On a visit to the Chelsea Flower Show in 2016, Queen Elizabeth was chatting with a gardener named Jekka McVicar. McVicar reportedly explained to the queen that in the past, lily of the valley, the delicate white flower so popular in bouquets, has been used as a poison. According to Hello, far from being horrified, the queen was quick with a joke. “I’ve been given two bunches this week,” she said. “Perhaps they want me dead.”

Over the past seven decades, the queen has surprised many with her dry sense of humor, which is “more subversive than you might expect,” according to historian Robert Lacey. The queen also enjoys a good joke and “is full of laughter,” her cousin Lady Margaret Rhodes once told the BBC.

This might seem shocking to those who think of the queen as grim-faced and stoic, her image placed under headlines that read “one is not amused.”

“Queen Elizabeth may often look solemn and dour, but she actually has a great sense of humor and is particularly known for her mimicry,” longtime royal correspondent Richard Mineards says. She can reportedly do impressions of anyone from Margaret Thatcher to Boris Yeltsin to average citizens of the Norfolk countryside.

In fact, according to Karen Dolby’s The Wicked Wit of Queen Elizabeth II, observers note the queen often frowns when she is trying to stifle laughter or emotion. “She laughs with her whole face and she cannot just assume a mere smile because she’s really a very spontaneous person,” politician Richard Crossman noted, per Dolby. “When she is deeply moved and tries to control it, she looks like an angry thundercloud. So very often when she has been deeply touched by the plaudits of the crowd she merely looks terribly bad-tempered.”

This self-control is evident when the queen has been spotted in private moments, especially with the late Prince Philip, a notoriously off-color jokester. “I could hear her guffawing. You didn’t realize she had that hearty laugh. But the minute she rounded the corner and saw us, she just straightened up,” one associate told biographer Sally Bedell Smith, author of Elizabeth the Queen.

Keeping a straight face was impressed upon Queen Elizabeth from an early age by her grandmother, the formidable Queen Mary. “A stickler for protocol, Queen Mary insisted Lilibet and Margaret Rose curtsy to her whenever they met,” Smith writes. “She rigorously suppressed her emotions—exhibiting, at most, a slight shift of her lips to indicate amusement—and impressed on Lilibet that it was inappropriate for a monarch to smile in public.”

But the royal family wasn’t always so perfectly contained. When T.S. Eliot recited his World War I opus “The Waste Land” at a reading at Windsor Castle, Queen Elizabeth and her daughters Elizabeth and Margaret were reportedly more amused than moved. “A rather lugubrious man in a suit…read a poem…I think it was called ‘The Desert,’” the Queen Mother recalled. “And first the girls got the giggles, and then I did and then even the king…Such a gloomy man, looked as though he worked in a bank, and we didn’t understand a word.”

Indeed, the Queen Mother’s impish and sly sense of fun was legendary. Once, impatient for her Gin and Dubonnet, she called down to the help. “I don’t know what you old queens are doing down there, but this old queen is getting rather thirsty,” she said, according to Thomas Blaikie’s You Look Awfully Like the Queen: Wit and Wisdom From the House of Windsor. Another time, she ribbed her daughter’s elevated status. “When debating whether or not to drink a second glass of wine at lunch, the Queen Mother helpfully advised, ‘Don’t forget, my dear, you have to reign all afternoon,’” Dolby writes.

The queen seemed to inherit her mother’s sense of humor about herself. “A curious exchange was overheard by waiting celebrities as the queen and the Queen Mother arrived at a West End theatre,” Blaikie writes. “‘Who do you think you are?’ the Queen Mother was saying. ‘The queen, Mummy, the queen.’”

Many of the queen’s reported witticisms deal with the absurdity of her position, and how people react to her. “I’ve seen some very comical moments,” her grandson Prince William once said. “I’ve seen people literally faint in front of her. It’s quite a startling moment as to what to do when you faint in front of the queen! There’s a lot of trembling knees and people can’t talk sometimes. It’s quite difficult talking to people when they can’t talk.”

The queen herself has quipped, according to Dolby, “I have to be seen to be believed.” Sometimes a glimpse of the queen can lead to extreme results. As Blaikie writes:

A county lady was once visiting a well-known boutique in London’s West End, when she realised that the person riffling through the racks next to her was the queen. She was so astonished that she wet herself. The queen had to be led away in helpless laughter and encouraged to sit down on the back stairs. When she had recovered enough to speak, she said, “It happens so often.”

She appeared particularly delighted on a rare occasion when she was not instantly recognized. “One time at Balmoral, her Scottish estate, she was walking with her private detective. A group of American tourists, failing to recognize Her Majesty, asked her if she’d ever met the queen. She replied, ‘No, but he has,’ pointing to her aide,” Mineards says.

The queen also reportedly relies on humor to make her subjects and guests more comfortable. “Given the strict official life she leads I firmly believe the queen finds humor a great stress buster, particularly given all the thousands of people she meets,” Mineards says. “She likes to make them feel at ease, not the easiest of tasks when meeting the most famous woman in the world, but I’m sure humor and the odd joke help a great deal.”

