Thursday 17 May 2007

Humour and Poetry

I'm a great fan of humourous verse. Humour can be used to deliver serious messages without boring the audience, or it can stand alone for pure entertainment. Wendy Cope is my favourite humourous poet, she is very entertaining and many of her poems have a serious point too. Many performance poets use a lot of humour, many of them tour the comedy circuits. Many performance poets are a bit too aggressive in their delivery for my tastes, though Ash Dickinson goes for the rambling surrealistic route to humour and is often hilarious.

I don't write humourous verse. If I try it comes out false. However I have written some poems that have drawn laughter from audiences when I have performed them in public. One of these poems can be read over on my Alter Ego blog. Please feel free to read it and let me know whether you think its funny or not!

7 comments:

Rob Kistner said...

I'll go look Juliet.

Unknown said...

I'll check out your "funny" poem and the links you posted. Thanks for the recommendations.

gautami tripathy said...

I too can't write humourous poetry at the drop of the hat. I have done a few dorothy parker though. But that is she, not me!

Catherine said...

I left a comment over at Alter Ego. I enjoy Wendy Cope, too.

Anonymous said...

hopeeternal said...
I enjoyed this Juliet. There were traces of remembered 'chats' with my mum here over my teenage clothing - made me think about whether I am like it with my own teenage daughter!
hopeeternal dot wordpress dot com

Anonymous said...

(sorry can't find a link to write to you directly)
but if you want to...
and only if you want to....
I tagged you at this location: http://ascenderrisesabove.com/wordpress/?p=1384

but don't feel you have to do it; as it is so annoying to be tagged, and I explained that in my post.

Maurice D'Ansa said...

Hi, doggerel fans! Please enjoy the occasional droolings of a curmudgeon, in verse, at this location: http://rictusgrinn.blogspot.com/