The subject of some of my classes in my Intermediate group this term. I've avoided this topic for four years and here it is, inevitably. A few of the poems I selected the other night went down quite well - Brendan Cleary's Planet Steve, Bill Herbert's Ode to Scotty.

Hugo Williams once wisely told me 'be wary of being called witty, it's what they call you when you're no good at anything else'. Six months later I was described as witty by erm, a certain poet (among other things, I'm glad to say)!

Which poets or poems make you laugh?

How do you negotiate that fine line between poetic humour and gag masquerading as poem?

Wendy Cope's poems are often gags masquerading as poems, in my opinion - or else small rhyming pieces of whimsy. Which is really nice in itself but I'd find it difficult to analyse these pieces alongside longer, more "serious" poetry. The "Bloody men are like bloody buses" one, for example, raises a smile but little else.

Joe Dunthorne's poetry is frequently brilliant and hilarious. I loved "Sestina for my friends", which he read at Broadcast last month and can be heard here at Poetcasting. I think that formal poetry lends itself really well to humour - we're entertained and impressed at the same time, particularly if the humour and technical skill is sustained over a villanelle or pantoum or sestina - a much more rewarding experience than reading a limerick.

Talking of sestinas, I've never read a funnier one than Sestina: Bob by Jonah Winter.

Humour through language. That's what gets me.

I think Luke Kennard is the funniest person I've read and heard in recent years. On a completely different level, I used to be in tears with Pam Ayres, who I think is still one of the funniest popular poets we have. And of course we have to include Gavin Ewart, John Cooper Clarke and John Hegley. I've never heard Chloe Poems.

As part of my first reading as Elgin's 'Poet Partner' I recently read Bill Herbert's poem 'Why the Elgin Marbles should be returned to Elgin.' The audience loved it, and picked up all of Bill's local references.

It's based on a funny precept, and builds up in a very funny way, but it's not a simple gag, and there's a lot of linguistic and poetic subtlety in it.

Poems which make me laugh out loud when reading them on the page are very, very rare.

Frank Kuppner's 'A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty' did (and does still).

A couple of Sean O'Brien's - 'Welcome Major Poet' made me laugh out loud the first time I read it; and I think 'The Play's The Thing' did, too.

I can remember being delighted with, and perhaps giggling out loud at, some of Cope's parodies in 'Making Cocoa...' when I first read it. 'Waste Land Limericks', too.

Poems which make you laugh at a reading are far more common, obviously.

When I saw this thread I immediately thought of Tim Wells' "On Being Expelled from Eton for Shagging Tallulah Bankhead" but couldn't remember the name of it so had to look it up, at which point I rediscovered "Office Politics". :lol:

I'd second Chris's recommendation of Luke Kennard. I heard him read at Cambridge Wordfest, was all set to be dismissive (younger than me, good-looking, published earlier than me, all the usual pathetic jealousies) and was blown away. For me, what makes his humour effective is the way in which that element of quirk in his poems is played out to its fullest. It's also, irrespective of humour or not, what makes his work so interesting. I'm really looking forward to where his imagination takes him next - and to meeting the poems on the page.

I'd also like to put forward Ian Duhig's "Margin Prayer from an Ancient Psalter", which was one of the first contemporary poems I encountered at close quarters, and which I love for its combination of humour and pathos. "Luke, White Luke!" I love as well his "A Line from Snorri Sturluson".

I'd like to second Charlotte on Joe Dunthorne, he's very funny but not in a showy 'aren't I clever' way. I didn't really think of Luke's stuff as being especially funny, more absurdist, but he's a wonderful reader.

My vote would go to our own Jacqueline Saphra for the poem she wrote for a recent "bad" poem workshop. It reduced the class to tears.

The Larkins I know by heart (the usual suspects) usually make people laugh when I recite them, though they are at least as grim as they are funny.

Fenton's 'The Skip' and 'God: A Poem' also work. And Billy Collins's 'Litany' and 'Sonnet' make me grin. Some of Auden's limericks, such as 'The Bishop Elect of Hong Kong...' and occasional lines from some of his other poems.

There is Hugo Williams's slightly evil WHEN I GROW UP, which revels in the rotteness of old age, the flip side of Jenny Joseph's, the black to her '...Purple'.

Poems have rarely made me laugh out loud. I think the last time it happened was when I read Koch's parody of W.C. Williams's THIS IS JUST TO SAY.

