Laugh-out-loud funny: what is?
 

Not long ago on a board nearby, folk were lamenting the scarcity of poems that are laugh-out-loud funny. That seems excuse enough to start a thread of people's nominees for such a status.

When I think try to name any, though, I find that the poems in which I remember laughing out loud are generally not hilarious all the way through. Bob Hickok's poem, "A Primer" cracks me up at specific lines (the one about the state motto, for example). And Ian Frazier's "Lamentations of the Father"--I'd call it a prose poem, but let's not argue--sends me into paroxysms with the line about the cat and the tape.

Are the same things funny to you? Is any of this analyzable? Even if it's not, would you care to link to examples of the things that put you in stitches?

Now that you mention it, I can't say that any poem has ever sent me into peals of uncontrollable laughter or made me laugh until I cried.

I remember a very funny poem by Antler that collected famous last words. I laughed out loud at that one. I'll keep thinking.

the funniest poem I've ever read
 

This is your superego calling,
Who finds your conduct quite appalling.
do da dirty do da sin
dump da pussy in da bin

To raise us from the primal swamp
We must curtail the instinct’s romp.
why dont we do it in da road
up ya bum ya moral code

A sense of civic duty needs
To govern all our words and deeds.
when da neighbour make me sick
whack him with a great big stick

A man is not a mindless clam:
‘I cogitate, therefore I am.’
you da boring fart dat reasons
me da id thing for all seasons

Basil Ransome-Davies

I've only LOL'd at a Gavin Ewart poem. It took me by surprise and it's so true:

For Translation into Latin

The sailors love the beautiful girls.

The wise poets love the sailors.

The girls often love the sailors.

The bad poets love the beautiful girls.

The bad girls love the farmers.

All the poets hate the farmers.

The bad girls hate the good girls.

The good girls love all the sailors.

The bad girls love the bad girls.

The farmers hate all the poets.

The good girls love the bad poets.

The bad poets hate the good poets.


Of course, the whole thing isn't funny. I only laughed at the idea behind it and those who haven't been forced to take Latin wouldn't understand.

I tend to find the most idiosyncratic things funny. By George Starbuck:

On Reading John Hollander’s Poem “Breadth. Circle. Desert. Monarch. Month. Wisdom. (for which there are no rhymes)”, pt. II

I liked that when I wrote it. By the time I got to bilge,
It even had a moral. All of that! And out of bilge!
It made me so blamed proud I bought some i-beams from the store
And welded me a Sculpture to bestride my study door:
A five-piece ten-foot Sculpture spelling out forevermore
B-I-L-G-E BILGE, to match the Late-Pop-Art décor.

I stood back to admire the thing. I beamed, but not before
I started to detect a tapping at my study door –
A featheriest tapping, tapping at my study door.

Imagine my surprise. It was John Hollander. He wore
The quizzical expression of the vanquished, but he bore
No malice. Quite the contrary. He said, “What perfect bilge!
Something of yours?”
Something of yours?”“You know,” he said, “it’s curious but bilge
Once struck me as unrhymable. A lead-pipe cinch like bilge.”

“You killjoy!” I exploded. I snatched up* the B in BILGE
And went for him. He countered with a well-aimed I from ILGE,
But his next words were his last words: “No don’t! I’m not a killj—”

*Literalists may question this. Not even a Mad Turk
Could “snatch” four hundred pounds of monumental ironwork.
Snatch is poetic license. It was more a clean-and-jerk.

I can't remember if I laughed out loud but it always makes me chuckle because the poem is SO absurd. Just completely ridiculous.

This one tends to make me chortle.

