The limerick form can be traced back several hundred years is normally satirical or downright rude. According to Wiki, Gershon Legman, who compiled the largest and most scholarly anthology, held that the true limerick, as a folk form, is always obscene. The word derives from the Irish town of Limerick. Apparently a pub song or tavern chorus based on the refrain “Will you come up to Limerick?” where, of course, such bawdy songs or ‘Limericks’ were sung. But as limericks were short, relatively easy to compose and bawdy or sexual in nature they were often repeated by beggars or the working classes in the British pubs and taverns of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventh centuries. The poetic zeal of the writers was often limbered up by a few jars!

The limerick packs laughs anatomical
In space that is quite economical,
But the good ones I’ve seen
So seldom are clean,
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.

The writer Edward Lear was a big fan of Limericks. Here’s one of his funnier ones…

There was an Old Person whose habits,
Induced him to feed upon rabbits;
When he’d eaten eighteen,
He turned perfectly green,
Upon which he relinquished those habits.

I like the ones that leave it to your imagination, that have a kind of anti-limerick about them…

There once was a lady from Bude
Who went swimming one day in the lake.
A man in a punt
Stuck his pole in the water
And said “You can’t swim here — it’s private

And…

There once was a man from the sticks
Who liked to compose limericks.
But he failed at the sport,
For he wrote ‘em too short.

Write us a limerick, go on…

Love from Steph and The Laundry

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