And I Said: “Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!”
While going through the March 2013 issue of Poetry to figure out who to spotlight this month, I found myself chuckling happily at three different poems by Dan Brown (“Nose Job” and “Girl-Watching” and “Judo”) because they were…funny. Well-crafted, obviously, and written by an experienced hand, but just…funny! And it’s rare, you know, for modern poets who write for adults to turn their hand to funny poems, generally. We used to have the Dorothy Parkers, and Larkin allowed himself some dry yawps from time to time, and there’s the whole world of nonsense rhymes, but most of them have gone the way of the dodo.
So, much like Carrie, it made me wonder: why not? Shall we not write some funny poems, then, that we can throw in the teeth of the ravening wolves of the world?
Of course, funny to one is grim to another; in high school, I used to love the poems of Alden Nowlan (Canadian content!), and one of his more famous poems (to Canadians), if not my favourite, was “Warren Pryor”, which I thought was a bummer, and my dad thought was funny, and I was all “you are a monster, it is sad,” and he just sort of shrugged and said: “hey, it’s funny to me.” And, of course, now I see that he was right. Not necessarily about the poem, but about the validity of your own experience of the poem. THANKS.
Now, before you go write funny poems, for the joy of it, Alden Nowlan’s best poem, at least for my money, and I never cease to think about it, so many years later, is “Great Things Have Happened” for its perfect little moment of sleepy domesticity. Enjoy!