Susan


Very Like a Whale
by Ogden Nash

One thing that literature would be greatly the better for
Would be a more restricted employment by the authors of simile and
metaphor.
Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons or Celts,
Can't seem just to say that anything is the thing it is but have to
go out of their way to say that it is like something else.
What does it mean when we are told
That that Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold?
In the first place, George Gordon Byron had enough experience
To know that it probably wasn't just one Assyrian, it was a lot of
Assyrians.
However, as too many arguments are apt to induce apoplexy and
thus hinder longevity.
We'll let it pass as one Assyrian for the sake of brevity.
Now then, this particular Assyrian, the one whose cohorts were
gleaming in purple and gold,
Just what does the poet mean when he says he came down like a
wold on the fold?
In heaven and earth more than is dreamed of in our philosophy
there are great many things.
But I don't imagine that among them there is a wolf with purple
and gold cohorts or purple and gold anythings.
No, no, Lord Byron, before I'll believe that this Assyrian was
actually like a wolf I must have some kind of proof;
Did he run on all fours and did he have a hairy tail and a big red
mouth and big white teeth and did he say Woof Woof?
Frankly I think it is very unlikely, and all you were entitled to say,
at the very most,
Was that the Assyrian cohorts came down like a lot of Assyrian
cohorts about to destroy the Hebrew host.
But that wasn't fancy enough for Lord Byron, oh dear me no, he
had to invent a lot of figures of speech and then interpolate them,
With the result that whenever you mention Old Testament soldiers
to people they say Oh yes, they're the ones that a lot of
wolves dressed up in gold and purple ate them.
That's the kind of thing that's being done all the time by poets,
from Homer to Tennyson;
They're always comparing ladies to lilies and veal to venison,
And they always say things like that the snow is a white blanket
after a winter storm.
Oh it is, is it, all right then, you sleep under a six-inch blanket of
snow and I'll sleep under a half-inch blanket of unpoetical
blanket material and we'll see which one keeps warm,
And after that maybe you'll begin to comprehend dimly
What I mean by too much metaphor and simile.

Seriously and honestly, Orwn, your Pop-corn poem cracks me up - and it wasn't just the delicious reading, but that it's so silly and so true, it's hilarious!

Childish humour is the genuine crack-up humour, I think. I don't mean juvenile or immature - I mean silliness, you know? Lots of poems come to mind that are highly amusing, but, for me anyway, silliness is sublimely funny!

Umm, that would be thilliness methinks Callikins!

And theri-ally Mary-Ange [!], ain't it all gist in the eye (or funny-bone) of the beholder?
.

See? You've just totally cracked me up, Beej! I'm pathetically easy to get to LOL!! Like being tickled.

I've been thinking - do you know what makes me happy-laugh, invariably? Scrambled syntax. Like this:

THE PARTERRE


I don't know any greatest treat
* *As sit him in a gay parterre,
And sniff one up the perfume sweet
* *Of every roses buttoning there.

It only want my charming miss
* *Who make to blush the self red rose;
Oh! I have envy of to kiss
* *The end's tip of her splendid nose.

Oh! I have envy of to be
* *What grass 'neath her pantoffle push,
And too much happy seemeth me
* *The margaret which her vestige crush.

But I will meet her nose at nose,
* *And take occasion for her hairs,
And indicate her all my woes,
* *That she in fine agree my prayers.

* * * * * * * * * *|The Envoy|

I don't know any greatest treat
* *As sit him in a gay parterre,
With Madame who is too more sweet
* *Than every roses buttoning there.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *E. H. Palmer.

P.S. Orwn - I've never told you this, but your name here always cracks me up! It's so silly and looks so funny! And so for me, crack-up humour must reside in the scrambling of the ordinary, somehow.

Hard to answer because surprise, I think, has a lot to do with laughing out loud (in private, as opposed to when we're part of an audience), so we aren't likely to laugh out loud a second time at a poem--unless we've forgotten it.

Limericks seem to me well designed for delivering laughs. Here are four by John Ciardi, and, beneath those, four by others, which I suspect made me laugh the first time I read them.


There was a young man with a rod
Who thought he'd been chosen by G-d
To excercise Hell
From the girls. He meant well,
But the thunder said: "Exorcise--clod!"


I feel sorry for young Dr. Dow.
Our ladies won't go to him now.
When examining the parts
Of Mrs. Ray Hartz
He should have said "Hmmm" and not "Wow!"


On the talk show last night, Dr. Ellis,
The sex shrink, took two hours to tell us
It's alright to enjoy
A rosy-cheeked boy
So long as your sheep don't get jealous.


Said Sophocles, putting his X
To the contract for Oedipus Rex,
"I predict it will run
Until the Year One,
If the shooting script plays up the sex."


A youthful beef-packer named Young,
One day, when his nerves were unstrung,
Pushed his wife's ma--unseen--
In the chopping machine,
Then canned her and labelled her "Tongue."
--Anon


There was a young girl, a sweet lamb,
Who smiled as she entered a tram,
After she had embarked,
The conductor remarked,
"Your fare." And she said, "Yes, I am."
--Anon


An elderly sage of B'nai Brith
Told his friend he was quite full of pith.
This could mean "full of fact"
And "with meaning compact,"
But not when you're lithping like thith.
--Isaac Asimov


Said Wilbur Wright, "Oh, this is grand,
But Orville, you must understand.
We've discovered all right
The secret of flight--
The question is, how do we land?"
--Frank Richards

This one!

