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 Well,
I’ve been a bit ponderous over the last couple of weeks, so I
have decided to return to the topic of comic verse. In part, I
am stimulated by a friend’s sending me The Oxford Book of Comic
Verse, edited by John Gross. This was first published in 1994,
but I have the paperback version, reissued in 2002. We’ll begin
with a poem to link us to our recent Food piece: this is by Sydney
Smith (1771 – 1845), and it is called Recipe for a Salad:
To make
this condiment, your poet begs
The pounded yellow of two hard-boiled eggs;
Two boiled potatoes, passed through kitchen-sieve,
Smoothness and softness to the salad give;
Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl,
And, half-suspected, animate the whole.
Of mordant mustard add a single spoon,
Distrust the condiment that bites so soon;
But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault,
To add a double quantity of salt.
And, lastly, o'er the flavored compound toss
A magic soup-spoon of anchovy sauce.
Oh, green and glorious! Oh, herbaceous treat!
'T would tempt the dying anchorite to eat;
Back to the world he'd turn his fleeting soul,
And plunge his fingers in the salad bowl!
Serenely full, the epicure would say,
Fate can not harm me, I have dined to-day!
One of my
favorite comic poets (as those who have read some of my earlier
forays into this aspect of our art) is Don Marquis (1874 – 1937).
His poetry is of course written by archy, a cockroach who inhabits
Don’s office, and types out his missives on the typewriter by
jumping on the keys. He can’t reach the shift key, so they are
all written in lower case, and without punctuation (you have to
have used a mechanical typewriter to understand why this is so!).
Most of archy’s messages relate to the life of mehitabel, a cat;
and the examples I have given before are mostly of that kind.
However, the OBCV contains one that I don’t recall seeing
before: apparently Don had asked archy to interview a mummy in
the Metropolitan Museum, and our first poem of the week is archy’s
report, archy
interviews a pharaoh. This was written during the period
of Prohibition in the U.S., as will become apparent.
Here is a
little poem by T. W. Connor, who wrote a large number of songs
in the early part of the twentieth century, typically performed
in what were called music halls. This was published in 1895:
She was
a dear little dicky bird,
‘Chip, chip, chip,’ she went,
Sweetly she sang to me
Till all my money was spent;
Then she went off song—
We parted on fighting terms,
She was one of the early birds,
And I was one of the worms.
Connor died
in 1936, but I have not been able to find a birth date or indeed
any biographical information about him.
 My
second poem for this week is by P. G. (Pelham Greville) Wodehouse
(1881 – 1975). Wodehouse is best known for his comic lovels, mostly
based on the idiocy of the English aristocracy of the early 20th
century: Jeeves, the manservant to the ineffable Bertie Wooster,
is a character now well-known to television audiences; but the
books have an adroit use of the English language which is impossible
to convey in any other form. He also wrote and collaborated on
many successful musical comedies; he lived in the United States
after 1945. I have used a poem of his before, taken from one of
his books: it was Good
Gnus, and it appeared in my piece on the topic of Hunting.
This week’s poem is quite different: it is on the irritation that
all writers share when they see their creation in print and discover
a typographical gaffe; the title is Printer’s
Error. I should emphasize at this point that all the spelling
mistakes and typographical errors in my pieces here are entirely
my fault: I have no intention of racing down to the vast marble
palace where The Mediadrome is created to express my fury as Mr.
Wodehouse does! By the way, P. E. N. in the final stanza refers
to what is now a worldwide organization of writers, originally
founded in England in 1921 by John Galsworthy (1867 – 1933). Nowadays
the periods between the initials are omitted: Merriam Webster’s
Encyclopedia of Literature says the acronym stands for “poets,
playwrights, editors, essayists, and novelists”.
Wodehouse’s
use of the power of the English language and the possibilities
it offers for being funny is mirrored by many of the humorists
of the later twentieth century. On radio, The Goon Show
of the post Second World War period depended on this; and its
successors included Beyond the Fringe and Monty Python’s
Flying Circus. There is a radio show that I think is still
running called I’m Sorry I’ll Say That Again that depends
on exactly this approach. One of the funniest people on British
television is Victoria Wood (1953 - ), and I wish I could quote
one of her pieces completely – generally she sings them to her
own piano accompaniment. But I can’t – for the usual copyright
reasons. I can, however, for illustrative purposes, quote a little
extract; this is from Saturday Night:
Oh dear
what can the matter be?
