Probably Poe's profoundest and dreariest pasquinade, “King Pest the First: A Tale Containing an Allegory” has always baffled readers. This paper explores this gross slice of Poe's humor and examines the ways that it might disrupt and/or lend itself to his principles on aesthetic effect. The paper uses the terms and conclusions of this reading, further, to allegorize Poe's laughter in one of the most plagued regions of the early twenty-first century: the death world of war-torn Syria manufactured by a coalition of sovereign pests.