Thanks,

Bill

The Bard of Barnsley.
 

Kudos Bill!

Ian himself reads it much better than this. It's a rare poetry performance where an audience cries with laughter, but I've been to many of Ian's when this has been the case. I will rush off now and find my own favourite.

Cally and BJP, this was LOL for me at very tender age. (Genuine oral transmission via the old Lilliput.)

The thunder god went for a ride
Upon his favourite filly.
"I'm Thor!", he cried - the horse replied
"You forgot the thaddle, thilly!"

Jerome!!!!!!!

I'm in stitches!!!!!! That's a rofl, not a lol!

Cally

There's a Mastery thread that has some good funny poems on it, started by much-missed Janet Kenny: http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showth...oto=nextnewest.

I posted one on that thread that still makes me laugh:

The Board’s Blare

Our Starver, Art without leaven,
Bellowéd be thy Fame;
Thy lingam come; thy will be gun,
On Campus as it is in Tavern.
Give us this day our Big Success.
Review at length our vacuousness
As we review those who evacuate with us.
And read us not in Profundity;
But circulate widely our drivel:
For Thine is the Foundation,
The Grants and the Glory,
For Sabbatical after Sabbatical.
Eh, men?

--Peter Russell, from his collection Malice Aforethought

It's not brilliant but it's pretty good. "Evacuate with us" and "Eh, men" are my favorite parts. I like humor with a scorpion sting, like that famous epigram by Blake on what an epigram is.

I also tend to like short funny pieces because they're less work. As in Max's limerick examples above. What can I say? I liked Austin Powers, the first one anyway. I have a weakness for sophomoric bathroom humor and dirty jokes.

On another note, I love Byron's wit (see Janet's example that opens that thread) and Shakespeare's wild wordplay scenes.

Andrew, your reminder of Janet's absence just put out my laughing. :-(

The Long Dark Corridor of Winter

A poem in the style of George Formby

It's dark!
It's long!
It's the long dark corridor of winter!

It's long!
It's dark!
It's the dark long corridor of winter!

After Christmas all you get
is freezing cold and soaking wet:
my Lancashire hot pot turns to ice
and missis, that's not very nice

Three months of underheated gloom
like laying out a corpse in a cold front room
tell me just tell me what I can do
when me ukelele's turning blue!

It's dark!
It's long!
It's the long dark corridor of winter!

It's long!
It's dark!
It's the dark long corridor of winter!

I'm from Lancashire not Finland
but I feel like an Arctic bloke
when you have to thaw your breath out to see what you're saying
it really is no joke!

Dark in the morning, dark at night
ghostly mills in ghostly light
I'm not feeling very bright
when winter grips me pencil tight!

It's dark!
It's long!
It's the long dark corridor of winter!

It's long!
It's dark!
It's the dark long corridor of winter!

Ian McMillan. I Found This Shirt. Carcanet.1998.

Laughing again! (god - I'm faithless to my feelings!)

Thanks for bucking me up, Bucks!

Spike Milligan was very good at the parody that plunges sharply in tone:

I must go down to the sea again,
to the lonely sea and the sky,
I left my vest and socks there,
I wonder if they're dry?


The boy stood on the burning deck
whence all but he had fled:- the twit!

I just realized I didn't really answer Maryann's question.

The thing about laugh-out-loud funny is it depends so much on mood and surprise. I did laugh out loud the first time I read "evacuate with us" in that poem, but not the second time. After the first time the funny part was more remembering how funny it was the first time. I was in the right mood the first time, plus the phrase surprised me. A lot of light or humorous verse, like a lot of poetry in general, lacks surprise--an unexpected turn of wit or language. So even if it's chuckle material it's not really laugh-out-loud material.

The Idle Demon.R.P. Lister.
 

I can’t resist a little Lister:

Postscript to
Die Schone Muller.

The freshet springs from woodland cleft,
Its waters crystal clear and cool;
The lovesick youth, of sense bereft,
Leaps madly in the swirling pool.

Quelled are his turbulence and woe
Who loved the miller’s daughter;
And in the village far below
They take to filtering the water.

Thanks for these great contributions--a great start to my morning.

