DIE LAUGHING

MAKE FRIENDS WITH AN UNDERTAKER. HE’S THE LAST PERSON TO LET YOU DOWN

What’s so funny about this? This joke and picture have a LOT of stuff going on. Let’s start with the joke itself. The only word that might give you some difficulty is “undertaker”. It used to be “funeral undertaker” because technically anyone who engages in an activity formally or even informally, can be said to undertake something. The verb still has this broad general meaning, but the noun has become a euphemism for mortician, someone who undertakes to prepare a dead body for a funeral and then for burial or cremation. When we say that someone has “let us down”, we mean they have disappointed us somehow. But in the context of this joke “let down” could mean into the ground, as in a burial. But wait there’s more. The picture begins with an exclamation, “Lucky Stiff”. This is an older slang expression meaning “lucky guy”. However a “stiff” is also slang for a dead body, a corpse; this is because when a body dies, it