Funny / The Shining

• Stanley Kubrick's films are usually not very funny, but the film critic David Thomson has argued that The Shining is the funniest film Kubrick ever made. The sheer richness of Jack's insanity, and the gleeful relish with which Jack Nicholson tackles the role, especially after Wendy's discovered that Jack's "novel" consists of nothing but pages and pages of paper covered with "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy", makes for something that manages to be both very frightening and freaking hilarious. Come on, tell us you didn't laugh at "Heeeeeeere's JOHNNY!"
• Dick Hallorann describing the problem they're having with the people that they hired to watch the hotel.
  "They turned out to be completely unreliable assholes."
• The bit where Dick tells Wendy and Danny about what is in the kitchen and pantry, mostly because of how long it goes. Also, the end, where he says they have "dried peaches, dried apricots, dried raisins, and dried prunes. You know, Mrs. Torrance, you gotta keep regular, if you're gonna be happy."
• When Jack enters the bathroom of Room 237, he's initially terrified when he sees a hand behind the shower curtain getting ready to pull it back. When he sees that the hand belongs to a beautiful naked woman, his wide-eyed, unnerved scowl instantly changes to a perverted grin. Everything that happens from then on in the scene is just Nightmare Fuel, however.
• As pointed out by Brad Jones, at one point during the famous stairwell confrontation with Wendy, Jack goes from acting like a slavering lunatic to acting exasperated and annoyed with Wendy for not giving him the bat, and the sudden, if brief, shift in his demeanor is pretty funny.
• The bar scene. After recovering from his current daze, Jack then looks directly at the camera (as though he's addressing the viewer) and says in an uncharacteristically casual tone:
  Jack: Hi Lloyd. [glances around the empty bar] A little slow tonight, isn't it?"
  • At the end, Wendy frantically runs in and tells Jack that some strange woman attacked Danny. Jack's reply is a calm, deliberate "Are you out of your fucking mind?".
• During the party scene, when Grady spills advocaat onto Jack, Jack says, "Looks as though you might have got a spot of it on yourself, there, Jeevesy old boy" and slaps some advocaat onto his back.
  • The ghost(? echo? preserved memory?) of a young woman at the bar notices all of this and rolls her eyes before returning to her drink. Not all of the ghosts in the Overlook are in on the recurring horrors, it appears.
• Their conversation in the men's room, which crosses over into horror as Grady's true and politically incorrect nature comes out, though his choice of Deadly Euphemism when describing what he did to his family (and what he's suggesting Jack do to his) is still darkly humorous.
• Just like most of the unintentionally funny moments in the film, this merits as one of them.During the scene when Jack is trying to break the bathroom door to get to Wendy and says "Little Pigs, Little Pigs, let me come in." Wendy, realizing she can't get out the window, grabs the knife and cowers in the corner with an expression saying "Oh, fuck this shit!", as if she were too tired to deal with the situation.
• In the novel, Jack and Wendy make a winking Double Entendre over the time Jack trimmed a woman's topiary for some extra cash. Danny innocently asks if the woman had "nice hedges," and has no idea why his parents are both sent into hysterics by it.
• Danny wondering why the woman who wants to get into the bellboy's pants doesn't just put on some pants of her own.
  • During their conversation in his car, Halloran absolutely loses it when Danny tells him this. First confused about the question of the woman wanting pants until Danny tell him verbatim what she was thinking. In the same conversation, Halloran tells him he sometimes uses his own shining to win horse races but still loses pretty often and that even with precognition, he has yet to hit the trifecta.
• Danny tells Hallorann that he tries to avoid reading his parents' minds, because he considers it an invasion of their privacy.
  Danny: It would be like peeking into the bedroom and watching while they’re doing the thing that makes babies. Do you know that thing?
  Hallorann: I have had acquaintance with it.
• When Dick Hallorann arrives at the Overlook after moving Heaven and Earth to come to the rescue, he's struck down by Jack Torrance with an axe just moments after entering the hotel, screaming like Tarzan. This scene may come across as upsetting when watched with the rest of the movie, but watched seldom and it comes across as dark comedy.
• Jack lets Wendy know he's had it with her:
  Jack Torrance: Wendy, let me explain something to you. Whenever you come in here and interrupt me, you're breaking my concentration. You're dis(smacks forehead)tracting me! And it will then (tears up the page he was writing) take me time to get back to where I was! You understand?
  Wendy Torrance: Yeah.
  Jack Torrance: Now, we're going to make a new rule. When you come in here and you hear me (types loudly) TYPING or whether you DON'T hear me typing, or whatever the fuck you hear me doing, when I'm IN here, it means that I am working! That means DON'T come in! Now, do you think you can handle that?
  Wendy Torrance: Yeah.
  Jack Torrance: Good. Now why don't you start right now and get the fuck out of here?
• When Wendy, already nearly on the brink of losing it, spots a man in a bear suit "blowing" a well dressed gentleman. Again, watching the scene alone will probably leave you in stitches, but with the rest of the movie it'll make you feel bewildered.
• Jack's brief little dance in the ballroom after his second encounter with Lloyd the Bartender.
• The ending of Kubrick's version, with Jack hunting down Danny in the hedge maze, is quite chilling. But taken on its own merits, the last glimpse we get of Jack - frozen stiff with his eyes rolled upward in a "Well, shit" expression - is downright comical.
• Jack calls Ullman in the novel:
  Ullman: What's the trouble?
  Jack: No trouble. The boiler's okay and I haven't even gotten around to murdering my wife yet.
• Edgar Allen Poe's The Masque Of the Red Death is referenced several times in the novel. What makes this funny is that Jack absolutely hates Poe, who he considers to be "The Great American Hack".
• If you don’t find the movie very scary. Or you only started watching the film from when Wendy finds “no work and no play” on the typewriter, then Jack Nicholson can admittedly be quite hilarious. First there’s his overly sarcastic response to Wendy saying Danny needs to go to doctor. And of course the “I’m not gonna hurt you, I’m just gonna bash your brains”. And let’s not forget the bathroom scene...
• This hysterical usage of Narrative Profanity Filter from the novel:
  "He invited the driver of the limo to perform an illegal sex act on himself. To engage in oral congress with various rodents and birds. He articulated his own proposal that all persons of Negro blood return to their native continent. He expressed his sincere belief in the position the limo-driver's soul would occupy in the afterlife. He finished by saying that he believed he had met the limo-driver's mother in a New Orleans house of prostitution."
• During the Exit chapter, just after the boiler blows, Hallorann, Wendy, and Danny are launched in the air, by the explosion. Right before they hit the ground, Hallorann's passing thoughts, essentially, amounts to, "This is what Superman must feel like." Even Hallorann is unsure why he thought that.
• Meta-example: the fake trailer that somebody made, using Manipulative Editing to reframe the movie as an '80s-'90s style romantic comedy. (Complete with spot-on usage of "Solsbury Hill.")
• In the novel, when five-year-old Danny is getting a checkup from Dr. Edmonds in Sidewinder, he tells the doctor "I used to go to nursery school when I was a little kid."