Funny / Titus Andronicus

• Even Titus Andronicus has a moment that always brings the house down:
  • In scene (3.1) Aaron promises Titus two of his sons returned alive if he or one of his family will give the Emperor a hand. Literally. The request is definitely not funny—it's pointless and cruel—but the argument about whose hand will go is easily played for a laugh.
  • While Lucius and Marcus go off to find an axe, Titus tells Aaron "I will deceive them both" and asks him to quickly cut his hand off. Aaron's response is the deadpan, "If that be call'd deceit, I will be honest / And never, whilst I live, deceive men so".
• The latter half of Act 3, Scene 2:
  Titus: What dost thou strike at, Marcus, with thy knife?
  Marcus: At that that I have killed, my lord— a fly.
  Titus: Out on thee, murderer! ... Poor harmless fly, that with his pretty buzzing melody came here to make us merry, and you have killed him!
• Then, when Marcus says that the fly reminded him of Aaron the Moor, Tamora's vicious lover, he stabs the already-dead insect multiple times. And then lampshades the impassioned foolishness of it all.
  • The above sequence was added some years after the play was originally written, and it has always seemed to me to be a tongue-in-cheek jibe by the author at the sensationalism of his early work.
• This priceless exchange:
  Chiron: Villain, what hast thou done?
  Aaron: That which thou canst not undo.
  Chiron: Thou hast undone our mother!
  Aaron: Villain, I have done thy mother.