Before I had come across Wendy Cope's poems, Frank Ormsby came and read a few of them to my MA class (all three of us). 'A Policeman's Lot', in particular, had us in stitches:

Oh, I once was a policeman young and merry (young and merry),
Controlling crowds and fighting petty crime (petty crime),
But now I work on manners litarary (litererry)
And I am growing old before my time ('for my time)
No, the imagination of a writer (of a writer)
Is not the sort of beat a chap would choose (chap would choose)
And they've assigned me a prolific blighter ('lific blighter) -
I'm patrolling the unconscious of Ted Hughes.

and so on.

Tim W's Tallulah Bankhead poem isn't really funny at the end, though, is it.

Don Juan. Makes me laugh.
Charlotte I think Wendy Cope is a lot more substantial than that.
James Merrill has a poem about a vampire that I can't read out loud, ever, to anyone, without cracking up totally - can't remember the title though and I'm at work.
James Tate has a couple I think are really funny - one was recently on Poem Daily I think.
Duhig, yes, he often is funny.

I think some of mine are really funny, too, and I love it when people laugh, but they're never JUST funny. Most of the funniest things are of course also quite dark. Roddy, you worry me, people are always calling me witty.

On the subject of Ian Duhig's work, I've always enjoyed 'From The Irish'.

I also think that Paterson's poems have their moments - 'The Reading' from Landing Light is great, and parts of 'The Alexandrian Library' (particularly its second installment in God's Gift) are pretty hilarious too.

Mooching around the TLS's subscriber archives recently I also stumbled across Carrie Etter's poem 'The Review', which is just brilliant.

As for what makes these poems successful, though - or at least for me - is their making a decent point in a humourous way. That is, they're still fulfilling my expectations of any poem - for it to be insightful, illuminating and thought-provoking - but doing so through humour. When all's said and done, poems that are funny without any wider artistic purpose just aren't poems. On it's own, humour for the sake of humour tends to smack of distraction.

Some funny (contemporary) poets wot I like, in no particular order.

Joe Dunthorne
Tim Wells
James Wilkes
Luke Kennard
Ross Sutherland
Suzanne Andrade
Abigail Oborne

None of these are 'punchline poets'.

For humour / wit which relies entirely on incredible deployment of language, and which might not even make you laugh, James Wilkes is your man.

Well Tom, as I've told him myself, I'm a fan. Love those reviews. And the eggbox!

I think I agree with this. You made me think about Kathryn Simmonds' work; often very funny in a wry kind of way but always with a sad or disturbing undercurrent. And while I wouldn't go as far as to say that poems that are only funny are not really poems, I do agree that as art they are pretty limited.

Billy Collins, now, his are shot through with humour and irony, you might even call some of them charming. But having eaten up his Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes, I was disappointed by Nine Horses. It just felt like more of the same; more charm, more irony, more beautifully executed work - but where was the development of his body of work?

Oh no, that makes it look like I'm using Kathryn's work as an example of limited art! I meant it the other way around; she's an example of where humour is inextricable from other elements. Not limited art at all! :o

Collins is possibly too prolific, a little like our own (at times brilliantly funny and/or tragic) Paul Durcan. Collins has his own distinctive, laconic humour, with its edge of darkness and sadness. Sure, I have sometimes got the impression (if I read too much of him at one sitting) that it comes perhaps a tad too easily, that he is on automatic pilot on some of those night drives and perambulations round the garden puffing a cigarette (one of his recent efforts, a humourless, cod-Irish piss-take of Heaney, was an embarrassment). All forgivable though, because he has, I believe, written some resonant poems.

As for developing, I am not sure one should demand that of any poet's body of work. And I am certain that a perceived lack of development should not cause one to dismiss the best of that poet's work. Did Hardy 'develope'? Did Did Larkin or Norman MacCaig, once they hit their stride?

I think MacCaig did develop. It's just that development is sometimes a shorthand for more complexity and diversity, or a euphemism for critical tolerance, which is not always how writers develop.

The laconic free verse sketches of Voice Over are in many ways a development from the 50s work with its residual tinge of the apocalyptics, the taut formalism of his 50s and 60s poems and the socio-political edge often there in his 60s and 70s work.

Thanks Roddy, useful to get that learnt. I only have the latest three by Collins, which seem pretty much stylistically uniform.

Billy Collins' 'Litany' always makes me laugh.

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/litany/