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.”