Comedy is totally subjective. What makes one person roar with laughter can fail to elicit even the faintest of smiles from another. But the classics of comic verse have stood the test of time.
Here are the favorites from Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Jonathan Swift, Thomas Hood, Hillaire Belloc, W.S. Gilbert, William Shakespeare, Lord Byron, John Keats, C.S. Calverley- all the way through to the masterly pen of our age, John Betjeman. And that is not to forget perhaps the greatest of them all: Anon.
They wrote in couplets, triplets, in quatrains and trochaic dimeters. There are ballads, sonnets, proverbs, and nonsense verse. Poems to inform, divert, satirize, castigate and praise. And then there is the delightfully abused form, the limerick. A collection to make all listeners smile, laugh, remember and discover.
