These. Humor keeps everything and everyone regular. But a balance should always exist, of course. Some of my favorite scenes from MTMTE were the downtime scenes, the bar scenes from Issue 6, the Shadowplay arc's scenes in the present, etc.

 

One of my most enduring memories of Transformers across all media is the Marvel UK Earthforce stories, short black and white tales that were mostly one-shot jokes. Often deeply silly, they really made those characters come *alive* for me (for example, I never cared about Prowl until Earthforce) because we got to see them in situations that weren't always grimdark life and death.

In particular, though, both my favourite TF "gags" ever were in Earthforce stories and both were meta jokes: one is when Prowl's thought balloon while talking to Grimlock is just the drawing of a brick, the other is when Grimlock beats up two Decepticons for laughing at him and the panel has a massive "censored" bar across it. Marvel UK did have a rather British sense of humour to it though that I guess I really liked.

 

Of course it belongs, in moderation. But I personally like humour that errs on the side of smart one liners, visual sight gags or cutting sarcasm rather than outright stupidity.

So taking the movie as an example, Starscream's "foot moment" or Hot Rod looking at the big fish that's huge to Daniel but tiny to him and saying:"yep it's a whopper alright" will make me smile.

Wheelie's pixie voice or Jar Jar antics, not so much.  

 

Yeah, simply because charaterization is important and that some people or situations are funny is part of this.
One of the types of humor I genuinely dislike though are the standardized and soulless tough/cool-phrases cinema movies always spam around that make every hero ever feel like the same person as well as memefying.

It needs to be handled with care during and after serious events as well. Manga tend to kill off tension a lot of times by forcing in humor where it doesn't belong. That doesn't mean that there can't be any funny situations or comments, even during a raid or something, but they should be short and not anticlimactic.

 

I like humor, but when it gets to the point when it turns into Tony Stark tier "self aware witty" jokes every five minutes it's too much.

 

The personal opinion I've formed is Ruckley's beliefs forbid any humor that's not "lol, oh so random."
I thought Barber was the worst writer ever. And yet somehow IDW has found the Kroger Brand of bad writers and slapped him on a periodical which represents a billion dollar franchise.

 

no transformers is only ever a serious series, you think theres something funny about robots that turn into cars and planes???

 

The Uk digest Earthforce collection was always one of my favorite humorous transformers tpbs - that had a genuine sense of humor without being ridiculous.