[R.A. Briggs]

XKCD's limerick database appears to be defunct, which is a great pity. They had some wonderful ones.

A woman in liquor production
has a still of elaborate construction.
The alcohol boils
through magnetic coils:
she says that it's proof by induction.

There was a young man from Peru
whose limericks stopped at line two.

There was a young man from Verdun.

[Julie Steiner]

Ooh, I particularly like those last two.

For years I've been trying to convince people that Billy Joel's "Piano Man" consists mainly of loose limericks, but so far I've persuaded no one. Any takers?

[Mary Cresswell]

An oldie but a goodie:

The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher
called the hen a most elegant creature.
The hen, pleased with that,
laid an egg in his hat,
and thus did the hen reward Beecher.

[R.A. Briggs]

Julie, so glad you liked the limericks!

I'm not convinced about Piano Man; it seems like a 4/4 ballad-ish thing to me. There's a technical sense of "ballad" where a ballad has to be alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines, but more loosely, I think anything designed to be sung in 4/4 time with an ABAB or ABCB rhyme scheme counts as a ballad. Here's a representative quatrain.

Now John is a real-estate novelist*
who never had time for a wife
and he's talking to Davy who's still in the navy
and probably will be for life.

It's true that Davy/navy is a deliberate rhyme, and that it's where the rhymes of the two short lines would be in a limerick. But the first two lines in the verses don't rhyme with each other, and that kind of internal rhyming is common in ballads (e.g., The Cremation of Sam McGee).

Possibly this has been an excessively serious disquisition on the subject of ballads.

[*Note: What on Earth is a real-estate novelist?]

[Susan McLean]

Rachel, a "real-estate novelist" is someone who makes a living by selling real estate while purportedly writing a novel, but who probably will never finish or sell the novel. It ties in to the song's theme of disappointment and settling for less than one dreams of.

Susan

[Max Goodman]

Originally Posted by R.A. Briggs

I'm not convinced about Piano Man; it seems like a 4/4 ballad-ish thing to me.

FWIW, limericks are also in 4/4:

There's a ONE and a TWO and a THREE [and a REST(4)]
And a ONE and a TWO and a THREE [and a REST(4)]
And a ONE and a TWO and a ONE(3) and a TWO(4)
And a ONE and a TWO and a THREE

(You're right about "real-estate novelist"; it's awkward.)

[Julie Steiner]

Yes, a non-rhymed first line shows up in otherwise limerick-rhymed country songs like Flatts and Scruggs' "Roll in My Sweet Baby's Arms". And in several hymns, as well as the ballads you mentioned.

Edited to say: Oh, yeah, and -- EMBARRASSING MINDWORM WARNING -- there's this song, too. Click only if you dare: link to mindworm. Maybe you can read the title and bail out before the music starts playing.

The Beatles' "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party" gets the rhyme scheme exactly right, but it doesn't feel limericky to me, because I miss the anapests.

Unlike those songs, "Piano Man" is written in 3/4 time, which keeps the treble-rhythmic swinginess which to me is more essential to the limerick form than perfect adherence to the rhyme scheme.

Your mileage may vary, of course.

[Roger Slater]

I see your point, Julie, but it still doesn't feel limericky to me. Whatever the precedent, I think the non-rhyming first line is a deal breaker. Also, the melody overrides the hint of anapestic meter the words may contain on the page. I think there are many 3-3-4-3 stanzas that aren't limericks, though I agree that if the tet line has an internal rhyme we begin to get close. Then, of course, there are less formal limerick characteristics that are nonetheless real, such as the humorous bounce, sex jokes and/or bad puns, comical rhymes, fifth line joke, etc. None of these are present in all limericks, but there's a general culture of the limerick that I think is part of the definition, the sort that makes us say we know it when we see it.

[Gail White]

Clean limericks are really an abomination. We used to sing limericks at parties in New Orleans, and I know a great many, none of which are squeaky clean, but the one about asking the Duchess to tea reminded me of this one, which you could probably read to your children (these days).

When asked by the Duchess at tea
If an eggplant I ever did see,
I said "Yes", rather bored --
She said, "Sir, you've explored
Up a hen's ass much further than me."

[R.A. Briggs]

Julie, you're right about Piano Man being 3/4, not 4/4. And I see what you're saying. Also (as a bigger point for maybe another thread), I've been wondering whether genre-policing is necessary at all: would we lose anything of value in our artistic discourse by allowing people to call things "limericks" or "sonnets" whenever the word roughly fits?

So I take it back: I do not deny that Piano Man is a series of loose limericks. (Can I do that without asserting that Piano Man is a series of loose limericks? Cue logic essay.)

Some equation limericks that I love:

A dozen, a gross, and a score
plus three times the square root of four
divided by seven
plus five times eleven
is nine squared and not a bit more

The integral v squared dv
from one to the square root of three
times the cosine
of three pi over nine
is the log of the cube root of e.

The arithmetic all checks out.