Famous Funny Poems

Poetry, though often considered the writing style of choice for the sad and morose, is also often the style of choice for writers with a good sense of humor. Exuding clever word play and satire, famous funny poems by poets like Ogden Nash and Alexander Pope have entertained and amused readers.

Ogden Nash was an American poet responsible for writing conventional, mainstream poetry that used rhyme and humor as part of his recipe for success. Born in the very early 20th century, Nash was a fairly prolific poet.  His fascination with rhyme led him to adopt a fairly simple rhyme scheme of AA BB, which matched the overall simplistic nature of his writing. His style is best represented by the now infamous poem, Reflections on Ice-Breaking: "Candy / Is Dandy / But liquor / Is quicker." Known for his love of sports, alcohol, and the city of Baltimore, which he called home for nearly forty years before his death, Ogden Nash was celebrated as the quintessential everyman and for his famous funny poems.

Alexander Pope was a classical British poet who lived during the 18th century. A Catholic in a nation of Protestants, Pope grew up alienated from the rest of his culture. His religious differences were magnified by the physical deformity of his body due to Pott's disease, a variant of tuberculosis. His bitterness and cynicism creeped into his poetry, which, while using the classical heroic couplet form, also frequently satirized it. Nowhere was this more prominent than in his best known work, The Rape of the Lock. The poem combines the verbal superfluousness of more serious poetry with a rather mundane, ludricous subject matter: the theft of a beautiful young woman's hair. Pope was also particularly fond of mocking his opponents and did so with thinly veiled jabs in some of his works, especially in The Dunciad.

From the writings of Shakespeare up to modern poems by Shel Silverstein, famous funny poems have appealed to all audiences.