Funny / 2010: The Year We Make Contact

• When Floyd boards the Leonov and tells Kirbuk they have to leave immediately, Kirbuk's reaction is understandable.... "You have been drinking your whiskey from Kentucky!"
• In the novel, Dave Bowman's attempts to track down his former girlfriend lead to a computer error that sends a check for $1.00 to everyone in Florida whose last name starts with the letter 'F'.
• Heywood and Curnow, talking about the things they miss back on Earth; specifically, a Seinfeldian Conversation about the best baseball stadium hot dog.
• Chandra telling Heywood and Curnow about deactivating their "kill switch" for HAL, should he go rogue again. The looks on their faces screamed "...you bastard".
  • Especially how nonchalant Chandra is, pointing out that it was easy to find and not at all hard to predict, while Floyd and Curnow thought they were so clever in doing so.
  • The last second grin Heywood shoots Chandra afterward borders on a Heartwarming Moment.
  • Chandra has no ill will toward Floyd, either. After giving Floyd the kill switch, he just shrugs, as if to say, "No hard feelings, I understand."
  • In an earlier scene prior to the escape burn, Floyd and Curnow are discussing how critical the timing and targeting of the burn is, and they can't disconnect HAL until the burn starts. Curnow cautions Floyd not to lose his calculator (that doubles as the trigger for the kill switch), and immediately Floyd frantically starts to search his jumpsuit...until pulling out the calculator from his pocket, implying he was just trolling Curnow, who exasperatedly replies "Shit. Please don't do that again." while Floyd just grins.
• In the novel, the fact that both crews were fluent in both Russian and English led to some amusing situations, such as the three Americans realizing that they had been idly chatting in Russian for nearly 30 minutes at one point or conversations among them all changing language in mid conversation. One result was the 'Stamp out Russlish' campaign, which was meant as a morale booster through humor than anything else.
• In the film, during the montage of Floyd preparing for the mission to Jupiter, there's a scene where his son Chris is trying to do sit-ups with him, only being 4 years old, he needs his dad's help to sit back up.
• In the same montage as above, Floyd's on a hike while his son accompanies him in a recumbent bike. The following conversation about hibernation ensues:
  Chris: "Daddy?"
  Floyd: "What?"
  Chris: "Mommy says you're gonna be asleep for a long time."
  Floyd: "That's true."
  Chris: "Are you gonna die?"
  Floyd: "WHAT?!"
  Chris: "Are you gonna die?"
  Floyd: "Why do you say that?!"
  Chris: "When Jamie's grandfather died, his mommy told he was gonna be asleep for a long time."
  Floyd: "No, no, this is different. They're gonna wake me up. But you have to sleep on the way up, and sleep on the way down; otherwise, you go cuckoo! and there wouldn't be enough food on-board the flight for everybody."
  Chris: "...Oh. I don't understand..."
• "Look! A flying saucer! Who's got a camera?!"
• HAL has just delivered a message to Floyd, with the Wham Line that the sender had identified as "I was David Bowman."
  HAL 9000: Do you want me to repeat the last response?
  Dr. Heywood Floyd: [Beat] No, no. Tell Curnow that this is no time for jokes.
• When Kirbuk and Floyd are debating Floyd's boarding of the Leonov after the U.S. Government separated the crews, Kirbuk states, "It's impossible. You heard the orders, you can't!" Except that her Russian accent makes it sound like she's insulting him.
• The film showing an issue of Time magazine with a cover drawing depicting Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick as the US President and Russian Premier, respectively.
• In the novel, Chandra is portrayed to be rather a monk of a computer scientist, with only one real vice: cheroot cigars. After the crew settles into their routine monitoring of the Monolith, Chandra gets caught smoking one in a lavatory on the Leonov, when it set off a smoke detector. Floyd described him in a ship-to-Earth transmission as "looking like a guilty schoolboy."
• Meta example: after the release of 2001, people began to notice that HAL's name just happened to be one letter removed from the name of a certain American computer company, and soon speculation was rampant that HAL was a subtle Take That! at IBM.^note The name was nothing more than a coincidence. IBM had provided a lot of technical assistance to both the novel and film, and Clarke went on record saying that he would've changed HAL's name if he'd caught onto it. In the 2010 novel, Dr. Chandra addresses this, and you can practically feel Clarke's frustration pouring through the words.
  Chandra: Utter nonsense!...I thought that by now every intelligent person knew that H-A-L is derived from Heuristic ALgorithmic.

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