What We Do in the Shadows: 15 Funniest Moments

We can’t look at a multipack of crepe paper and not picture Nandor, cape over his shoulders and red shopping basket in hand, lovingly fawning over the grocery store’s selection of “creepy paper.” The scene, featured in the series opener, has wormed its way into the subconscious of every viewer and is emblematic of why WWDITS’s premise — centuries-old vampires maintaining a dysfunctional coven in Staten Island — doesn’t need high drama or overwrought plots to be laugh-out-loud funny and deliciously macabre. —Nikki McCann Ramirez

Shadows came out of the gate hot; our initial draft of this list had gags from the first four installments (including the raccoon panic from the city-council episode) and several from “Werewolf Feud” alone (including the introduction of Vanessa Bayer as Evie the emotional vampire). In the end, there could only be one winner from this episode, though, much as there is only one winner in Nandor’s duel with a werewolf champion. Presented with a table filled with potential weapons to use in combat, Nandor uses his head for once, picks up a squeaky chew toy, and tosses it off the roof of the building where they’re standing, inspiring the dumb, dog-like beast to leap after it. An incredible, unexpected punch line. —Alan Sepinwall

“It’s a big, bloody, stupid hat with a big, bloody, stupid curse on it,” Nadja says of Laszlo’s prized 100 percent witch-skin chapeau. The hat breathes. It bleeds. It has its own asshole. It probably caused the Potato Famine. And indeed, many things “bloody, stupid, terrible” — and hilarious — happen in this episode whenever the hat is around. A bookshelf crushes Justin, the new familiar. Lazlo falls through the floor. Rival vampire Simon the Devious accidentally blows up his club. But perhaps the best gag in the episode is when the cape of the hat-wearing Laszlo catches in the door of a taxi. The cab speeds off, dragging him down the road, and knocking the hat to the street. An annoyed Nadja does a piece de camera, while in the background, the hat rights itself and speedily (for a hat, at least) chases after the car. —Lisa Tozzi

We could fill this list with examples of Colin Robinson embodying all of the most exhausting aspects of modern culture, and it would still feel like a difficult challenge narrowing it down to 15. But maybe none of them is more elaborate, and more Shadows-specific, than this bit where he keeps trying and failing to get his housemates to fall for the “What’s ‘updog’?” joke, until finally he has to resort to conjuring up the spirit of his dead grandmother just so someone will ask it of him. —A.S.

The several-minute sequence that begins with Nandor checking his email and ends with Nadja receiving a cursed bounce-back email from “Mailer Daemon” is Shadows at its hilariously stupid best. First, Nandor and Colin Robinson discuss the strength of Nandor’s Hotmail password: “I have a very secure password, OK? My password is an impenetrable fortress,” Nandor announces, before remembering, finally, his actual password: impenetrablefortress. Then, Nandor checks his two emails, one of which is a Fandango promotional invitation to a 2009 Blind Side screening (“I missed it!” Nandor laments), which triggers an energy-draining Colin Robinson spiel about Sandra Bullock’s acting prowess. But it’s the other email that sets off this episode’s main event: a foreboding AOL-era chain email from “Bloody Mary” that Nandor takes all too seriously. It only gets better from there. —Jon Bernstein

It’s one of the show’s most lasting gags, featuring one of its greatest cameos: In an attempt to flee a hostile foe played by Mark Hamill, Laszlo has self-exiled into vampire witness protection, having restarted his life in small-town Pennsylvania as “regular human bartender” Jackie Daytona. Daytona looks exactly like Lazslo, but a simple toothpick in his mouth renders him unrecognizable when his arch nemesis, Jim the Vampire (Hamill) shows up. “The jeans, the toothpick, salt of the earth,” as Jim the Vampire puts it admiringly upon their first encounter. But when Jim returns to Daytona’s bar for a “human alcohol martini,” he finally catches on to Daytona’s disguise when his rival vampire doesn’t appear in a mirror. Jim’s fears are confirmed, finally, once Daytona removes his toothpick: “It was you the whole time!” —J.B.

Laszlo discovers his 1852 “ode to the local fishmonger’s missus” is stolen by Dexys Midnight Runners for their 1982 hit “Come on Eileen,” and we learn about Nadja’s and his musical career, which included hits such as “Hoop Skirt, Poop Skirt” and “For I Am a Jolly Good Fellow.” Laszlo brags about the various instruments he can play,  including the “three-way plunk box, Antoine Sax’s metallic clarinet, and the ”chimp-grinder’s wind piano.” When the couple decide to perform at a local open-mic night, their music bores the audience — until they break out their 18th-century sea chantey “Kokomo” (the Beach Boys, of course, nicked that one). The crowd warms up and enthusiastically sings along. “We killed,” Nadja says. “Literally did, we killed some of them at the end,” Laszlo responds. Such a brilliant moment. Such a magical evening. —L.S.

Among Kayvan Novak’s prodigious comic gifts are his skills as an impressionist. Earlier in this final season (in an episode we’ll get back to later in this list), he did a strong Richard Nixon voice. And in Season Three’s “The Cloak of Duplication” — where the other vamps use the titular garment to pose as Nandor and help him win the heart of fitness-club receptionist Meg — Novak got to channel the voices and mannerisms of several of his co-stars. The highlight of this is when Novak does a note-perfect Colin Robinson, when the energy vampire tries and fails to neg Meg, swaggering into the lobby and declaring, “Hey, dipshit!” —A.S. 

