Thursday 20 May 2010

My Favourite Limericks (of which precisely one is actually a limerick)

Here's the actual limerick:

There was a young man from place B
Who satisfied Predicate P,
He performed action A,
In adjective way,
Resulting in Consequence C.


There was a young man of St Bees,
Who was stung on the arm by a wasp,
When asked "does it hurt?"
He replied, "Yes it does,
but I'm sure glad it wasn't a hornet.

There was a young man from Japan,
Whose limericks just wouldn't scan,
When he was asked why,
He said in reply,
"I'm not really sure but I think it might be because I always try to cram as many words into the last line as I possibly can".

There was a young man from Tyree,
Whose limericks stopped at line three,
A bit like this one.

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

There was a young man from Verdun.

And then, of course, there's the one about the Emperor Nero.


Whilst I'm on this topic, if anyone knows where it is possible to get hold of a copy of The Oxford Book of Meta Limericks by Elliott Moreton and Carl Muckenhoupt, please let me know (I've tried abebooks, and amazon, which about exhausts my online book sources).

Update (21/05):
a selection of poems from the book are available here, which just makes me want it more.... :(

I really love the 'copyright' one.

6 comments:

Andy said...

Once you read those, you can delete them to make way for the limerickal-comments :-), like the following.

Andy said...

Elliott Moreton seems to have a few good ones, like this one:

There once was a fellow from Xiangling
Whose greatest delight was in mangling
Poems. He would drop
Words between lines and lop
Their ends off, and leave readers dang


Also, you're already 3rd out of 225000 on Google for "meta limericks"!

John Faben said...

I did, so I think I'll leave the first one in, just because it's now deeply confusing, and hence fits in with the theme of the post.

Yeah, I probably should've linked to the the site that I assume you got those from (I have now).

Anonymous said...

There was a black cat on a grave
He did not want to misbehave
He was abandoned there
And it was just not fair
But then he attended the Zombie Rave

Shirley Smothers


This limerick was inspired by Limerick Friday/Facebook

Peter Shor said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Chris Wallace said...

Inspired by 'There was a young man from Tyree', I would like to add my own:

There was a young man from Kildare
Whose limericks didn't play fair
Despite needing more
He stopped at line four

Chris Wallace