Here lies the laugh that never lived.

Larry's sense of humor has been put out of our misery.

Here lies the laugh that never lived.

Every good poem needs a palette of vivid language;

Unfortunately, Larry’s humor was particularly monochrome,

Words that evoke lifelessness, pallid, inert, moribund, sterile, ashen, and wilted.

Harvested terms that specifically describe jokes: punchline, gag, quip, one‑liner, zinger.

By juxtaposing, I could craft images like “a moribund one‑liner that wilted before the first laugh could sprout.”

The key was to keep the sarcasm razor‑sharp but not overcooked; after all, a burnt roast, or a burnt joke, is just another form of dead humor.

Larry’s attempts at levity were less “light‑hearted” and more “light‑less.”

He’d launch a joke with the enthusiasm of a sloth on a treadmill,

The punchline landed with the subtlety of a brick through a stained‑glass window. Once vibrant, now lives only in the archives of Reddit’s darkest corners.

Each time Larry tried to be witty, it recorded the precise moment of death.

The pause lingered longer than an awkward silence at a tax‑preparation seminar.
The eyes that glazed over like a sitcom audience who just discovered the script was missing; the inevitable “uh‑huh” that was less acknowledgment and more a desperate plea for oxygen.

Dead jokes are the compost of comedy. They enrich the soil of future sarcasm, but only after we trudge through their putrid smell.

I sprinkle paprika on the punchline’s ash, whisper incantations from a sitcom’s dusty script, and wave a rubber chicken as if it were a wand—but the silence returns, louder than a midnight garbage truck.

So here we lay Larry’s jokes in a metaphorical grave, marked with a headstone that reads, “Here lies the laugh that never lived.”

Word Count: 268
Form: Eulogy