The Oxford Book of Comic Verse PDF Download

Author: John Gross
Publisher: Oxford Books of Prose & Verse
ISBN: 9780199561612
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
From limericks to social satire, The Oxford Book of Comic Verse offers a remarkable collection of outstanding light poetry. John Gross has brought together the finest writers in the history of the English language - from Chaucer and Skelton to Shakespeare and Swift, Lord Byron to Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson to John Updike, as well as witty song lyrics from such artists as Irving Berlin and Cole Porter - offering delightful examples of their comic verse. Drawing on many different types of verse, including epigrams, street ballads, advertising jingles, clerihew, music-hall lyrics, and the doubledactyl of the calypso, this highly entertaining collection offers an exceptionally wide range of comic pleasures. The poems are by turns subtle, down-to-earth, macabre, ingenious, acerbic, ribald, and cheerful. Written to amuse, they call forth laughter and delight in equal measure. Compiled by one of our finest critics and anthologists, this reissue boasts a stylish new design and a fresh contemporary feel.

Author: Steven Pearlman
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1483419142
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 84

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Book Description
This is an anthology of humorous poetry that has been 40 years in the making. I'm not going as far back as my silly limerick about a gorilla which I wrote when I was nine or ten but I do remember the pleasure I got in composing it and in making other children laugh with it. I suppose my 'serious' attempts at humorous poetry began at Bradford University where I was the unofficial resident poet at a fortnightly folk club in the cellar of the Catholic chaplaincy. I felt obliged to inflict my warped observations and tortuous puns on whoever remained in the room. I love the way a whole poem can grow from just one observation, one comment, one pun. I find that developing that idea and playing around with words, even parts of words, to be a deeply satisfying process. I use humorous poetry as a way of expressing my opinions, feelings or personality in a brief, easily accessible and hopefully entertaining way. Enjoy/endure.

Author: Barbara Hamby
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820330876
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
Can serious poetry be funny? Chaucer and Shakespeare would say yes, and so do the authors of these 187 poems that address timeless concerns but that also include comic elements. Beginning with the Beats and the New York School and continuing with both marquee-name poets and newcomers, Seriously Funny ranges from poems that are capsized by their own tomfoolery to those that glow with quiet wit to ones in which a laugh erupts in the midst of terrible darkness. Most of the selections were made in the editors' battered compact car, otherwise known as the Seriously Funny Mobile Unit. During the two years in which Barbara Hamby and David Kirby made their choices, they'd set out with a couple of boxes of books in the back seat, and whoever wasn't driving read to the other. When they found that a poem made both of them think but laugh as well, they earmarked it. Readers will find a true generosity in these poems, an eagerness to share ideas and emotions and also to entertain. The singer Ali Farka Tour said that honey is never good when it's only in one mouth, and the editors of Seriously Funny hope its readers find much to share with others.

Author: Brian Moses
Publisher: Macmillan Children's Books
ISBN: 1760986380
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
The Best Ever Book of Funny Poems is a brilliantly funny anthology of the most giggle-worthy children's poems from one of the nations most celebrated children's poets, Brian Moses. Perfect for gifting and for reading aloud, you'll be chortling along with Brian as he shows you the funniest poems in the world! Explore chucklesome poems about pets, funny creatures, school, family, fantasy and fairy-tales, dinosaurs and dragons, space, and just plain SILLY poems. With poets such as Brian Bilston, Sue Hardy-Dawson, Pie Corbett and Paul Cookson next to Liz Brownlee, Mike Jubb, James Carter and Rachel Rooney, this is the ultimate hysterical collection of rib-tickling poems guaranteed to make you laugh out loud.

Author: W. H. Auden
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 159017089X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Auden's celebrated anthology of light verse is packed with surprising finds while also offering a striking rethinking of the poetic canon. Commissioned by Oxford University Press in the 1930s, when Auden's own work was at its boldest, the book caught its original publisher off guard. For it is less a collection of humorous verses than a celebration of the popular voice in English, in which the work of great satirists like Swift and Byron keeps company with ballads, chanteys, ditties, nursery rhymes, street calls, bathroom graffiti, epitaphs, folk songs, vaudeville turns, limericks, and blues. Turning away from the post-Romantic cult of the sentimental lyric, Auden features poetry that is clear, enjoyable, and, no matter its age, absolutely modern. This new edition includes previously censored poems, together with Auden's remarkable introduction and a new preface by his literary executor, Edward Mendelson.

Author: D.B. Wyndham Lewis
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 9781590170380
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
The editors of this legendary and hilarious anthology write: "It would seem at a hasty glance that to make an anthology of Bad Verse is on the whole a simple matter . . . On the contrary . . . Bad Verse has its canons, like Good Verse. There is bad Bad Verse and good Bad Verse. It has been the constant preoccupation of the compilers to include in this book chiefiy good Bad Verse." Here indeed one finds the best of the worst of the greatest poets of the English language, masterpieces of the maladroit by Dryden, Wordsworth, and Keats, among many others, together with an index ("Maiden, feathered, uncontrolled appetites of, 59;. . . Manure, adjudged a fit subject for the Muse, 91") that is itself an inspired work of folly.

Author: Paul Beatty
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1596917164
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
Edited by the author of The Sellout, winner of the 2016 Man Booker Prize, Hokum is a liberating, eccentric, savagely comic anthology of the funniest writing by black Americans. This book is less a comprehensive collection than it is a mix-tape narrative dubbed by a trusted friend-a sampler of underground classics, rare grooves, and timeless summer jams, poetry and prose juxtaposed with the blues, hip-hop, political speeches, and the world's funniest radio sermon. The subtle musings of Toni Cade Bambara, Henry Dumas, and Harryette Mullen are bracketed by the profane and often loud ruminations of Langston Hughes, Darius James, Wanda Coleman, Tish Benson, Steve Cannon, and Hattie Gossett. Some of the funniest writers don't write, so included are selections from well-known yet unpublished wits Lightnin' Hopkins, Mike Tyson, and the Reverend Al Sharpton. Selections also come from public figures and authors whose humor, although incisive and profound, is often overlooked: Malcolm X, Suzan-Lori Parks, Zora Neale Hurston, Sojourner Truth, and W.E.B. Dubois. Groundbreaking, fierce, and hilarious, this is a necessary anthology for any fan or student of American writing, with a huge range and a smart, political grasp of the uses of humor.

Author: Neil Astley
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Limited
ISBN: 9781852249618
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
This lively anthology brings together two kinds of funny: humorous poems that make you laugh or smile (funny ha-ha), and strange, surreal, witty or plain weird poems (funny peculiar). There has always been a tradition of comic and curious verse in English poetry, but in contemporary poetry the peculiar has come into its own, as this surprising selection shows. Presented in a hardback version of the giftbook format used for other shorter Bloodaxe anthologies aimed at a popular readership, Funny Ha-Ha, Funny Peculiar covers a wide variety of highly entertaining or provocatively engaging poets.

Author: Kingsley Amis
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780192820754
Category : English poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Kingsley Amis has achieved his main objective in compiling The New Oxford Book of Light Verse--to raise a good-natured smile--by providing a witty and consistently entertaining survey of this tradition of English Writing. The book ranges from satire to nonsense verse, from deft vers de societe to epigrams and limericks.

Author: Carolyn Wells
Publisher: Legare Street Press
ISBN: 9781022209480
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A collection of comic poems and limericks by a variety of authors, including Ogden Nash, Hilaire Belloc, and W.S. Gilbert. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.