Funny eulogy examples
Humour at a funeral is not a risk you take with the room — it is a decision about whether it is true to the person. Three complete examples below, and the two questions that decide it.
Last updated 11 September 2026
Whether humour belongs at this one
The question is never whether a funeral can take a joke. It is whether the person could. If they were funny, a eulogy with no laugh in it is a portrait with the face left out, and the people who loved them will feel the omission without being able to name it.
If they were not funny, humour in their eulogy is about you. That is the whole distinction, and everything else on this page follows from it.
The recognition test
Read the funny line out to somebody who knew them and watch what happens. If they laugh and then say some version of “that’s exactly him”, keep it. If they laugh and then look slightly guilty, cut it. The guilt is the room telling you the joke is at his expense rather than about him.
The parent filter
Whoever in that room is most bereaved — usually a parent, a widow, a child — every gentle joke has to be survivable by them. Not enjoyable. Survivable. If a line would make his mother feel that the last public account of her son was a comedy set, it goes, however well it lands with everyone else.
A useful rule: humour works in a eulogy when it is a way of describing somebody accurately, and fails the moment it becomes a performance.
Three funny eulogy examples
Three complete eulogies, written for this site. None of them is a comedy routine — each one has one or two funny stories doing the work of characterisation, and each turns serious before the end, which is what stops a lighthearted eulogy feeling weightless.
For Danny Okonkwo, given by his best friend
About 420 words · three minutes
Danny once drove ninety miles to return a drill he had borrowed eleven years earlier. He did not phone first. He turned up at a house where the man who had lent him the drill no longer lived, explained the situation at length to a woman called Bernadette, and left the drill with her.
He told this story constantly. He told it as though it reflected well on him.
That is the thing about Danny. He operated on a set of principles that were completely coherent and shared by nobody. He would not eat in a restaurant that had photographs of the food. He believed, with real conviction, that you should never be the first person to leave a party or the last, and he would do laps of a kitchen for forty minutes waiting for the window.
We were friends for twenty-six years and I have never met anyone who wasted more energy on things that did not matter. It was magnificent. It was also exhausting, and I want to say that plainly because he would.
Here is what the drill story is actually about, though, and I only worked this out on Tuesday.
He could not stand owing anybody anything. Not money, not favours, not a drill. And the flip side of that — the part that mattered — was that he never once made you feel you owed him. He drove me to the hospital at four in the morning in 2019 and refused to discuss it afterwards, ever, in a way that eventually became annoying.
He gave enormously and kept no ledger. He just could not tolerate being on the other side of it.
Danny, mate. You do not owe anyone anything. You are all square. You can go.
For Raymond Petch, given by his son
About 300 words · just over two minutes
My father’s last words to me, three days ago, were: “Don’t let your sister do the sandwiches.”
My sister did the sandwiches. They are in the hall. I want everyone to understand that I did what I could.
Dad had opinions about catering, about routes, about the correct way to load a dishwasher, and about a neighbour called Ron whose crimes were never specified. He was not a difficult man — he was a man with a system, and the system was not written down anywhere, and you were expected to have learned it.
He worked in insurance for thirty-four years, and every single person from that office who has phoned this week has said the same thing to me, independently: he was the one who noticed. Not the loudest. Not the cleverest. The one who noticed when you had gone quiet, and would appear at your desk with a cup of tea and no questions.
So the man with the system had one rule underneath all of it, and the rule was pay attention to people.
I am going to try to notice things. I am probably going to say something about the dishwasher.
Thanks, Dad. The sandwiches are fine.
For Sheila Brennan, given by her granddaughter
About 340 words · two and a half minutes
My grandmother was banned from a garden centre. I am not going to explain the circumstances, partly because they are disputed and partly because two of the people involved are here.
She was ninety-one and she was still furious about it.
Nan had a capacity for sustained indignation that I have never seen matched. She was in a dispute with the council about a hedge for the whole of the 1990s. She wrote letters. She kept copies of the letters. There is a folder.
And I want to say something about that folder, because it would be easy to tell you she was a lovely gentle old lady and that would be a lie, and she hated a lie.
The same woman who fought the council about a hedge for nine years is the woman who, when my mother was ill in 2011, moved into our house without being asked and ran it for four months. She never mentioned it afterwards. It was not generosity, exactly. It was the same stubbornness pointed at something that mattered.
She could not let a thing go. Usually that was the hedge. Sometimes it was us, and when it was us it was the most useful force in this family.
Nan, we did try the garden centre again last year. They remember you.
What to leave out of a humorous eulogy
- Inside jokes. If four people laugh and ninety do not, you have excluded the room from the person. Explain it in one line or cut it.
- Jokes about the death itself. Almost never lands, and cannot be taken back.
- Anything that settles a score. The room can hear it, even when it is dressed as affection.
- Their weight, their drinking, their failures. Affectionate between the two of you, humiliating from the front of a room.
- Material you did not write. Jokes lifted from a list have a different texture from stories about a person, and everyone can hear the seam.
Delivering a funny eulogy
- Start sincerely. Say who you are and who they were to you before the first funny story. The room needs to know you understand where it is.
- Pause after the first laugh. It will be louder than you expect — a room this tense is looking for permission. Let it happen and do not talk over it.
- Five to seven minutes, and no longer. Humour holds a room beautifully and then falls off a cliff.
- Turn serious before the end. Every example above does this. A lighthearted eulogy that never turns leaves people oddly unsatisfied.
- Have someone who can finish it. Crying in the middle of a funny story is extremely common and nothing to plan around except by handing a second copy to somebody near the front.
Balancing humour against the seriousness of the occasion is mostly a question of order: funny first, true last. Family members who were unsure about the whole idea are almost always won round by that final turn.
How to deliver a eulogy covers the rest, including what to do if your voice goes.
Related reading
Eulogy examples has six complete eulogies in different voices and lengths. Eulogy for a best friend covers what is specifically hard about speaking for a friend rather than family. Eulogy examples for a father has four complete eulogies for a dad. Celebration of life speech examples covers the less formal service, where humour is expected rather than risked. How long should a eulogy be sets out realistic timings. The eulogy writer will draft one from your own memories if you would rather start from something than from nothing.