Funny Cliche Sayings Taken Literally Are Genuinely the Funniest Genre of Wordplay

There’s a particular kind of comedy that only works when somebody decides to take a familiar phrase completely seriously, and the cliche-saying genre has refined this approach into a small art form. English is, after all, a language full of phrases that nobody examines too closely. “It’s not rocket science.” “The early bird gets the worm.” “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.” The funny English idioms filling galleries like this are essentially the result of somebody pausing on each of these phrases and noticing, for the first time, how completely deranged they sound when you remove the cultural context.

What makes the form particularly satisfying is how often the literal interpretation reveals something true about the original metaphor that the metaphor was trying to hide. “Spilling the beans” is funny in the abstract. A chef physically spilling a vat of baked beans onto a kitchen floor is funny in a different, much more specific way. The literal idiom memes in this gallery thrive on this exact tension, where the abstract version is fine and the concrete version is somehow horrifying.

There’s also a strong recurring subgenre involving idioms that, on close examination, are mildly hostile to animals. The horse. The cat with multiple lives. The birds being stoned with one rock. The hilarious idiom memes in this category are essentially documenting the casual cruelty embedded in English, and the cruelty is, in retrospect, a lot.

The broader thing this whole genre captures, beyond the obvious wordplay, is how much of language is invisible to the people using it daily. Idioms are passed down for generations, used in casual conversation, and almost never examined for their original meaning or implications. The literal-interpretation genre exists, in part, because most people have never stopped to think about what “beating a dead horse” actually means until somebody pointed out, on the internet, that it is, in fact, a sentence about hitting a deceased animal.

There’s also a small linguistic education embedded in this content. The people making these memes are, in many cases, doing the work of actually examining phrases that nobody else has examined in decades, and the examination produces small revelations about how language operates. We say things we do not mean. We mean things we do not say. The funny English sayings in this gallery are essentially a small invitation to slow down and notice that English is, on closer inspection, weird.

The horse is fine. The horse is, however, listening. We should probably stop the eating metaphors.