Doggerel

Humorous Doggerel

Though some writers deliberately set out to compose amusing doggerel, for example in the form of limericks and nonsense verse, the most humorous examples tend to be the work of authors who are not aware that they are writing bad verse. This disparity or incongruity between pretension and performance is a leading source of humor in a variety of fields, such as the contrast, often referred to by writers on comedy, between the case of a frail, elderly person who falls over in the street, and that of a pompous, self-important person who slips on a banana skin and executes a pratfall. The latter case is more likely to elicit laughter than the former. In the case of poetry, the confidence that allows one to write despite appalling incompetence is a fertile source of humor for many readers.

Leading Practitioners of Doggerel

Quoted here are a number of writers whose verse, in general or in a particular instance, is often cited as illustrating the disparity mentioned earlier.

The Scottish religious writer and preacher Zachary Boyd (1585–1653) also wrote poetry, an example being his poem on the battle at Newburn Ford in 1640 in which the Scottish army seized possession of Newcastle. It contains these lines:

The Scots cannons powder and ball did spew

Which with terror the Canterburians slew.

Balls rushed at random, which most fearfully

Menaced to break the portals of the sky.

In this conflict, which was both swift and surly,

Bones, blood and brains went in a hurly-burly.

Boyd has sometimes been referred to, not without justification, as a “Scottish prince of bad poets.”

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