Charles Harper Webb
I think it's a mistake to TRY to write funny poems. The best funny poems, like the best serious ones, rise out of the author's honest "take" on the world. To exclude humor from poetry, as to exclude it from conversation, is a recipe for dullness, and guarantees that any depiction of the human condition will be incomplete. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
HUMOR INCOMPETENCE IS A SERIOUS PROBLEM
—ad for a Continuing Education class
How bland and flat the earth must be
to kids who can "pass gas," and not crack up.
How can they make friends, with their pinched noses
buried in Bibles and books on etiquette?
How cut off they must feel—like the tone-
deaf hearing "Toccata and Fugue."
Or maybe, like the blind from birth,
they don't know what they're missing.
Girl to Boy: I can't see you anymore.
Boy to Girl: You want to borrow my glasses?
"I don't get it," becomes "Not funny!"
Confusion dresses up as Arrogance.
Impotent to laugh things off, humor incompetents
sue, screen airport baggage, and perforate
their own impacted guts. What can the suicide-
bomber-in-training do with a dream
about a conga-line of beavers except to tell
some mullah muffling snorts behind his beard?
Humor incompetents must fear laughter
the way I did after my Michael Jackson moon-walk
convulsed the sophomore class. Next day,
still hoping to be hip, I chirped to Sheri Kronen,
"There's a party in your mouth, and I'm coming."
Her hangers-on shrieked and nearly wet their pants.
But her answer, let me tell you, was no joke.
First published in Poems and Plays.
CRACKAGE
—for Karen
It's one of yoga's benefits, along with muscle tone,
flexibility, and (with a little luck) enlightenment.
The spine sighs, glad to be snapped
straight, head and coccyx perfectly aligned.
Crackage is spinal orgasm, tension squirting
from between clenched disks as relaxation's honey
drips from the neck down. It’s wonderful, achieved
alone, or with a paid professional, but better yet
with a loved partner after stroking, kneading,
joking—Don't stop, I'm almost there! Love
rises quickly when one body lies face-down,
and lets another kneel over its bare back, and rub and press,
producing oohs, aahs, oofs and finally, blessed
crackage: a rainbow risen from gray, stressful skies,
its colored curve a handle with which, if he had only
had a place to stand and a good wife to crack
his back, Archimedes could, without a lumbar twinge,
have lifted and carried off the world.
PORP APLENTY
". . . like quills upon the fretful porpentine"
—The Ghost, Hamlet
First described by Shakespeare, porp is a skin-
prickling mix of impatience, anxiety,
and helpless rage. Its gray-and-yellow gunk
makes muscles ache, and shoves the mind
toward earthquakes, anthrax in eyeliner,
and gridlock on the 10 when you have to pick
your son up at pre-school, or pay a dollar
per late minute till you do. Cause and effect
of modern life, porp tows your car with an hour
on the meter, and your camera locked inside.
For those restrained by law, religion, or timidity,
porp can be the spice of life, flushing
the face, pushing sweat-beads out the pores,
causing limbs to jitterbug, hearts to jet-ski.
The government hurls billions at the War
on Porp. Drug companies quell porp with pills.
You pay with your ability to come.
This makes you porpy? Boom!—back
to square one. Still, like spitting watermelon seeds,
pronouncing porp is fun. Its one percussive
syllable has more uses than a Swiss army knife,
and won't be confiscated at the airport,
where porp is mandatory—especially if
you have five minutes to make your connection,
or the shoe-heel beside yours sports a fuse.
Might as well embrace it, like being a cat lady,
or loving show tunes. Might as well sing its praises:
"If you're porpy and you know it, shout hooray."
"I'm in the mood for porp." "Porp is a many-
splendored thing."
TAKING IT PERSONALLY
—"Thank you for the chance to read your work. We regret that
it does not suit our present needs."
We regret that your talent’s a pinworm, and our needs are
anacondaesque.
Your knees are wrinkly; the meniscuses, a tennis-playing mess.
The way they creak and crick and crack—take them away!
Your lungs are like bald buzzards, crushed and hung on a cartilage-
tree.
Your penis, like the siphon of a tiny clam—oh, spare us, please!
Your bowels, though convoluted, lack complexity and depth.
Of their contents . . . need we say?
Nipples, elbows, earlobes, tongue—no, no, not these. Nor are
your fingers, forearms, femurs, for us. For me.
Your heart fails utterly to make our blood surge or its pressure
soar.
Your teeth need whitening; your toenails—clip them, for the love
of Christ.
Your dead-shad uvula, and the too-sweaty, much too-large small
of your back—impossible.
Don't get us started on your brain’s shriveled hemispheres, muddled
medulla, purulent pons, (sinking) Island of Reil, (stinking)
Fissure of Sylvius . . .
Your smirking face with goo-goo eyes and shovel-teeth, your cow-
boy gait, arms aflail like wind chimes in a hurricane,
Your habit of pencil-wagging, hair-twirling, thigh-wiggling—
We are repelled, repulsed, revolted, entirely sub-underwhelmed,
shot through with disinclination, not to say loathing and utter
antipathy.
Others may feel differently.
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