“Previously on this filmed documentary program — or whatever the fuck this is supposed to be,” the gang was tasked with maintaining the welfare (and containment) of the Sire, the primordial vampire from which all other vampires were created. They failed. In the scramble to recover the Sire, a charred and only partially limbed Baron Afanas is dug up from Lazlo’s vulva garden to aid in the recovery efforts. The episode is WWDITS at its best, and every gag lands beautifully, but nothing puts us in stitches like Baron Afanas’ legless torso switching out his hellhound (a golden retriever) for a Barbie-pink remote-controlled convertible. The show may be coming to an end, but we’re keeping our fingers crossed for a spinoff covering the Baron, the Sire, the hellhound, and their litter of mutants’ domestic bliss (and Airbnb victims) in the suburbs of New Jersey. —N.M.R. 

What is the most human song of human songs, and why is it “One Week” by the Barenaked Ladies? The song is a recurring joke in this episode as Nando’s search for the meaning of the afterlife (a theme throughout the show’s run) leads him to a wellness center/cult with a big Eighties vibe run by Jan (an outstanding Cree Summer), a vampire grifter who has brainwashed her devotees to think that they can become human again by following her ways. Angsty Nandor, hoping this is finally the way to happiness, leaves home to live among the defanged, step-aerobics-loving “former” vampires. The montage of Nandor’s immersion in the cult, in short shorts, feathered hair, and a lot of pelvic thrusting à la the Jamie Lee Curtis-John Travolta movie Perfect, is set to the cult’s anthem — you got it — “One Week” by the Barenaked Ladies. The gag becomes even more glorious later in the episode, when Nandor is unwillingly rescued by Guillermo and he sings the opening verse of the 1998 earworm as proof of his conversion. “I know the full fucking song. I’d say that’s pretty gosh-darn human, wouldn’t you?” —L.T.

Between his vulva garden and his massive collection of dildos and porn, Laszlo was the vampire most likely to inspire laughs related to genitals and/or sex. Yet the series’ best and most elaborate dick joke involved Nandor. During a season where he has the services of a djinn, Nandor decides to use one of his wishes to give himself the world’s biggest penis. But Guillermo warns him that djinns and genies use wishes like this to grant the wishers an ironic punishment, and that Nandor needs to be careful in how he phrases the wish so it doesn’t bite Nandor in the ass. (Nandor: “Are you saying he’s gonna give me a penis that’s gonna bite me in my own ass?”) What follows is a negotiation that gets into the tiniest and most mundane details possible about increasing Nandor’s endowment — should, for instance, it be big enough to crush a mouse? — to the point where the djinn acknowledges, ”What they are doing, it’s correct, but, um … it’s annoying.” Not to anyone watching it wasn’t. —A.S.

The thing about vampires being able to hypnotize people is that it solves so many problems that it would be too easy for the Shadows writers to deploy it constantly. Instead, they’ve shown admirable restraint on this front, and in fact have gone out of their way to demonstrate some of the limitations of this power. In this episode from early in the Baby Colin Robinson season, Laszlo and the other vamps try to get the aging Baby Colin Robinson admitted into an elite private school, but they flub the interview with the school’s headmaster. So they try hypnotizing the man into forgetting the conversation and starting over again and again and again, in various combinations, each time failing to make the necessary sales pitch. Worse, they hypnotize the headmaster so many times in a row — more than 400! — that eventually he suffers a stroke and dies. Between that and the brain damage that constant hypnosis has done to Laszlo’s human best friend Sean, it is a dangerous, dangerous tool.  —A.S. 

There are so many Laszlo lines throughout the series that might be slightly amusing on the page, but that become comic symphonies simply through the choices in intonation that Matt Berry makes. The most astonishing of these comes in this HGTV-parody episode where Laszlo admits defeat to longtime rival Simon the Devious, his voice soaring up multiple octaves as he says, “You really are the most devious bastard in New York City!” As Berry explained this fall at New York Comic-Con, “It’s never preplanned. Every scene, you’re just thinking about getting to the end. And everything is to amuse yourself as well — you know, if you have to say these things more than once. So it’s always a surprise to me when certain lines seem to pick up. I can’t predict which ones they are.” This was definitely one of them. —A.S.

Repeat gags are rarely as funny the second time around, but “The Roast” pulls it off spectacularly. When Baron Afanas arrives at Lazlo’s roast he’s been “restored to his original splendor” after (accidentally) being burned to a pork-rind crisp by Guillermo in Season One. His hair is silken, his limbs are all there, and his blistered flesh has mended enough to tolerate clothes. The episode builds flawlessly, showcasing the true might of a vampire as ancient as Afanas in his rage over learning that it was Guillermo who exposed him to the sun. When the pair finally reach a truce, things go “almost OK” before — in a masterfully executed callback no one can clock before it happens — Guillermo opens the door only to be greeted by a blinding Staten Island morning, and the Baron is once again smoldering like a breakfast sausage. —N.M.R.

OK, one more hypnotism gag to close it out, from the best-constructed episode of this wonderful final season. At its heart, Shadows is a show about a group of dumb, lazy, misanthropes who have lived together for far too long, and whose powers make it increasingly difficult for them to solve problems the way a human would. That idea is taken to farcical extreme here when the vampires — squabbling over various petty household issues, most notably what to do with Guillermo’s former room in the cupboard — realize that their hypnosis powers will work on one another if applied while the other vamp is asleep. Soon, Laszlo is a clean freak, Nandor is Richard Nixon, and everything keeps getting worse rather than better. And Colin Robinson’s David Schwimmer poster proves surprisingly crucial. —A.S.