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| Saturday, October 12, 2002 |
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A limerick is a five-line humorous verse. More like our Punjabi tappas that are commonly bandied about at marriage festivities. A limerick could be nonsensical, and is often ribald. Indeed critics of limerick term it as indecent verse. The limerick is furtive and mean; You must keep her in close quarantine, Or she sneaks to the slums And promptly becomes Disorderly, drunk, and obscene. — Morris Bishop And there’s Stanley J. Sharples making fun of people who are looking for lewdness in a limerick. There was a young lady... tut, tut! So you think that you’re in for some smut? Some five-line crescendo Of lewd innuendo? Well, you’re wrong. This is anything but... To limerick’s votaries, the bawdiness can be a real source of amusement and delight; a clean limerick hardly evokes interest. The limerick packs laughs anatomical Into space that is quite economical, But the good ones I’ve seen So seldom are clean, And the clean ones so seldom are comical. — Anon |
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The sailors returned to their ships To contemplate thousands of trips, Then set sail on the breeze With short rhymes up their sleeves, And limericks from Croom on their lips. The five-line verse probably originated from the limerick-makers of Croom, a village in Limerick County, Ireland. Schoolteachers, priests, and self-styled persons of letters living in the area would gather at inns and taverns — called poets courts — and fashion five-line verses. It is widely believed (and perhaps incorrectly) that one Edward Lear invented the limerick. He certainly made it popular. Oxford English Dictionary first defined the word limerick in 1892, four years after Lear’s death. But as O.E. Parrott makes clear in the opening pages of The Penguin Book of Limericks: The limerick’s birth is unclear: Its genesis owed much to Lear. It started as clean, But soon went obscene. And this split haunts its later career. The limerick acquired widespread popularity in the early years of the twentieth century. Newspapers and magazines used to hold limerick contests. Interest in this form of verse has since declined. Some well-known poets and writers have penned limericks. The American poet Ogden Nash wrote them regularly. Here’s one from him. There was a young lady called Harris, That nothing could ever embarrass: Till the bath-salts one day In the tub where she lay Turned out to be Plaster of Paris. Science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov published his collection that he called Lecherous Limericks. Among other notable writers of limericks are Mark Twain, Aldous Huxley, Tennyson, and Rossetti. Obscene ones are mostly put out anonymously. But some writers dare to let them go under their own name. There has always been some amount of interchange between the clean and indecent limerick streams. Obscene ones are laundered into clean ones and clean ones turned into bawdy ones. Reproduced below are a few typical limericks. An angry young husband called Bicket Said: "Turn yourself round and I’ll kick it; You have painted my wife In the nude to the life. Do you think, Mr Greene, it was cricket?" — John Galsworthy There was a young lady of fashion, Who had oodles and oodles of passion; To her lover she said, As they climbed into bed; "Here’s one thing the bastards can’t ration." — Anon There was a young lady of Trent, Who said that she knew what it meant When men asked her to dine With cocktails and wine, She knew what it meant — but she went. — Anon |
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