How I Got Bit by a Limerick Bug
The first dirty limerick I ever heard, tumbled from my father's smiling lips as our family's station wagon creaked off the ferry to Nantucket Island. I was eight.
In those days my father lectured graduate students about chemistry at a big university. Today, people would mumble something about his being on the spectrum. Back then, they just called him an absent-minded professor. He rarely spoke. But he loved jokes. Particularly dirty ones. He had hundreds stored in his photographic memory. Occasionally they'd pop out when circumstances suggested them. The one he recited that day went like this:
There once was a man from NantucketWhose dick was so long he could suck it.He said with a grin,As he wiped off his chin,“If my ear were a cunt, I would fuck it.”
I loved the Nantucket limerick so much, I asked him to recite more. He continued reeling off filthy limericks for about half an hour. At that age, I found the mention of a word like "toilet-bowl" hilarious. So imagine my delight at my spectrum-ish professor of a dad saying words like "cunt" and "dick" in front of our whole family; which included girls. He recited one that went on for many verses as it told the unlikely story of an encounter with kings from far off lands. I just remember this part from its middle:
Then up spake the king of Siam,“For women I don’t give a damn.They haven’t the grip,Or the velvety tip,Or the scope, of the asshole of man.”
Of course as an eight-year-old, I barely understood what the king was going on about. But rhyming the naughty word "damn" with "king of Siam" topped off with a mention of "asshole" tickled my funny bone so hard I peed my pants.
The rhythm of the limericks stuck in my head like the beat of a Top-Forty tune. My AI app has this to say about that: A limerick has "iambs" that are a pair of syllables that go: da-DUM. And lots of "anapestic" triplets that go: ba-da-DUM. Thus spake my AI app.
Yet, there's more to a limerick than its sticky rhythm. It must have just five lines. The first, second and last have eight to ten syllables, and all rhyme. The middle lines are really short, with five to seven syllables. They rhyme with each other, but not the long ones.
Good limericks tell stories in just those five brief phrases. First we meet the hero. Then there's a bit of tomfoolery. And finally a surprise to make us giggle or groan. Here's a classic:
There once was a pirate named Bates,Danced a hornpipe for all of his mates,But he slipped on his cutlass,And made himself nut-less,And now he’s just worthless on dates.
Perhaps my favorite thing about limericks is the fuzziness of their Rule-of-Law. Some limericks are fun precisely because they miss a beat, or fudge a rhyme. Here's one I wrote myself whose very grammar is a bit queer:
An elegant gent took my mom,On a trip to an island near Guam.Then called me to say,That my mom ran away,With a barmaid who called themself Tom.
Within this website under the View tile at the top of the Home Page, you will find a collection called Dumb Daddy Collection. It includes sixty foul and pointless limericks I wrote myself, rather than doing something useful. Each is illustrated by an absurdly talented young fellow from Belgrade in Serbia. I found him on UpWorks, an app where you can hire artists to illustrate most anything. The limericks I wrote and the cartoons he drew are often laced with profanity and sexy stuff. Or poke fun at someone or other.
Of course nowadays “someone or other” belongs to a class of people entitled to the utmost lip service, if not respect. Beware! This website is politically incorrect; or perhaps, just downright offensive. Sorry about that.
If you suffer from debilitating wrath, or self-doubt, when reading words that poke fun at imaginary people, please, read no further. Peril lies ahead!
On the other hand, if you giggle at inappropriate comments, or enjoy writing letters to the editor about folks like me ruining the world for future generations, please feel free to click around to your heart’s content.
Alternatively you can download an e-book of just the limericks I wrote, along with their cartoons, for FREE. It’s right on this website. Just click the e-book tile on the Home Page.
In the book, for your personal safety, the limericks are arranged from mildly politically incorrect to extremely naughty. So if you start turning blue early on, there’s still a chance to close the page before you go apoplectic.
As a further service to the wary e-book reader, the limericks are grouped into five sections according to the degree of vulnerability of the helpless victims facing the cis gender patriarchy as follows:
Part One: Girls On Top
In these irresponsible verses you will meet someone assigned the female gender on their birth certificate. Worse yet, they may have a romantic interest in a similarly certified gentleman. Usually the “lady hero” seems to come out ahead in terms of which gender got the short straw (so to speak).
Part Two: Better Together
Here we find people in a relationship. Its offensiveness depends on whether one swings liberal or conservative. A centrist may well be offended left and right.
Part Three: Oddballs
These people are acting a tad peculiar. So far I don’t know who will be traumatized by their fictional behavior the most. Please be so kind as to let me know.
Part Four: Naughty Boys
Now come the bad guys who represent at least a few of the most derided attitudes of the Eurocentric patriarchy that may or may not be losing its grip on universal hegemony.
Part Five: Clerical Errors
At last we meet the clergy from the 55 modern sects who are certain the instructions in the Dead Sea Scrolls came from The One True God by way of a chatty bush that burned up 3500 odd years ago, a pair of stone tablets etched in paleo-Hebrew that got lost in Jerusalem about 2500 years ago, and/or 531 sheets of gold in approximately A4 format, emblazoned in reform Egyptian hieroglyphics, that got returned to an angel just outside Palmyra, NY circa 1829. If you are allergic to stereotypes of clergy acting like people (or worse), please keep your EPI pen handy.
Part Six: The One True Prophet
As to Part Six: The One True Prophet, I was never able to write a single verse, satanic or otherwise, due to my irrational fear of a well-intentioned fatwa. Sometimes a pen may be mightier than a sword. But a quill wouldn’t be my weapon of choice on defense against a scimitar in close quarters. Especially not on a dark and stormy night in County Limerick, or for that matter, Belfast in broad daylight. And to be sure, not on a stage anywhere near Chautauqua, NY.
Could we maybe discuss this over lunch?
But here is a limerick I wrote about that, by way of apology, for being such a scaredy cat. It is the only one on this whole website that is utterly lacking in profanity or dirty stuff. As befits a prophet.
All The World Is But A Stage
S. Rushdie had thought way back when,That the sword could give way to the pen.But then he got mugged,By a righteous young thug,And had to consider again.
