Eternal Wit

Whoever said, "You can't take it with you" was obviously not referring to a sense of humor ...

Here is a list of actual epitaphs from departed souls who clearly had more to say than the time to say it, or from their next of kin, who wanted to be sure they literally had the last word:

On the grave of Ezekial Aikle in East Dalhousie Cemetery, Nova Scotia:

Here lies

Ezekial Aikle

Age 102

The Good Die Young.

In a London, England cemetery:

Ann Mann

Here lies Ann Mann,

Who lived an old maid

But died an old Mann.

Dec. 8, 1767

In a Ribbesford, England, cemetery:

Anna Wallace

The children of Israel wanted bread

And the Lord sent them manna,

Old clerk Wallace wanted a wife,

And the Devil sent him Anna.

Playing with names in a Ruidoso, New Mexico, cemetery:

Here lies

Johnny Yeast

Pardon me

For not rising.

Memory of an accident in a Uniontown, Pennsylvania cemetery:

Here lies the body of Jonathan Blake

Stepped on the gas

Instead of the brake.

In a Silver City, Nevada, cemetery:

Here lays Butch,

We planted him raw.

He was quick on the trigger,

But slow on the draw.

A widow wrote this epitaph in a Vermont cemetery:

Sacred to the memory of my husband John Barnes

who died January 3, 1803

His comely young widow, aged 23, has many qualifications of a good wife, and yearns to be comforted.

A lawyer's epitaph in England:

Sir John Strange

Here lies an honest lawyer,

And that is Strange.

Someone determined to be anonymous in Stowe, Vermont:

I was somebody.

Who, is no business

Of yours.

Lester Moore was a Wells Fargo station agent for Naco, Arizona in the cowboy days of the 1880's. He's buried in the Boot Hill Cemetery in Tombstone, Arizona:

Here lies Lester Moore

Four slugs from a .44

No Les No More.

In a Georgia cemetery:

"I told you I was sick!"

John Penny's epitaph in the Wimborne, England, cemetery:

Reader if cash thou art

In want of any

Dig 4 feet deep

And thou wilt find a Penny.

On Margaret Daniels grave at Hollywood Cemetery Richmond, Virginia:

She always said

her feet were killing her

but nobody believed her.

In a cemetery in Hartscombe, England:

On the 22nd of June

- Jonathan Fiddle -

Went out of tune.

Anna Hopewell's grave in Enosburg Falls, Vermont has an epitaph that
sounds like something from a Three Stooges movie:

Here lies the body of our Anna

Done to death by a banana

It wasn't the fruit that laid her low

But the skin of the thing that made her go.

Here's more fun with names, this time featuring Owen Moore in Battersea, London, England:

Gone away

Owin' more

Than he could pay.

Someone in Winslow, Maine didn't like Mr Wood:

In Memory of Beza Wood

Departed this life

Nov. 2, 1837

Aged 45 yrs.

Here lies one Wood

Enclosed in wood

One Wood

Within another.

The outer wood

Is very good:

We cannot praise

The other.

On a grave from the 1880's in Nantucket, Massachusetts:

Under the sod and under the trees

Lies the body of Jonathan Pease.

He is not here, there's only the pod:

Pease shelled out and went to God.

The grave of Ellen Shannon in Girard, Pennsylvania is almost a consumer tip:

Who was fatally burned

March 21, 1870

by the explosion of a lamp

filled with "R.E. Danforth's

Non-Explosive Burning Fluid"

Here's Harry Edsel Smith of Albany, New York:

Born 1903--Died 1942

Looked up the elevator shaft to see if the car was on the way down.

It was.

In a Thurmont, Maryland, cemetery:

Here lies an Atheist

All dressed up

And no place to go.

But does he make house calls? Dr Fred Roberts, Brookland, Arkansas:

Office now upstairs

Let's hope.