“A tomahawk is what if you go to sleep and suddenly wake up without your hair, there is an Indian with.”
— University of Texas El Burro, 1969, from A Century of College Humor
Humor
Double Duty
What’s unusual about this limerick?
There was a young lady of Riga,
Who went for a ride on a tiger,
They came back from their ride
With the lady inside
And a smile on the face of the tiger.
It remains a limerick when translated into Latin:
Puella Rigensis ridebat,
Quam tigris in tergo vehebat,
Externa profecta
Interna revecta,
Risusque cum tigre manebat.
Ronald Knox found that the same is true of this one:
There was a young man of Devizes,
Whose ears were of different sizes;
The one that was small
Was no use at all,
But the other won several prizes.
Visas erat; huic geminarum
Dispar modus auricularum:
Minor haec nihili;
Palma triplici
Iam fecerat altera clarum.
Sound Rhymes
Peculiarly English limericks:
There was a young lady named Wemyss,
Who, it semyss, was troubled with dremyss.
She would wake in the night,
And, in terrible fright,
Shake the bemyss of the house with her scremyss.
A pretty school-mistress named Beauchamp,
Said, “These awful boys, how shall I teauchamp?
For they will not behave,
Although I look grave
And with tears in my eyes I beseauchamp.”
There was a professor of Caius
Who measured six feet round the knaius;
He went down to Harwich
Nineteen in a carwich,
And found it a terrible squaius.
There lived a young lady named Geoghegan,
The name is apparently Peoghegan,
She’ll be changing it solquhoun
For that of Colquhoun,
But the date is at present a veoghegan. (W.S. Webb)
An author, by name Gilbert St. John,
Remarked to me once, “Honest t. John,
You really can’t quote
That story I wrote:
My copyright you are infrt. John.” (P.L. Mannock)
See This Sceptred Isle.
Commentary
Reviews of a test pattern on Netflix:
- “Not as good as the book. If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve pretty much seen the whole thing. I hope ‘Downscaling 2998fps: Too Down, Too Scaler’ is better.”
- “This is truly some of the best acting I’ve ever seen Keanu Reeves do. Hands down.”
- “Not since Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist has there been such a grim exploration of nihilism, peppered with gratuitous exploitation as ‘Test Pattern: Downscaling 2997fps 10Min.’ I found it beautiful and filthy with a soundtrack that puts Frozen‘s ‘Let it Go’ to shame.”
- “I had not seen any of the previous test patterns, and I was afraid I would not ‘get’ this one. Boy was I wrong! Talk about exciting! Going in my list. I’ll be watching this one again!”
- “I turned it off at 01:17:18. Pretty obvious where this thing was going. Really sad to see that cyan has resorted to doing test pattern work, another hue that started out with so much potential. The circle with the spinning colors showed promise and that ‘bleep’ sound was kinda clever.”
- “What happened Netflix? A year or two ago your test patterns were good clean fun. Yes, you might attract more subscribers with this kind of material, but at what cost? You’re better than this Netflix!”
Reviews of a gallon of milk on Amazon:
- “Unfortunately, after a terrible night’s sleep, I have concluded that this product is not suitable for use as a pillow.”
- “This is a fine milk, but the product line appears to be limited in available colors. I could only find white.”
- “I cannot say that Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 gal, 128 fl. oz. was entirely responsible for my winning the Sveriges Riksbank Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. However, I would be remiss in not mentioning it.”
- “Has anyone else tried pouring this stuff over dry cereal? A-W-E-S-O-M-E!”
- “Bought it for my cousin who had cancer, item never arrived and my cousin died.”
- “You know, if you click on the different image views, it looks like it’s coming to GET you…”
- “WANTED: Somebody to buy milk on the internets with me. This is not a joke. You’ll get paid after we drink it. Must bring your own weapons and be able to crawl through a series of tubes. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before.”
See Beach Reading.
