[Maryann Corbett]

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?

[Roger Slater]

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.

[Mary Meriam]

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

[Orwn Acra]

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.

[Susan McLean]

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.

[Cally Conan-Davies]

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!

[B.J. Preston]

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?
.

[Cally Conan-Davies]

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.

[Max Goodman]

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

[W.F. Lantry]

This one!

Thanks,

Bill