The Limerick

In the opinion of no less an authority than George Bernard Shaw, a Limerick is innately obscene. A Limerick that isn’t properly rude isn’t really a Limerick.

The limerick packs laughs anatomical

In space that is quite economical.

But the good ones I've seen

So seldom are clean

And the clean ones so seldom are comical.

With that in mind TVFP has gathered together a few of our favourites for your enjoyment. Parental warning: you may want to ask the children to go and smoke their pot in the other room.

*

The limerick’s callous and crude

It’s morals distressingly lewd

It’s not worth the reading

By persons of breeding

It’s designed for us vulgar and rude

From what we can tell Limericks, with some notable exceptions, were written by the dispossessed. The writers were almost always men. Often as not the object of their deprecations were minorities, mostly women and homosexuals.  Most of these limericks are anything but funny, but rather reflect times of poverty and in some cases genocide by starvation, a soaring infant mortality rate, class and gender conflict, war and political frustration.

Having said that we find it difficult to dismiss the Limerick on grounds of political and social correctness. The Limerick would only laugh at us and would write a scathing five liner about the size of our penis or would endeavor to insert some article of commodity fetishism in our anus. The Limerick by its nature is defiant of any attempt to cleanse its anarchic soul. In truth that is why at we at TVFP are so fond of it.

Some of these limericks have been adapted by TVFP to reflect modern concerns. The rest are what they are.

*

Some time back there was a bombshell

Light Rail Transit might start to do well

Now that could cost loads

To the selfish who build the roads

So they brought in an exhaust hole from hell

*

Have the treasures of our land in thrall

Any chance of survival at all

With a dope like Kent to trust

It looks like a bust

And the Harper we know is a know-it-all

*

The thing about ‘Back to Basics’

And similar high moral tricks

Is they’re bound to backfire

When your Conservative choir

Have all got their brains in their dicks

*

A mathematician named Hall

Has a hexahedronical ball

And the cube of its weight

Times his pecker plus eight

Is his cell number – give him a call

*

There once was a young lady with such graces

That her curves cried out for embraces

You look, said McGee

Like a million to me

Invested in all the right places

*

An astronomer, pious but odd

To be honest a dirty old sod

Who’d searched for a sign

Of the presence divine

Cried, I’ve just found Uranus, dear God

*

Her husband is in the Hussars

A colonel all covered in scars

But it isn’t his weals

For which nightly she feels

But the privates he lost in the wars

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