Moana quotes, funny edition: Maui's one-liners and a chicken who never says a word
Maui gets most of the jokes, Moana gets the comebacks, and the chicken gets laughs without a line of dialogue. Here's the funniest writing in the 2016 film, plus how the bird's performance was actually recorded.
Disney built the 2016 film around two comic engines: a demigod who will not stop talking and a rooster who cannot start. Only one of them needed a script.
The gag rate in Moana is higher than the film's reputation suggests, mostly because the comedy is split three ways — Dwayne Johnson's Maui does volume, Auli'i Cravalho's Moana does the puncturing, and Alan Tudyk does an entire supporting performance in clucks. The Tamatoa sequence handles the rest.
Maui's best lines
Maui's humor runs on ego with nothing underneath it, which is why the writing keeps letting him trip over his own vocabulary:
- "If you start singing, I'm gonna throw up." — Delivered to Moana, in a musical. The film knows exactly what it's doing.
- "I will smite you. You wanna get smote? Smotten?" — A threat that collapses mid-sentence.
- "Boat snack!" — His opening assessment of Heihei, grabbed by the throat.
- "Nunya... Nunya business." — His explanation of a tattoo, and the oldest joke in the film.
- "Did not see that coming." — Said after the ocean repeatedly returns Moana to his boat, having learned nothing each time.
- "We're dead soon. Hey, it's okay, it's okay, we're dead soon." — Reassurance, Maui-style.
The running bit about navigating by water temperature — "if the current's warm, you're going the right way" — exists purely to set up Moana's reaction, which is the correct one.
What Moana gets back
Her comedy is almost entirely reactive, and the best exchange in the film is about three seconds long.
Moana: "I'm not a princess. I am the daughter of the chief."
Maui: "If you wear a dress, and you have an animal sidekick... you're a princess."
She also gets the film's driest line, defending Heihei from a villager who suggests eating him: "Sometimes our strengths lie beneath the surface. Far beneath, in some cases." Gramma Tala, meanwhile, deals with consequences by assigning them elsewhere — "whatever just happened, blame it on the pig" — and shuts down her son with "I'm his mom, I don't need to tell him anything."
The chicken who never says anything
Heihei has no dialogue. Alan Tudyk, who voices him, spent the session producing chicken noises, and his assessment of the character in a December 2016 AV Club interview was blunt: the stupidest chicken on planet Earth.
"It's amazing how much actual chicken sounds lend themselves to stupidity," Tudyk told the AV Club in 2016. "The baseline rooster sound sounds like there's an emotional issue happening."
His recording method was practical — he ran all the normal material first and saved the screaming for the end of the day, so he could destroy his voice without ruining the rest of the take list. Tudyk did not return for the 2026 live-action remake.
Tamatoa, briefly
Jemaine Clement's giant crab gets the darkest jokes in a Disney film that year. He interrupts his own menace to complain about eye contact — "just pick an eye, babe, I can't concentrate on what I'm saying" — and then volunteers, unprompted, that he ate his grandmother, and that it took a week because she was humongous.
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He also closes the film. Stranded on his back in the post-credits scene, he observes that someone would have helped him up by now if his name were Sebastian and he had a cool Jamaican accent.
For the record: the live-action version arrived on 10 July 2026 with Catherine Laga'aia, Dwayne Johnson back as Maui and Clement back as Tamatoa. It took $308 million worldwide against 32% on Rotten Tomatoes.
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