Eight o’clock at night on a Saturday
Tracey Clegg and Nicola Battersby
Coming to town double quick.
They rendezvous
in front of a pillar
Tracey’s tall like Jonathan Miller
Nicola’s more like Guy the Gorilla
If Guy the Gorilla were thick.
Their hair’s
been done it’s very expensive
Their use of mousse and gel is extensive
As weapons their heads would be classed as offensive
And put under some kind of a ban.
They’re
covered in perfumes but these are misnomers
Nicola’s scent could send dogs into comas
Tracey’s kills insects and dustbin aromas
And also gets stains off a pan.
This is not,
of course, to say that a similar linguistic-based humor is absent
from the United States; for example, many of the poems written
by Ogden Nash (1902 – 1971) are based on this approach. I have
quoted a number of them here before, and I am deliberately avoiding
his work this week!
Fortunately,
many comic verses are anonymous, and can be quoted freely! Here’s
one called The Pig. The version I have here appears to
have come from an Irish source:
It was
an evening in November
As I very well remember,
I was strolling down the street in drunken pride,
But my knees were all a-flutter,
And I landed in the gutter
And a pig came up and lay down by my side.
Yes, I
lay there in the gutter
Thinking thoughts I could not utter,
When a colleen passing by did softly say
‘You can tell a man who boozes
By the company he chooses’—
And the pig got up and slowly walked away.
I have written
several pieces in this series on the poetry of war, and particularly
the poetry of the First World War Poets. There is another totally
different type of poetry that appears during wars that is anonymous,
and frequently of a type impossible to quote from here for reasons
unconnected with copyright problems! Here are a couple of examples
from the First World War:
We are
Fred Karno’s army
The ragtime infantry
We cannot fight, we cannot shoot,
What earthly use are we!
And when we get to Berlin,
The Kaiser he will say,
‘Hoch, hoch! Mein Gott,
What a bloody fine lot
Are the ragtime infantry!
Fred Karno
was the stage name of Frederick John Westcott (1866 – 1941), who
had made a fortune as a music hall impresario. He employed a group
of talented comedians, amongst whom was the young Charlie Chaplin.
Karno spent a vacation in a hotel on Tagg's Island, which lies
in the mid-Thames near Hampton, up-river from Molesey Lock. In
1912, he embarked on a huge gamble. He bought the island and the
hotel. He engaged the well-known architect Frank Matcham and started
to build, in place of the original, what would turn out to be
the most luxurious hotel of the day, The Karsino. There wasn’t
a lot of money around after the war, though; and in 1925 Karno
had to declare bankruptcy and the hotel was sold.
Sure, a
little bit of shrapnel fell from out the sky one day,
And it nestled in my shoulder in a quaint and loving way,
And when the doctor saw it, it looked so sweet and fair,
He said, ‘Suppose we leave it for it looks so peaceful there’.
The he painted it with iodine to keep the germs away,
It’s the only way to treat it, no matter what they say.
But early the next morning he changed his [fickle] mind
And he marked me down for duty and he sent me up the line.
And finally:
I have
no pain, dear mother, now,
But oh! I am so dry.
Connect me to a brewery
And leave me there to die.
The Irish
have a gift for comedy. I come from the City of Liverpool, in
England; and before we were known as the place the Beatles came
from, we were known as a major source of comedians. My high school
had old heavy wooden desks, and carved into the one I had were
the names of two comedians still well known and active when I
was there (Tommy Handley and Arthur Askey, for the showbiz historians
amongst you). Those of us from the ‘pool were asked why there
were so many comedians there, and the answer was that life was
so difficult you had to either laugh or cry. There were more Irish
in Liverpool at the time than there were in Dublin, or so we were
told, and both the humor, and the poetry written there has always
had very visible Irish roots.
My last poem
of the week is by William Percy French (1854 – 1920) who was born
at Cloonyquin, County Roccommon, Ireland. A poem of his, Phil
the Fluter’s Ball, was one of the poems earlier in the
year when our topic was Dance,
and in it I gave a summary of his biography, so I won’t repeat
it again. However, it is worth noting that he is buried in Formby,
which is a small town just outside Liverpool. French’s poem for
this week is The
Mountains of Mourne, and it tells of the problems of an
Irishman immigrating to London.
So there
we are. I hope you enjoy another of our visits to the funny side!
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