An iron and blue shirt cuff stick out of a mound of soil beside a small trowel on bright green grass.

Original artwork, not a still

Reinhold Niebuhr

Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to hide the bodies of those people I had to kill because they pissed me off.

Behind the line

What it means

Our interpretation.

This twists the familiar serenity prayer into a darkly comic confession. After asking for acceptance and courage, it ends by begging wisdom to conceal the corpses of people the speaker killed for irritating them. The joke sets pious language against casual murder, deliberately without softening the killing.

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