10/10/18 Grif.Net - Limericks
Robert Griffin
I love limericks, though the humor of some can be bawdy at best. Here are old and new family-friendly limericks.
The 5-line limerick used the now-familiar rhyming scheme of A-A-B-B-A, and metric beat of 3-3-2-2-3 in those rhyming lines.
Shakespeare employed a rough form of limerick in "Othello":
And let me the canakin clink, clink; (canakin = drinking can)
And let me the canakin clink
A soldier's a man;
A life's but a span;
Why, then, let a soldier drink.
Mother Goose (1744) has the familiar Jack and Jill limerick, and this ditty you know:
Hickory dickory dock,
the mouse ran up the clock;
the clock struck one
and down he run;
hickory dickory dock.
Edward Lear (1846) has been called the "father" and the "poet laureate" of the limerick because he helped popularize the form:
There was a young lady of Niger
who smiled as she rode on a tiger;
They returned from the ride
with the lady inside,
and the smile on the face of the tiger.
The earliest published American limerick appeared in 1902 in the Princeton Tiger:
There once was a man from Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket.
But his daughter, named Nan,
Ran away with a man
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.
The modern wit Ogden Nash penned better, more clever limericks, by far. I remember laughing in my school days at:
A flea and a fly in a flue
Were imprisoned, so what could they do?
Said the fly, "let us flee!"
"Let us fly!" said the flea.
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.
The grif net blog humor you read here today resulted from my reading a modern (Oct 2018) limerick in Reader’s Digest and laughing out loud:
A forgetful old gasman named Dieter,
Who went poking around his gas heater,
Touched a leak with his light -
He blew out of sight –
And, as everyone who knows anything about limericks can tell you, he also ruined the meter.
~~
Dr Bob Griffin
"Jesus Knows Me, This I Love!"