A Joke Walks into a Poem: Using Humor in Poetry
-
1️⃣ “Ode to the Midwest” by Kevin Young
2️⃣ “The Swan at Edgewater Park” by Ruth L. Schwartz
3️⃣ “Are All the Break-Ups in Your Poems Real?” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
4️⃣ “Report on the Most Recent Survey of Morale” by Carrie Shippers
5️⃣ “On Being the Glamorous Blonde Villain from All Those Nineties Kids’ Movies” by Ellie Black
6️⃣ “Sick” by Shel Silverstein
Ever wonder where poems come from? Poe-trees.
What did one poem say to the other? You’re so verse-tile!
Poetry has a reputation for being serious—a literary form that deals with serious subjects in serious ways. Of course, this is not not true; poetry does, in fact, grapple with the complexity of the human experience, which includes suffering, death, grief—or collective and aggregates of these individual pains—war, genocide, systemic oppression.
I know poetry is where I turn when I cannot make sense of the senseless, as Maggie Smith says in “Good Bones”:
….The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
Few would dispute Smith’s point about the world being substantially terrible, and the success of this poem hinges on the reader’s agreement with that obvious fact.
Poetry also works quite beautifully in capturing the other fifty percent that Smith alludes to—joy, triumph over adversity, our happiness amidst the terrible. Ross Gay’s, “Throwing Children,” considers the unbridled joy of a child:
…like a bumblebee like a hummingbird up there giggling in the light like a giddy little girl up there the world knows how to love.
I won’t argue that poetry eschews aspects of life we relish and celebrate. Still, these subjects can be, and often are, treated seriously to varying degrees.
My wondering here is more about the ways poets engage the grand spectrum of experiences and emotions using tonally different approaches, specifically through humor. I often think about how humor works in poetry, how poets use humor to evoke a range of emotions.
At its best, I think humor can serve to bring a reader closer to a poem and temper the terrible in ways to consider it more fully. Humor can illuminate the strangeness of the world or the strange workings of a poet’s mind. It can surprise and delight.
Here are a few of my favorite poems that lean into humor:
1 “Ode to the Midwest” by Kevin Young
As a native, lifelong Ohioan, Young’s poetic confection makes me smile every time I read it. What compels me is the deft way he plays with stereotypes about midwesterners and creates humor for both insiders and outsiders to our ways of being—from a food culture he describes as “doused in cheese & fried” to fashions of tacky Christmas sweaters (even before it was an ironically hip cool holiday thing) to sweatsuits.
Young pokes fun at us midwesterners in a way only an insider among us can. Amidst all the good natured jabs, he drops, “I want to be/ the only black person I know” a line almost inconspicuous in the list he has curated, but one that still points to a serious truth about his experience in a region where geographic segregation by race is as much a part of the landscape as snow in winter.
2 “The Swan at Edgewater Park” by Ruth L. Schwartz
For a Clevelander like me, Ruth Schwartz’s “The Swan at Edgewater Park'' is a natural progression from Young’s playful homage to the Midwest, both for its focus on place and for its use of humor as poetic strategy.
Her swan personifies Clevelanders with descriptions that function simultaneously as gentle critique and hilarious observation–the swan is “one of your prissy richpeoples' swans,” “swilling whatever it is swans swill'' amidst condoms and candy wrappers along the shores of the infamously polluted Lake Erie. She points to how the locals react to the sight of the swan, “Clevelanders walk by saying Look/ at that big duck!” Here, she lobs a clever and inarguably accurate barb at the assumptions people make about a certain refinement the people of this city might lack, one that every Clevelander can’t deny is kind of true.
3 “Are All the Break-Ups in Your Poems Real?” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
This poem’s humor begins in its title: Nezhukumatathil sets the tone for poetic self-deprecation, the poem pokes fun at the tendency for poets to explore the timeless subject of heartbreak and grief. She questions how poets (and writers) seem to have more of these experiences than the average human, which also points to a central tenet of writing—you do not have to be factually accurate to relate an emotional truth to the reader.
In fact, sometimes writers sometimes dispense with what is “real”—qualifying it in her first line, “If by real you mean as real as a shark tooth stuck / in your heel.” She uses a delightfully exaggerated string of metaphors as if to challenge the bravado of poets’ penchant for melodrama and successive romantic misfortunes. Like the Clevelanders in Schwatz’s poem, poet readers cannot look away from the truth or help but laugh at themselves.
4 “Report on the Most Recent Survey of Morale” by Carrie Shippers
Shippers takes her readers to the world of work, playing with the conventions of being employed in a modern bureaucracy, ways the experience can be dehumanizing, and how workers can feel patronized in passive-aggressive ways.
The pretext of the poem is management’s response to an anonymous survey about morale employers were asked to complete. Apparently, some responses were quite critical of the workplace culture, as some workers “filled the comment boxes / with These questions suck or Stop wasting / my time.” As the absurdity of these scratching responses is cataloged throughout the poem, Shippers points to a recognizable truth about the ways people experience work in our time.
5 “On Being the Glamorous Blonde Villain from All Those Nineties Kids’ Movies” by Ellie Black
Black’s poem is a hilarious personification of a familiar pop culture trope that is laced with feminist critique—her speaker, identified in the title, is “here to marry your father / or whoever’s most convenient, / to take your inheritance, your fortune, / your home, your family, your life.” The evil stepmother persona is exaggerated so hyperbolically, she becomes ridiculous.
With lines like, “If anyone ever tried explaining / compulsory heterosexuality to me, / I would plug my ears and scream,” it’s as if Black pushes a level of hyperbole so as to make the lens of her critique unavoidable. There is no subtlety in the satire of this figure, as Black points to the ways women are portrayed in negative two-dimensional ways in popular media—with a quip aimed at midwesterners for good measure, “I grew up modestly in the Midwest / (“modestly” means something different / to me than you).”
Read “On Being the Glamorous Blonde Villain from All Those Nineties Kids’ Movies” ↗
6 “Sick” by Shel Silverstein
It’s impossible for me to consider humor in poetry without including at least one of Silverstein’s timeless gems in the list. What I find so marvelous about these poems is that they work on so many levels. I laughed as a kid in elementary school experiencing them for the first time and then again, just as hard, but for slightly different reasons as an adult reading them to my kids.
Silverstein is a master of poetic humor as evidenced by the layers of funny that one can peel back reading his work over a lifetime. In “Sick,” the subject lists all the ailments that might prevent her from attending school that day. So many unlikely illnesses arranged in such a ways as amplify the absurdity—from “the measles and the mumps,” to a shrunken brain and a hole in her ear, little Peggy Ann McKay persists in presenting her litany of severe medical conditions until she learns in a twist at the poem’s end that it is not actually a school day and her illnesses miraculously recede.
* * *
In short, humor can work on many levels in a poem—taking on hard truths and offering a critique of our world with a wink and a smile. In many ways, the laughs these poets embed in our reader experience serve to prime us to more deeply consider the kernels of truth at the core of any successful attempt at humor. The reader has to first recognize the reality in order to fully buy into the criticism the poet is showing us.
Jokes aside, humor is an effective strategy in creating poems that can delight a reader while still delivering a powerful (and serious) message. It is a way of varying the way into a subject that can be a fresh take on an old idea. Even the structure of a traditional joke format can be fodder for infusing humor into a poem. Consider this:
How many poets does it take to change a lightbulb? It depends on how many metaphors they can come up with for the word “light.”
This article was published on July 23, 2024. Written by:
