🐐April Goat Fool 04

I just missed a few days, I am not abdicating the throne.

Sorry. I didn’t intend to be late, it just kinda happened that way. I blame the goat.

In my previous post I ended with a math “joke” which wasn’t spectacular on its own, but it brought up a couple fun math limericks. (well, “fun” is in the eye of the beholder, of course, particularly when it comes to math)

I had said I didn’t have enough [good] math jokes to last the month. As I dug through my notes for the limericks, I decided to tell more math jokes share some fun limericks.

I should maybe preface by saying that I’m not much of a “poetry” guy. I mean, I like good poetry as much as anybody, but I don’t love poetry for the sake of poetry. If it has good meter, a steady rhythm, and passable rhyming, I’ll accept it as poetry. If it’s lacking all of those… I very well might not. I recognize that it can still be “art”, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
A lot of other art is like that, too — I’m not required to like it just because it’s “art”.
And opinions. I’m not required to like (or even accept) your opinion if it’s stupid…but I’ll usually be civil about it.

But getting back to the points — on my horns and in my rambling — it’s limerick time!
Most limericks are fun and/or funny. That’s probably why they’re so well-liked (people like to laugh). The good ones will keep the rhythm/meter consistent while also having proper rhyming.

So here I go with some limericks I like:

(I think it’s fun to try to guess the last line before you get there, like that one segment on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me. I wish that the forum had a working [spoiler] tag, but it doesn’t. Oh well. I blame the spirit of Goatsmas past.)

An exhaustingly non-exhaustive treatise on limericks

(Some of these are actually found on the Wikipedia page. Sorry.)

What is a limerick? Well, it’s a humorous poetry style with a particular structure, assumed to be named after the city or county “Limerick” in Ireland.
I’m confident you already know exactly what it is, I’m just using this to establish a pattern that may increase the humor later on.

There was an old man
who wrote limericks that were
much more like haiku.

That wasn’t a limerick.
But at least it was closer than this:

There was a young man from Purdue
Whose limericks stopped at line two.

Or this:

There once was a man from Verdun.

This is a limerick:

A limerick packs laughs anatomical
into space that is quite economical.
    The goods ones I’ve seen,
    so seldom are clean,
and the clean ones so seldom are comical.

The first rule of limerick club is that we don’t talk about Bruno.
The second rule of limerick club is that they have 5 lines.

A very sad poet was Jenny.
Her limericks weren’t worth a penny.
    In technique they were sound,
    yet somehow she found
whenever she tried to write any
she always wrote one line too many.

See, that wasn’t a limerick. It must have 5 lines that rhyme in the pattern AABBA, like this:

There was a young man from Japan
whose limericks never would scan.
    And when they asked why,
    he said “I do try!
But when I get to the last line I try to fit in as many words as I can.”

Okay, that rhymed correctly, but it didn’t work.
I was taught as a kid that a limerick’s syllables are 9,9,6,6,9. It’s more accurate to say that the lines are 8-9 and 5-6 syllables, but even better is to count just the accented syllables (3,3,2,2,3) and make sure it doesn’t sound clumsy.

There was an old man of St. Bees,
who was stung in the arm by a wasp,
    when asked, “Does it hurt?”
    he replied, “No, it doesn’t,
I’m so glad it wasn’t a hornet.”

Perfect! Except that lost the rhyming…

Aside from the stricture of structure, limericks often follow a particular format. The first line introduces a person from a place, the second line… why am I wasting time explaining this? They’re like this:

There once was a {person} from {place}
Whose {body part} was {special case}.
    When {event} would occur
    It would cause {him or her}
To violate {law of time/space}.

By the strict rules (and ancient tradition), the first and last line can end with the same word. I don’t like that because it doesn’t feel as clever (but that’s my opinion). For example:

There was a Young Person of Smyrna
whose grandmother threatened to burn her.
    But she seized on the cat,
    and said “Granny, burn that!
You incongruous old woman of Smyrna!”

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As previously indicated, they often reference things that make them not child-friendly.

There once was a lady from Bude
Who went for a swim in the nude.
    Then a man came along,
    and unless I am wrong,
you expected this line to be lewd.

FWIW, here is one that my parents used to teach/explain limericks when I was a kid. Apparently it’s by William Cosmo Monkhouse (but I don’t know who he is).

There was a young lady of Wilts
who walked up to Scotland on stilts.
    When they said it was shocking
    to show so much stocking,
she answered: “Then what about kilts?”

Like jokes and memes and anything else we steal borrow off the internet, I don’t know the origin of most of these. But in this case, I have a note that it’s by John Ciardi, from a book of limericks (co-authored with Isaac Asimov). I’m too lazy to verify that right now, but some day I’ll track that book down and read it.

There once was a girl who intended
to keep herself morally splendid
    and ascend into Glory,
    which is not a bad story,
except that that’s not how it ended.

This one is a little about math (I never promised I wouldn’t), but more about zymurgy. And puns; always the puns.

A woman in liquor production
owns a still of exquisite construction.
    The alcohol boils
    through magnetic coils.
She says that it’s “proof by induction.”

Here’s another one on the nerdier side, but leaning toward chemists this time.

A mosquito cried out in great pain,
“A chemist has poisoned my brain!”
    And the cause of his sorrow
    was para-dichloro-
diphenyl-trichloroethane.

(that’s DDT btw)

As long as we’re talking science, here’s one for microbiologists. I disagree with the pronunciation of “quaff” that this requires, but apparently it’s legal.

An amoeba named Sam, and his brother,
were having a drink with each other,
    in the midst of their quaffing,
    they split their sides laughing,
and each of them now is a mother.

As an aspiring linguist, I like to pronounce things correctly, including letters of the alphabets. But sometimes “incorrect” pronunciations make for funnier stories:

There once was a vicar at Kew
who kept his pet cat in a pew.
    He taught it to speak
    alphabetical Greek,
but it never got farther than µ.

Speaking of language, this one tries to trick you a bit. Just remember that “spring” and “fall” both have meanings aside from the seasons. I am saddened by it reusing the rhyming word. Oh well.

There was a young fellow named Hall
who died in the spring in the fall.
    ’Twould have been a bad thing
    had he died in the spring
but he didn’t — he died in the fall.

This has a punchline you’ve heard before, but this is may be your first time hearing it in a limerick:

A young psychic midget named Marge
went to jail with the most heinous charge.
    But despite lock and key
    the next day she broke free,
and the headlines said “Small Medium at Large”.

In this last one, “the Wold” could be any of

• wold: a wood or forest, or an unforested/deforested plain
• a poetic abuse of “the Wolds” (a region of hills/valleys in England),
• an older name for Old, Northamptonshire, England
• the northernmost region of Rohan, Middle Earth
• who cares? It rhymes with “beer icy cold.”

There once was a man from the Wold
Who loved drinking beer icy cold.
    As he reached for his cup,
    Never gonna give you up!
Oooh, snap! You’ve just been limerickrolled!