But I have to make a terrible confession: I don't get the McMillan "Meaning of Life." I know it will be like cutting up a living thing to explain to me how it's funny, but perhaps somebody's willing.

I have to admit my ignorance as well, re The Meaning of Life. I played it twice and still didn't "get it". Another bad brain day?

Nah then, Janice.
 

Sorry Maryann and Janice. My wife and I were rolling on the floor laughing at your bewilderment. The mystery to me is how Bill gets this.

It makes me realise how difficult humour is to explain. This is regional, related to Yorkshire dialect and South Yorkshire ways of speaking. Ian is parodying plain-speaking local folk wisdom. These are the sort of phrases you hear in the chip-shop or the canteen or the bus-shelter, attempts to fathom the meaning of life. He scrambles them all up and brings out their absurdity and black hilarity. Everything is surly and dark and getting darker, yet full of subversive humour.

In performance the poem's last line always gets a great roar of laughter/recognition from the audience who recognise their own black humour reflected back at them.

Now Bill needs to tell us.

Call it a poem, or call it a prose poem, but whatever, it cracks me up -- Jame Tate's "The List of Famous Hats":

Napoleon's hat is an obvious choice I guess to list as a famous hat, but that's not the hat I have in mind. That was his hat for show. I am thinking of his private bathing cap, which in all honesty wasn't much different than the one any jerk might buy at a corner drugstore now, except for two minor eccentricities. The first one isn't even funny: Simply it was a white rubber bathing cap, but too small. Napoleon led such a hectic life ever since his childhood, even farther back than that, that he never had a chance to buy a new bathing cap and still as a grown-up--well, he didn't really grow that much, but his head did: He was a pinhead at birth, and he used, until his death really, the same little tiny bathing cap that he was born in, and this meant that later it was very painful to him and gave him many headaches, as if he needed more. So, he had to vaseline his skull like crazy to even get the thing on. The second eccentricity was that it was a tricorn bathing cap. Scholars like to make a lot out of this, and it would be easy to do. My theory is simple-minded to be sure: that beneath his public head there was another head and it was a pyramid or something.
.

Petra, I seem to be playing the regular straight-man, deadpan role today. Tell me what happens in your head to make you laugh. The passage is absurd, and full of unexpected changes in direction and awkward situations, but it doesn't trigger a laugh at all for me.

Sometimes I do know what's tickling me. A rhyme will do it, like interpolate/purple ate in the Nash poem. By the way, Susan, "Very Like a Whale" has long been a favorite of mine too.

As Andrew says, surprise is important, and that rhyme is a surprise.

Shifts and mismatches in tone are good reliable tools. Yesterday's poem on The Writer's Almanac relies on that mix.

Steve, about the McMillan poem, I need an even closer close reading. In the context of chip shops, what does "Half a dozen eggs" mean, and how is it an answer to "You're looking poorly"? And is that last comment being uttered straight or in irony there in the chip shop? Sorry to be so hopeless.

I wouldn't expect everyone to laugh at Tate's poem. But I like absurd humor, or silly-absurd. The poem is weird and humorous to begin with, but this is where I laugh out loud:

the same little tiny bathing cap that he was born in, and this meant that later it was very painful to him and gave him many headaches, as if he needed more. So, he had to vaseline his skull like crazy to even get the thing on. The second eccentricity was that it was a tricorn bathing cap.

The pictures that jump to mind are very funny to me. The tricorn (three-cornered) bathing cap alone is funny.

A fairly obvious name in a discussion of humour is P.G. Wodehouse. However, not everyone knows that he wrote a great deal of excellent comic poetry in addition to his novels and short stories. Here's a link to one of his funniest poems, "Good Gnus". It's even funnier in context, as is explained by the person posting the poem in the thread I've linked to.

I love the parenthetical comments in the poem. And "a kopje or a cactus" is a definite LOL line for me (never thought I'd use this abbreviation but it seems appropriate).

Thank you very much, Cally!

It comes from my misspent youth: far too much time hanging out with ex-pat brits on the Promenade des Anglais. ;)

Thanks,

Bill

This one still cracks me up:

Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken páprika, she glanced at me,
twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
and only the fact of her husband (& four other people)
kept me from springing on her

or falling at her little feet and crying
'You are the hottest one for years of night
Henry's dazed eyes
have enjoyed, Brilliance.' I advanced upon
(despairing) my spumoni.—Sir Bones: is stuffed,
de world, wif feeding girls.

—Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes
downcast ... The slob beside her feasts ... What wonders is
she sitting on, over there?
The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars.
Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.
—Mr. Bones: there is.

Not quite as funny as Ovid on the same situation, but almost. Almost! ;)

Thanks,

Bill

Oh, we should have thought of that wild one when Duncan's clever rendition was up at Translations.

Half a dozen eggs.
 

Just for comparison, here's Ian reading his "The Meaning of Life."

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetrya....do?poemId=364

And this link might help you reference the humour.

http://monologues.co.uk/You_Do_Look_Queer.htm

What a great thread, Maryann.

Steve,

I didn't find "Professional Yorkshireman" (derog.) Ian McMillan's 'The Meaning of Life' funny at all, unlike "My Word, You Do Look Queer". The former doesn't rhyme and I've yet to see or hear a free verse poem that really made me laugh (sorry, Bill, but what on earth 'cracks you up' about the poem in post 30?); rhymed verse lends itself far better to laughter IMO.

A couple of daft ones that amuse me:

Said a boy to his teacher one day,
"Wright has not written 'rite' right, I say."
And the teacher replied,
As the error she eyed,
"Right! Wright: write 'write' right, right away."

THE TIRED WOMAN'S EPITAPH

Here lies a poor woman who always was tired
She lived in a house where help was not hired
Her last words on earth were: 'Dear friends, I am going
Where washing ain't done, nor sweeping, nor sewing;
But everything there is exact to my wishes;
For where they don't eat there's no washing of dishes.
I'll be where loud anthems will always be ringing,
But, having no voice, I'll be clear of the singing.
Don't mourn for me now; don't mourn for me never -
I'm going to do nothing for ever and ever.' (Anon)

Hmm, I think I might get that one read at my funeral :)

I like those a lot, Jayne, and I definitely think they are funny. But I don't howl out loud or shake or make loud mirthful noises from which I need to calm down or collect myself when it's over. Do you? Do any poems produce that sort of reaction for you?

Emily Dickinson has made me laugh out loud, on occasion.

Ah, bathos! Julie, what a way to wreck a Dickinson poem ;D

I meant to say earlier that bathos is the Main Funny Thing in the poem Mary posted above. The tone of the first speaker is so stiff and correct that he can be punctured just by the lowbrow pronunciation "da." That one does crack me up.

And putting the superego and the id together like that is part of the action in the John Berryman poem that Bill posted, too. I do think you have to know something about the characters--that Henry is the speaker and main character, that Mr. Bones is a sort of alter ego--to glom on to the situation. Even Lowell was none too sure what Berryman was saying in the Dream Songs: "At first the brain aches and freezes at so much darkness, disorder and oddness. After a while, the repeated situations and their racy jabber become more and more enjoyable, although even now I wouldn't trust myself to paraphrase accurately at least half the sections."

I'm sorry. I changed my mind. It was a silly idea. You didn't see me, right?

Orwn's posting of the Ewart 'For Translation Into Latin' has given both fellow teachers and students in our classics department some serious LOLs. A kid in Latin 1 (not my class) apparently laughed till he cried. I LOLed, but didn't ROFLOL, which I've never done in response to a poem.

(Thanks Orwn!)

Jayne,

Desperate passion in a hopeless doofus always cracks me up, perhaps because it reminds me of myself... ;)

"The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars. Where did it all go wrong?"

One time, he goes fishing with a friend: "They caught nothing. It is in the nature of Henry to catch nothing..."

And in mine as well... ;)

Thanks,

Bill

I haven't yet figured out how to cut and paste from google books, but this one, wherein Ovid tells two different and very complicated lies, to two very different women, about the same event, is priceless. It's one of his pairs, so you must read *both* VII and VIII:

http://books.google.com/books?id=X_nz4SZje5IC&pg=PA50&lpg=PA50&dq=%22Am+i+ forever+to+be+put+on+trial%22&source=bl&ots=rOlgJZ irnC&sig=ygjGj1tehZz-Z1qTv4_e0sZKz3c&hl=en&ei=TlqjTPPOLoKKlwfXgpnmAw&sa =X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBIQ6AEw AA#v=onepage&q=%22Am%20i%20forever%20to%20be%20put %20on%20trial%22&f=false

"But as things are, your credulous invective
Becomes both wearisome, and ineffective!"

Ovid was such a cad! Worse than Horace, even, and that's saying something! ;)

Thanks,

Bill