To demonstrate how to write a great
limerick I have a couple of examples
here. The first one is from Edward
Lear, the 19th century poet who really
popularized the limerick, and then the
second one is from me. I guess I said how
to write a "great" limerick, but maybe I
shouldn't lay claim to that myself!
In any case, if you want to write a
limerick, there are three things you
should watch out for. You should focus on rhyme, rhythm, and content, and we'll cover
each of these in some detail. So first of
all rhyme. Every limerick has five lines,
and they rhyme A A B B and A again. Sometimes in older limericks it was
actually quite customary to have the
last line rhyme, or use the same word in
the last line, as what you have before.
You can see that here with "about." So
"about" is repeated. So that's the rhyme.
The next thing is the rhythm, and this is
where you're gonna see a lot of
variation. If you look online or on
YouTube, and you try to figure out how to
write a limerick, you're gonna see a lot
of different recommendations.
Most people when they talk about the
rhythm of the line they talk about how
many syllables this should be per line,
and you see all sorts of variations. The
the usual suggestion is that the first,
second, and fifth lines ... should have
about eight to nine syllables. There
is some flexibility here. They don't have
to be exactly 8 to 9 -- sometimes you even
see ones with 7 or as much as 10 -- but 8
or 9 is is typically standard. Then 
the 3rd and the 4th lines are a
little bit shorter, and they usually have
five to six syllables. Again, there's
a little bit of variation, but you can
see that [in] Edward Lear's limerick here the
third line has six syllables and the
fourth one only has five. So there's
definitely room for play. It gets even
trickier when we think about the actual
rhythm in each particular line because
limericks have an interesting rhythm in
the sense that they have a lot of unstressed
syllables and just a few stressed
syllables. So the way to think about this,
and this is probably the easiest way to
approach this, is to think that these
first, second, and fifth lines -- they
usually have three stresses. So you're
gonna see three stresses in these lines,
whereas lines three and four have just
two stressed syllables. And you can
hear it here: There 'was' an old 'man' who
screamed 'out.' That's one way anyway to
scan this line. Then: when-'e'-ver they
'knocked' him a-'bout.' ... You can see there's
three there. But not every line is going
to be the same, and as you look more
closely at these limericks you're gonna
see particular kinds of what are called
feet -- particular kinds of rhythms -- come up again and again. So one rhythm would be
what's called an "anapest," and an anapest is where you have two unstressed
syllables followed by a stressed
syllable. Another common pattern is
what's called an amphibrach.
I know these are kind of weird words. This is where you have an unstressed
syllable, a stressed syllable, and an
unstressed syllable. You can hear
that in the second limerick here, with
there once was a man from Seattle.
So that's a very common pattern as
well. Don't worry too much about these
terms. What you really need to see is
that [with] a lot of these these rhythms, as
soon as you add for instance two amphibrachs after each other, what you end up
with a lot is this kind of repetition of
unstressed syllables, and then the odd
stressed syllable. So that's sort
of the pattern that you get, and that
gives it that really nice kind of lilt,
where it goes pah pum pah pah pum ...
And you can vary it, but as long as it has a kind
of rhythm to it then it then it sounds
good. So that's the rhythm, and again
lots of variation there. The last thing you need to focus on is the
content. When you write a limerick they
usually start the same way. They
start with "there was" or "there once was."
That's the most common way to start. They
often have a place name at the end, and
we learn about a particular person. Now
often it's a man, but you can also
introduce a girl, and I think
contemporary limericks do this more
often
(or a "woman" I should say, not just a "girl"). So we have a person, we have
"there was," and then we often have the
place name. Then we want to introduce
something that happened to that person.
We want to make it funny.
A lot of limericks these days are
written for adults and they contain
dirty jokes, but you can write very
nonsensical limericks like the ones that
we have here that are perfectly clean. So
try to have something witty and funny,
and don't be afraid to have something a
little bit absurd and nonsensical, and
even sometimes violent, as you can see in
these limericks. It turns out that the
people that are being described in these limericks -- they're
always a bit odd. They don't fit in very well, and people
don't always treat them very nicely. So
that's basically how you should write a
limerick. Remember to focus on rhyme,
rhythm, and content, and if you have time
do what Edward Lear did and add some
hilarious illustrations.
