The idiom "an elephant in the room" postdates Houdini's death.

de rigueur mortis: when etiquette requires a stiff upper lip.

In the tradition of the ageless phrase, "If I had a nickel for every time I ...":

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Gordon Meyer writes:

If, as Robert Louis Stevenson said, "wine is bottled poetry," then Mint Juleps are georgics, vodka is blank verse, and a set of drinks is a roundelay.

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Jonathan Caws-Elwitt posits:

And Irish whiskey is a limerick?

Prof. Oddfellow answers:

Yes!  And did you know that after a few shots it doubles as an anapestic?

June quips:

I thought tequila would be a lime-rick.

An Italian friend asked about the Franklin penny's motto, "Mind your business."

Q: Does the motto mean "Mind your [own] business" (as in "Mind your beeswax") or "Mind your business [affairs]"?

A. Both: it's a "doubloon entendre."

I looked for a punch line when I found a Lorem Ipsum generator with all sorts of language links at the top.  (See screenshot.)  Here's my own punch line in honor of Robert Heinlein:

The erotica author didn't write under an alter-ego but rather an alter-id.

"Head gear prevents most soft tissue injuries to the face but is not as protective to the brain as many believe."
—Steven J. Karageanes

Illustration c. 1882

Comedy is "at risk."  And that would be funny if it weren't so:

1. serious
2. unwittingly ironic
3. provoking
4. stupid
5. pathetic
6. prevalent
7. frustrating
8. tragic
9. dangerously misinformed
10. terrifying
11. sad
12. pitiful
13. ludicrous
14. destructive
15. impressive
16. gross
17. scary
18. true
19. disastrous
20. disgusting
21. painful
22. probable
23. terrible
24. patently ridiculous
25. sincere
26. perverse
27. unfunny
28. horrible
29. stressful
30. outrageous
31. ill-bred
32. sickening
33. insulting
34. crazy
35. typical
36. deadly
37. insidious
38. grotesque
39. significant
40. absurd
41. real
42. despicable
43. wicked
44. bitter
45. wide of the mark
46. common
47. moralizing
48. filled with pathos
49. vile
50. cruel
51. appalling
52. hideous
53. painfully revealing
54. very nearly unbearable
55. important
56. predictable
57. expensive
58. heartbreaking
59. damn personal

Here's one for linguists:

What's an allophone in French? 

An allo-allophone.

The emotional magician wore his heart on his sleeve.  No one suspected he had a heart up his sleeve, too.

Ironically, the best way to dance your way out of a support group is the two-step.

Though prima facie the opposite of highbrow, lowbrow is actually a corruption of Lord Loughborough (Alexander Wedderburn, 1st Earl of Rosslyn), notorious for being so dull that he caused dullness in others.

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And I thought the word "lowbrow" derived from the name of a beer!

We popularly say that ASAP is an acronym meaning "as soon as possible."  But ASAP comes to us from the Greek storyteller ÆSAP, whose brief fables can be read on the quick.

The professor abandoned teaching by degrees.

The eleventh hour leaves me at sixes and sevens (unless I'm dressed to the nines).

Atheists who celebrate only bar and bat mitzvahs: Jews in a formal life.

Q: What do you call the horizontal strokes in the passage below?

A: Slapdashes! (Snippet from Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess, 1987, p. 75)