Dry Humor
Jokes from the Dust Bowl:
The drought was so bad that when one man was hit on the head with a rain drop, he was so overcome that two buckets of sand had to be thrown in his face to revive him. Housewives supposedly scoured pans clean by holding them up to a keyhole for sandblasting, and sportsmen allegedly shot ground squirrels overhead as the animals tunneled upward through the dust for air. Some farmers claimed that they planted their crops by throwing seed into the air as their fields blew past and that birds flew backwards to keep the sand out of their eyes.
In 1935 Dalhart Texan editor John McCarty founded a Last Man’s Club in which each member took an oath: “In the absence of an act of God, serious family injury, or some other emergency, I pledge to stay here as the last man and to do everything I can to help other last men remain in this country. We promise to stay here till hell freezes over and skate out on the ice.”
As a joke he proposed to build a huge hotel amid the dunes north of Dalhart where tourists would pay “fancy prices” for the privilege of witnessing the “noble grandeur an imposing beauty of a Panhandle sandstorm.” “We’ve got the greatest country in the world if we can just get a few kinks straightened out,” he wrote. “Let’s keep boosting our country.” About 100 people joined the club; more said they wanted to do so but acknowledged they were afraid they’d have to leave.
(From R. Douglas Hurt’s The Dust Bowl: An Agricultural and Social History, 1981.)
“The Mostly German Philosophers Love Song”
By Colorado classics teacher Jeremy Boor:
MP3, lyrics, and chords are on his website.
“Illustrated Verse”
slow, But if it breaks it comes down up goes elevator The so.
— Yale Record, 1900-1919
Problem Solved
Auric and I played all that Satie had written for the piano; one of us would play with him what he composed for four hands. Once, after we had played Morceau en forme de poire, I asked our hero, whom we called mon bon Maître, why he gave such a title, Pieces in the shape of a pear, to this ravishing music. He answered with a twinkle in his eyes: ‘You do know that I visit Debussy quite often; I admire him immensely and he seems to think much of whatever talent I may have. Nevertheless, one day when I showed him a piece I had just composed, he remarked, “Satie, you never had two greater admirers than Ravel and myself; many of your early works had a great influence on our writing. … Now, as a true friend may I warn you that from time to time there is in your art a certain lack of form.” All I did,’ added Satie, ‘was to write Morceau en forme de poire. I brought them to Debussy who asked, “Why such a title?” Why? simply, mon cher ami, because you cannot criticize my Pieces in the shape of a pear. If they are en forme de poire they cannot be shapeless.’
— Vladimir Golschmann, “Golschmann Remembers Erik Satie,” High Fidelity/Musical America, August 1972
(Thanks, Dan.)
“No, No, Mr. Nash”
Let us begin by saying we have nothing but the deepest aversion
Against casting an aspersion
On the beautiful works of Ogden Nash.
In fact we might say we go for his stuff like a vegetarian goes for his succotash.
But the thing that swerves us
From downright admiration is the length of his lines which sometimes look more like paragraphs than lines — frankly it unnerves us.
In fact we have it from unreliable sources
That several people have narrowly missed death by asphyxiation while attempting to read aloud one of these book-length sentences in one breath, all of which forces
Us to request that Mr. Nash please stick to a line that can be written entirely on one page, for when we see one of these endless lines looming up over the edge of the next stanza, we have been known to turn the page and start something else; while on the other hand, when Mr. Nash sticks to a briefer line with definite rhythm,
We’re whythym.
— An unnamed college humor magazine, quoted in Richard Koppe et al., A Treasury of College Humor, 1950
Punctual
Ernest Hemingway published this “blank verse” in his high school literary magazine in 1916:
Get it? David Morice followed up with this “punctuation poem” in Word Ways in February 2012:
% , & —
+ . ? /
” :
% ;
+ $ [ \
It’s a limerick:
Percent comma ampersand dash
Plus period question mark slash
Quotation mark colon
Percent semicolon
Plus dollar sign bracket backslash
(Thanks, Volodymyr.)