go over like a lead balloon

Example: “My joke about the boss's driving went over like a lead balloon.”

Origin: American in origin, with a possible early trace to a Mom-N Pop newspaper cartoon from June 1924 using "lead balloon" for something doomed to fail, though the phrase doesn't reappear in print again until after the Second World War. The joke is built on a flat physical impossibility: lead is one of the densest common metals, so a "lead balloon" could never actually rise — making it a vivid, almost cartoonish image for an idea, joke, or pitch that falls completely flat rather than lifting off the way it was meant to. The British version swaps the verb, "go down like a lead balloon," for the same defeated image and the same reasoning. Decades later, the English rock band Led Zeppelin took its name from a satirical remark that the group would go over like exactly that — a lead balloon — cementing the phrase's odd second life in music history.