Man Spends Five Minutes Brushing His Teeth To Save His Twin Brother From Death

Some jokes get better with age. Others become legendary precisely because they take an absurd amount of time to reach one painfully obvious punchline. I think this story proudly belongs in the second category.

The setup follows two identical twin brothers, one a successful dentist and the other chronically unemployed. After the lazier twin is nearly killed in a car crash, the Grim Reaper accidentally appears at the dentist’s door instead. Rather than accept the mistake, the dentist challenges Death to a contest to save his brother’s life.

His chosen battleground? Dental hygiene. What follows is an increasingly elaborate showdown involving toothbrushes, toothpaste, gleaming teeth, and supernatural stakes. Scroll down to see the pun that somehow required an entire near-death experience to deliver.

A dentist challenges the Grim Reaper after his twin brother nearly dies in a serious car crash

Some disappointments become strangely precious once enough time has passed. A joke can waste five minutes, produce an exhausted groan, and still become something people remember fondly years later. Sometimes the pleasure is no longer in the punchline at all. It is in knowing exactly what is coming and willingly taking the journey again.

That seems to be the emotional engine behind this deliberately overbuilt joke. The writer spends an extraordinary amount of time establishing twin brothers, unemployment, a car accident, hospitalization, mistaken identity, the Grim Reaper, and even a supernatural dental competition.

Readers naturally assume that such elaborate preparation must eventually justify itself. Instead, everything exists to deliver one painfully ordinary pun: the dentist had a “brush with death.” The enormous imbalance between investment and reward is precisely what makes the ending feel both infuriating and memorable.

There is also a fresher way to view why reposting it every four years works. On the first encounter, readers are victims of the setup. Eight years later, returning readers become participants in the ritual.

They know the destination is terrible, yet nostalgia transforms frustration into anticipation. The joke effectively develops its own anniversary tradition. What originally depended on surprise begins depending on shared memory instead.

Humor researcher Peter McGraw, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and coauthor of The Humor Code, is known for the benign violation theory of humor. His research proposes that something becomes funny when it simultaneously feels wrong, uncomfortable, or disruptive while also being perceived as safe or acceptable.

McGraw’s work also emphasizes that psychological distance can help transform unpleasant situations into humorous ones. In this story, death, a horrific accident, and the Grim Reaper are serious ideas, but their cartoonish treatment makes the threat harmless enough to become comedy.

That framework helps explain why the ridiculous length matters. Each escalation violates another expectation. A dying twin suggests tragedy; Death arriving at the wrong house introduces absurdity; challenging him to a tooth-brushing contest destroys whatever seriousness remains.

By the time the final pun arrives, the audience has traveled such an unnecessarily elaborate route that the anticlimax itself becomes part of the entertainment.

Perhaps that is why intentionally terrible jokes can have unusual staying power. A technically sharper punchline might earn a bigger immediate laugh and then disappear. This one creates an experience people can complain about together, remember four years later, and knowingly endure again.

So the joke’s greatest achievement may not be making people laugh. It is making them groan loudly enough to remember it. At that point, reposting it every four years stops being repetition and becomes tradition.

Check out how the community responded:

These users loved how painfully bad the joke was and wanted to suffer through it again someday

These commenters admitted they were warned and only had themselves to blame for reading it

These users reacted with pure disbelief at just how terrible the joke turned out to be

Would you call that terrible joke-writing, brilliant anti-humor, or both?

And if it gets reposted again in four years, are you reading the whole thing anyway?