From commoners to heads of state, the queen has been known to smooth over embarrassing situations with a gentle quip or two. According to Blaikie, at a Buckingham Palace Garden Party, a woman was chatting with the queen when her cell phone embarrassingly started ringing. “You’d better answer that,” the queen told her. “It might be someone important.”

Then there was the notorious incident that occurred during Charles and Madame de Gaulle’s state visit to Buckingham Palace. “Somebody asked Madame de Gaulle what she was most looking forward to in her retirement, which was imminent,” Blaikie writes. “Not speaking English much at all, she replied, ‘A penis.’ Consternation reigned for some time but it was the queen herself who came to the rescue. ‘Ah, happiness,’ she said.”

Despite being perceived as a stickler for tradition and formality, the queen often appears to loosen up when the unexpected occurs. “Leading such a well-ordered life, when her schedule is timed to the last second, the queen reportedly loves it when matters go awry,” Mineards says.

One well-documented disaster was the silver jubilee celebration at Windsor Great Park on June 6, 1977. The queen had been invited to light a beacon atop Snow Hill, but it didn’t work out that way. Dolby writes:

Pageant master Major Sir Michael Parker had worried that the huge beacon would not light fast enough, so he had packed it with fireworks and positioned a Royal Signals major next to a detonator. Unfortunately, the soldier pressed the detonator too soon and the bonfire burst into flames. “I can’t think why you bothered to ask me [ to do it ],” the queen laughed. There were then problems with the sound system, and a deafening firework mortar went off instead of a flare. “Your Majesty,” said Sir Michael, “…everything that could possibly go wrong is going wrong.” Smiling broadly, the queen replied, “Oh good. What fun!”

Another reported incident occurred in the 1980s at the opening of Parliament. According to Blaikie, the Lord Chancellor, who was leading the solemn procession, was slow-moving, and to speed things along, the Garter King of Arms hit him in the back. “Afterwards the queen was in very high spirits,” Blaikie writes. “She singled out Garter and said, ‘I loved the great biff you gave the Lord Chancellor.’”

The queen’s apparent sense of the absurd has also helped her through some terrifying incidents. In 1982, Blaikie writes that a man somehow got into the queen’s private bedroom in Buckingham Palace.

“She was superbly poised and managed to engage the disturbed man in conversation until she had the brainwave of offering him a cigarette, which gave her an excuse to get out of the room,” Blaikie writes. “After the terrific strain of the occasion, the queen sought relief in doing imitations of the cockney chambermaid coming upon the scene. For days afterwards Her Majesty was going about the palace, saying, ‘Bloody ’ell, ma’am, what’s ’e doin’ in ’ere?’”

Showing the remarkable courage of one who lived through the Blitz, Her Majesty was even able to joke about—and therefore diffuse—incidents that could have had international reverberations. According to the Los Angeles Times, during a tour of New Zealand in 1986, the queen was pelted with an egg thrown by a protester.

Far from appearing frazzled or fearful, the next night at a state banquet she reportedly quipped, “New Zealand has long been renowned for its dairy produce, though I should say that I myself prefer my New Zealand eggs for breakfast.”

These public quips while on state visits to the USA have endeared her to the more casual American political establishment. In 1991, while visiting the White House of George H.W. Bush, only her hat was visible above the podium on the White House lawn during the welcoming ceremony. The next day, she appeared in front of Congress and deadpanned, “I do hope you can see me today from where you are.”

It was on that trip she had first met the future President George W. Bush, whom she teased about being “the black sheep in the family,” Smith writes, while charming him with “the twinkle in her eye.” He lived up to his rapscallion reputation during the queen’s visit to the White House in 2007. While introducing her, he said the queen had celebrated America’s bicentennial…in 1776. Although he claimed, per The Guardian, that the queen had given him “a look that only a mother could give a child,” the next day she joked, “I wondered whether I should start this toast by saying, ‘When I was here in 1776…’”

At 95, the queen still hasn’t lost her sense of humor. Lacey points to what she said when she posed for pictures with President Biden, Boris Johnson, and the leaders of the G7 in Cornwall in June this year: “Are you supposed to be looking as if you’re enjoying yourself?”

When one thinks of the legions of people she has met, the countless photo-calls she has posed for, the numbers of nations she’s visited, and the family scandals she has had to endure, humor has been the queen’s way to to cope—and connect. “Look at it another way,” writes Dolby. “Could she have survived all these years doing what she does without being able to see the funny side of life?”

— Cover Story: From Puff Daddy to Diddy to Love
— Behind-the-Scenes Details About Working With Meghan and Harry
— The Doris Duke Cold Case Reopens
— A Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton TV Project?
— Monica Lewinsky on the Love of Her Life and Her Greatest Regret
— Jennifer Lopez Unfollows Alex Rodriguez on Instagram
— Love Is a Crime: Inside One of Hollywood’s Wildest Scandals
— “That Woman Was Made of Steel”: Aaliyah’s Life and Legacy
— 19 Black-Owned Beauty and Wellness Brands With Something for Everyone
— From the Archive: The Code of Silence at Brett Kavanaugh’s Alma Mater
— Sign up for “The Buyline” to receive a curated list of fashion, books, and beauty buys in one weekly newsletter.