Limericks - the sparkling delivery system for filth

The humble limerick has a history of over 200 years. You may associate the limerick with ribaldry and filth, and you may be well justified to do so. This sentiment has been famously stated (in a limerick):

The limerick packs laugh anatomical,

Into spaces that is quite economical.

But the good ones I’ve seen,

So seldom are clean,

And the clean ones so seldom are comical.

This tendency towards filth does not detract from the merits of this form. The limerick has the strict rhyme scheme of AABBA, making it necessarily terse and forcing the author to be witty. There are many very obscene limericks but I find the funniest are the ones which are dirty but not smutty. Such as:

The Anglican archbishop of Hong Kong,

Has a thing that’s twelve inches long.

He thinks the waiters,

Are admiring his gaiters,

When he goes to the bathroom – but he’s wrong.

This gem is by no less than W.H. Auden, arguably the greatest poet of the twentieth century. Another literary giant who indulged in the limerick is Robert Conquest, the historian behind the Great Terror: Stalin’s Purges of the 1930s. A friend of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, Conquest manages to pack a lot into mere five lines. For example, Shakespeare’s ‘All the world’s a stage’ monologue from As You Like It, the famous tract comparing the world to a stage and man’s life divided into seven stages:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Conquest manages to condense the above to:

Seven Ages: first mewling and puking,

Then very pissed off with your schooling,

Then fucks and then fights,

Then judging other chaps’ rights,

Then sitting in slippers, then drooling.

Not much missed, on has to admit.

What about the history of Bolshevism?

There was an old bastard named Lenin

Who did two or three million men in.

That’s a lot to have done in

But where he did one in

That old bustard Stalin did ten in.

However, he’s not above a bit of filth:

A usage that’s seldom got right

Is when to say shit and when shite,

And many a chap,

Will fall back on crap,

Which is vulgar, evasive and trite.

The late great Christopher Hitchens had a repertoire of limericks to last an evening, including many nuggets:

A vice both obscene and unsavoury,

Holds the bishop of Barking in Slavery.

With Lascivious howls,

He deflowered young owls,

Which he lured into an underground aviary.

There once was a man from Devises,

Whose balls were of different sizes.

One was small,

Hardly there at all,

The other was huge – won prizes!

There was once a young man from Australia,

Who painted his arse like a dahlia.

A dollar a smell,

Was all very well,

But two dollars a kiss was a failure.

There is also the red herring:

There was once a young man called Hunt,

Who was given an engine to shunt.

Saw a runaway truck,

By yelling out “duck!”

Saved the life of the fellow in front.

And the equally meta limerick:

There was an old man from Japan,

Who cannot get his poems to scan.

When asked why,

He replies with a sigh,

“It’s because I always try to pack in as many words into the last line of my poems as I possibly can.”

And a dirty one to end it – though I have intentionally kept the most smutty ones from the faint of heart:

There once was a young hooker from Crewe

Who filled her vagina with glue.

She said with a grin:

“Since they’ll pay to get in,

They can pay to get out of it too.”