Walking the Doggerel.

By Mike Nettleton 

Official Doggerel of the U.S. National Poetry team.  

 

 Ah, Spring.  When I was a kid, I could always tell when Spring had arrived. My father would clear his throat and recite the following:

      Spring has Sprung,

the sap has riz.

       How I wonder where

       the birdies is. 

This, I came to find out, is a type of poetry known as doggerel. Webster says doggerel is:

         Loosely styled and irregular in measure. Esp for burlesque or comic effect. Marked by triviality or inferiority.

I’m not sure I’m buying that. Most of us are much more likely to remember these shorties but goodies than lines from The Wreck of the Hesperus or Ode on a Grecian Urn.

      Roses are red,

        Violets are purple.

        Sugar is sweet.

        And so is maple syrup-ull.

Or:

      A wonderful bird is the pelican

        His bill will hold more than his  belican

        He can take in his beak

        Enough food for a week

        But I’m damned if I see how the helican!

 That one is by a poet and humorist named Dixon Lanier Merrit. I’m sure he was a lot more fun at a party than Lord Byron or William Wordsworth.

The most famed doggerelist is probably Ogden Nash. This mid-twentieth century poet, author and playwright loved to play with words.  Here are a couple of my favorites:

      Candy’s dandy

        But Liquor’s quicker.

        (And sex doesn’t rot the teeth.)

 A Word to Husbands:      

       To keep your marriage brimming,

        With love in the loving cup,

        Whenever you’re wrong admit it;

        Whenever you’re right, shut up.

 And then there’s his tribute to the Burma Shave signs that used to line America’s highways.

Lather as you go:

Beneath this slab,

John Brown is stowed.

He watched the ads,

And not the road.

 Reading the doggerel on the Burma Shave signs used to be the highlight of any family cross-country trip. They were short, funny and easy to recite. Imagine the following series of six signs, spaced perhaps 100 yards apart.

         Every Shaver

           Now can snore

           Six More minutes

           Than before

           By using

           Burma Shave.

 The most famous doggerelistette may have been the acerbic-witted Dorothy Parker, famous for tossing off lines like:

        Men seldom make passes,

           At girls who wear glasses.

 And:

         I like to have a martini.

            Two at the very most.

            After three I’m under the table.

            After four I’m under the host.

 Carolyn and I had to smile on a recent visit to Camas, a small, artsy town along the Columbia River east of Vancouver. A sign outside a brewpub read:

        Rose are red,

           violets are purple.

           Poetry is hard.

           Let’s have a beer.

 You’re invited to submit your own favorite doggerel through the comments section on this blog.

               

I'm soooo not laughing !!!

I like to think I have a sense of humor about myself. After all, as a tubby kid growing up in small-town Oregon, I had to learn to use humor to deflect the constant ribbing (bullying in today’s context) heaped on me by my classmates.

My 42-`year profession as an on-air radio personality involved a lot of poking holes in the balloons of the pretentious and (inadvertently) ridiculous. Movies like Waiting for Guffman and the original The Producers leave me gasping for breath, tears of hilarity streaming down my cheeks and into my mouth.

That’s why I found myself wondering why, while sitting through 6 episodes of Vancouveria, Brighton West’s spoof of life in “the Couv,” I could only produce a few wry smiles and a possible chuckle. (This last is in the process of being verified by the National Board of Giggles and Guffaws.)

Was my humor gland malfunctioning,? Did I need to find a donor for a future transplant?

Here’s the primary reason Vancouveria  wasn’t funny. While Portlandia, the spoof of Stumptown, takes the quirks of its downtown hipper-than-thou crowd and exaggerates them for fun and profit, there’s still a tone of fondness in the humor. Sure, some of the people depicted are absurd and hopelessly woo-woo. But there’s still a sense that what they’re doing is motivated by noble intentions cranked up to 11 on the 10-point humor amplifier.  Sure, they insist on eating free-range chicken that has 50 square miles to roam, but still, free range chicken is a life-affirming concept, right? Allergy awareness parade? Sensitivity gone mad, but even if absurd, still, kind of benevolent.  

Compared to Portlandia’s nudge-nudge wink-wink approach, Vancouveria is, in a hyphenated word, mean-spirited.  The people who live across the river from an “enlightened” Portland are hyper-patriotic borderline bigots who fuel their families on a steady diet of Big Macs and “Bloomin’ Onions”.  They delight in the right-wing propaganda generated by the likes of Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. There is nothing to see and nothing to do in Vancouver. We all drive gas-guzzling SUVs and revel in spewing poisonous exhaust fumes.

Portlandia comes across as local folks poking fun at themselves. We’re laughing with them. Vancouveria feels like a Portland hipster (West?) scolding the sullen masses who dare to oppose plans to build an iconic bridge across the Columbia and foot their fair share of someone’s high-concept vision.

Vancouveria feels mean-spirited and snide. At no point do you sense fondness for its subject matter. I could have overlooked this if one important criteria had been met. It needed to be funny and, with the exception of a few moments, it wasn’t. The jokes were badly crafted,  the punch lines half baked, and the situations reeked of cheap-shot cologne.

Vancouver is still fair game for satire and even ridicule. But simply basing a skit on ugly stereotypes that are, for the most part, not true, aren’t the material of belly laughs.