you regard ants?
    Robo: I don't. They're just... Oh, I see.
• Robo starts to fight against "Futuresaurus Rex", which instantly deploys rocket launchers, cannons, machine guns and the like only to then SPIT OUT two Mauser Pistols and take them in its tiny hands. Robo says it best.
  Robo: What?
• A problem with the Large Hadron Collider forces Tesladyne to consult the world's leading expert on it:
  Dr.Dinosaur: It is I! The Expert! How very unexpected!
• Robo ends up captured during an infiltration mission that turns out to be an ambush. He ends up rescued by a commando who is spouting various nigh-incomprehensible Scottishisms the entire time.
  Scottie: Yer lookin' a wee bit peely-wally, eh?
  Robo: What?
  Scottie: Le's shoot the craw, aye?
  Robo: Is this some kind of secret commando code they didn't tell me about?
• From the same issue as the above, Robo beating up a German soldier with another German soldier.
• In the Centralia FCBD, after Lang has been complaining about how boring the deserted town is, the action scientists hear a scream from off-panel. Lang immediately adopts a massive ":D" expression.
• Robo's first words after having his head revived after spending decades in storage due to time-travel related shenanigans? "My everything hurts".
• After Dr. Dinosaur unleashed a dino killing machine at the LHC, which he had no way to pacify when it also looked to killing him:
  "Other than everything going completely wrong, it's all going according to plan!"
• This little exchange after Robo had to mail himself across the Pacific and we get some magnificent reverse-Engrish:
  Robo: [In Japanese] Thank you on voyage. My hope for the weight was not too many.
  Mailman: Your accent is atrocious.
  Robo: Apologizing. I am foreign robot man.
• The ending of "The Savage Sword of Doctor Dinosaur" which ends with Robo trapped back in 1870, is hilarious because it inadvertently proves that Doctor Dinosaur's origin of using crystals to travel back in time may be somewhat accurate as well as Robo's belief that time travel is impossible incorrect. In short, the crazy, scientifically-impossible, talking dinosaur was right and the super smart super robot was wrong. To make it even funnier, back in the present, the other action scientists use zorth interactions as they're putting together what happened, meaning that the crazy, scientifically-impossible talking dinosaur ended up being right because of Robo's own theory.
• The end of "Bug Hunt";
  Bernard: You think they'll mind?
  Robo: What? About the tanker?^note Full of highly expensive rocket fuel we just used to fumigate our future base of operations of giant mutant bugs?
  Bernard: Yeah.
  Robo: We're neighbors. And Adventure Industrialists. That was like, y'know, borrowing a cup of sugar.
  (Distant Reaction Shot. Beat. )
  Sir Richard Branson: Sir Richard Branson thinks you should ask before you borrow something.
• The A-plot of "The Spectre of Tomorrow" centers on people from all over the world turning out to be cyborg sleeper agents. One page shows people from multiple locations turning in the middle of a crowd much to everyone's shock...and then there's Portland.
• Foley has a bad day.
  Foley: You'll be back by sunset. What could go wrong?
  ZPAK ZPAK
  Foley: It's supposed to do that.
  FOOSH
  Foley: Anyway you'll be back by sunset.
• Lang learns a lesson about Tempting Fate.
  Lang: We're on orders to take a vacation, the car's packed, nothing but a fire can stop us now!
  ALAN, his clothes on fire, slams into the top of the car with a FWAM noise
  ALAN: Hello. My name is ALAN. Ordinarily I'm not on fire.
  Lang: (quietly) I meant, like, a big fire.
• BEHOLD!!! THE ZORTH EXPERT!!!
• Most of the short stories dealing with the career of the "Four Musketeers" between starting at Tesladyne and the whole "vampire dimension" fiasco are funny and/or touching.
  • ALAN 2.0 makes friends.
    Robo: In the interests of full disclosure, there was another ALAN before this one. One that was cut off from humanity for sixty years and nearly sterilised the Earth with radioactive fire to break free.
    Margot: Are you saying we have to be nice to ALAN or he'll cook the planet?
    ALAN: Yes.
    Robo: NO!
  • "Now Ur Cooking with Doctor Dinosaur"
    Dr Dinosaur: Today we're cooking stew! Oh, I'm sorry. I meant Stu.
    Stu, the cameraman: Uh, wait-^note Judging by the label on the flask in Dr Dinosaur's suitcase in "The Vengeful Dead", Stu doesn't make it
  • Olivia introducing ALAN to Chrono Trigger.
    Olivia: Looking up a walkthrough.
    ALAN: But isn't that like cheating?
    Olivia: Well, here's how I see it. No.
  • How to deal with Jenkins's "obstacle course":
    Lang: I got the new kids working on it for extra credit.
    Foley: Good thinking. If they're gonna be Action Scientists, they need to know how to overcome a madman's lair filled with traps.
  • Just Robo being such an old man that he's apparently quite easy to distract and send off into off-topic stories about his "glory days".
• Combining funny with heartrending, as Robo and ALAN stand before Jenkins' grave the one they set up for Bernard at the beginning of the volume now reads "Nevermind"
• In the wake of his role as the Zorth Expert, Dr Dinosaur decides he gets to move in with Robo now and claims a room at Tesladyne, where he expects Robo to apologise for interfering in his supervillainy (and claiming that it counts when Robo's rant includes the lines "I'm sorry, but-"). For bonus points, he's got a towel piled up on his head like he's just washed his hair...even though, as a Jurassic Park-styled dinosaur, he doesn't have any.
• The "new kids" dealing with a Villain Team-Up that missed Robo leaving by like a day. Shortly after Ben suggests they could wait there until he gets back (earning a Dope Slap for his trouble), The Cavalry arrives: Dr Dinosaur, driving a hovertruck, while singing a mangled version of "Lookin' Out My Back Door" by Creedence Clearwater Revival, and wearing a ridiculous set of purple shades.
• Robo and ALAN struggling to explain the latter's origin story, which ends with ALAN clarifying that Robo didn't kill Alan Turing.
• Ben insists that the members of the Villain Team-Up are all "stone cold science villains" who wouldn't waste time wrecking their stuff. Cut to Helsingard wrecking Olivia's room, Undead Edison wrecking Margot's room, and...Tyrantula looking at the hellscape that is Ben's room and wondering how she could wreck it worse than Ben already has.