Painfully Funny Similes and Metaphors from High School Students

You can almost feel it, can’t you? That tiny, irritating raspberry seed lodged in your tooth (or worse yet, in your gums).

A good metaphor or simile breathes life into a sentence. It helps the reader’s mind make fresh correlations between smells, sounds, taste, touch.

A bad metaphor kills the sentence deader than a chainsaw murderer wielding a plastic chainsaw from Toys R Us. Get the idea?

Metaphor vs. Simile

Here’s a mini refresher course on the difference between a metaphor and a simile:

Metaphor – a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them (as in drowning in money)
Simile – Using like or as to compare two unlike things (as in cheeks like roses)

For detailed examples of the difference between metaphors and similes, visit our friends at Grammarly. You’ll also learn about the following types of metaphors:

Implied metaphor
Sustained metaphor
Dead metaphor
Mixed metaphor

Student Essay Examples

One of the best places to find funny figures of speech is in student-written essays. Here are some ‘winners’ from excerpts submitted by English teachers across the U.S. (vote for your favorites!)

Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.
He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.
McBride fell twelve stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.
The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.
It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.
The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.
Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.
Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.