Wayne Lee
As Mel Brooks so eloquently said, "Tragedy is if I cut my finger. Comedy is if you walk into an open sewer and die."
Yes, we all need to laugh—especially in these globalwarming economicfreefalling energydepleting times. I love using humor in my poetry. Not all the time, of course. But sometimes all we can do is laugh at the “beautiful foolishness of things,” to quote Kakuzo Okakura. To laugh is to express the joy of living, whether through parody or paradox, parable or paranoia. To laugh is to play, including wordplay. To laugh is to put things into perspective.
Where does our need to laugh originate? From God, of course (as He personally assured me one afternoon while I was enjoying an altered state of consciousness). “Do I have a sense of humor?” He asked rhetorically. “Of course I do. Look at you!”
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Punchline
"The gods too are fond of a joke."
--Aristotle
A traveling salesman walks into a bar
with a duck under his arm.
“Why did the chicken cross the road?”
asks the Irish midget on the next stool.
A Polish lawyer jumps up and yells,
“That’s not me bagpipe!”
A paraplegic blonde, blind brunette
and retarded redhead are sitting in a booth,
flirting with a twelve-inch pianist.
“Why the long face?” queries the male nurse.
“Confucius say there’s a fly in our soup,” they reply.
A minister and rabbi fight over a 5,000-pound
hooker that works for peanuts. A vegetarian priest
from a desert island chants “lettuce, turnip and pea.”
“Those aren’t pillows!” blurts out a black Norwegian
to his crack-smoking divorcee parrot.
A farmer’s daughter enters and screws in a light bulb,
despite the skid marks in front of the skunk.
“I’ll have what she’s having,” giggles a pregnant nun.
“That’s no lady, that’s my wife!” cries the big-breasted
Chinese cowboy, who carries a gay frog in a blender.
“Rectum? Damn near killed ‘im!” shouts an Arab proctologist
with weapons of math instruction—but no one laughs.
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Wayne Lee and his wife, poet Alice Morse Lee, moved to Santa Fe from Washington state in 2005. Their book Twenty Poems from the Blue House was published by Whistle Lake Press. Lee’s awards include the Emily Dickinson Award in Poetry, the William Stafford Award in Poetry, the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Writer’s Digest Poetry Award, the Charles Proctor Humor Award and the Santa Fe Reporter’s War Poetry Contest. His poems have been published in New Millennium, The Ledge, The California Quarterly, New England Anthology of Poets, Poetry Motel, Jones Av., Thanatos, Poets Against the War, The Floating Bridge Anthology and numerous other journals and anthologies. Lee currently owns Club Z! In-Home Tutoring Services of Santa Fe.