The following memes had so much potential until someone decided to tack on a caption that made them substantially worse than they were before. They could have had a shot (not a great one, but a small shot, at least) on their own. Maybe they could have grown popular and made us laugh … but then, disaster struck. Someone with zero sense of humor committed the act known as "comedy homicide." We watched in horror as the life was sucked out of these memes and spit out in the form of an awfully captioned picture that wasn't even funny anymore.

Here, you can watch this happen all over again with these memes that were destroyed by mere captions. Whether it's an unnecessary emoji or an excessive number of exclamation points, it's fair to say the following jokes would have been better if left alone. Much, much better. Here are 15 of our favorite failures collected from the idea meme-seeking subreddit /r/ComedyHomicide. RIP to what could have been.