The World's Best Dirty Limericks

Product Information

The poem might belong to some old-fashioned, run-down pantomime show, with a brilliantined emcee wagging an extended index finger at his squirming middle-aged male patrons: “Ooh, you naughty boys, what were you thinking? Lear was the unquiet possessor of a shameful secret (a gay sensibility) and, to him, a yet more shameful secret (epilepsy).

It’s also to traffic in a language of ambivalence more emotionally authentic—truer to one’s own forever irreconcilably mixed outlook on life—than any simpler utterance. This definitive collection of the world’s rudest, lewdest limericks will perhaps finally bestow respectability upon stanzas long venerated in oral tradition. I enjoy this quotation so much that I’ve never dared to confirm it; how lovely to think that words so wise, so helpful and constructive, issued from the mouth of somebody who back in the fifties was regularly referred to (without irony or self-consciousness) as a “sex bomb.But this year they came up a little dry and given today is all about having a bit of a laugh we had to reach deep into the archives for something a little different. But if you ask me, you’ll be better off reading his Foundation Trilogy, a bona fide sci-fi masterpiece.

But rather than alluding to the conjugal act with clever innuendo, these dull and dirty limericks display zero sense of subtlety.This is likewise true of the goofy, pun-overrun quatrains of a number of light-verse poems by Thomas Hood (1799– 1845). There’s a modest brilliance at the heart of Emily Dickinson’s credo: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.