Death, Taxes, and Bad Jokes: A Look at Life's Last Laughs No. 5

Is it worth your time?

If you're the type of person who stares at old cemetery headstones for forty minutes while your friends wait in the car, you’ll love this. Everyone else? You’ll probably hate it within ninety seconds. It is essentially a lecture on mortality, but with more puns.

Honestly, watching Life's Last Laughs No. 5 feels like someone forced you to look through their grandfather’s collection of vacation slides. Except instead of the Grand Canyon, it's just dusty rock carvings. It’s dry. It’s weirdly specific. And yet, I couldn't look away from the sheer pettiness of some of these people.

The vibe check

There's a rhythm to this that is hard to pin down. It doesn't move like a normal movie. It just cuts from one tombstone to the next with almost no context. It has the same frantic, low-budget energy I remember from Would You Believe It!, though this is definitely more morbid.

• Some of the epitaphs are actually pretty funny.
• The camerawork is… well, it exists.
• I’m pretty sure the narrator was just reading these off index cards.

One moment stuck with me. There’s this one grave that claims the guy died because he ate too much cheese. The way the screen lingers on the carving of the name—it’s just bizarre. Why is this here? Did the director just walk into a graveyard and start filming whatever caught his eye? It feels like it.

It’s not as polished as something like A Million Bid, obviously. It’s a scrappy, odd piece of filmmaking that doesn't really care if you're bored. It just wants to tell you that Old Man Jenkins hated his neighbor even from beyond the grave. And honestly? I respect the commitment to the bit. 🪦

Don’t go in expecting a deep philosophical meditation on the afterlife. It’s just jokes about dead people. Some land. Most are just confusing. But in this era of perfectly curated content, there’s something nice about a film that feels this dusty and unbothered.