A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Crematorium
Her casket was upstairs in the front bedroom
Where she’d died
Her request was that she should lie there
In state
With the guzunder underneath
In case she felt the urge to go -
Her sense of humour outlived her.
And she would have brayed with laughter
Like a tickled donkey
At the antics of the funeral director
An appropriately anguished beanpole
With a five o’clock shadow
Like a featherweight Fred Flintstone
Whose ill-fitting hairpiece
Was dislodged while he and his glumly-perspiring pallbearers
Bumped and bumbled the box down the stairs
And it skittered down the lid
Like a Peruvian guinea pig -
She would have been in fits.
And the fun didn’t stop there
The funeral cortege lumbered over
To the wrong crematorium
So had to inappropriately speed
Up the dual carriageway
To the crem on the right side of town
Wreaths flying from the roof of the hearse
Like floral Catherine wheels -
My God, she would have been helpless.
And when they eventually arrived
Late for her own funeral
The tipsy priest consistently
Got her name wrong
They played Monty Python’s’ Camelot’
Instead of ’Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’
As her sarcophagus perambulated
Toward the final curtain
Which resolutely refused to close.
If wasn’t for the fact she was already dead
She would have died laughing.