The New Limerick: 2750 Unpublished Examples American and British

by Gershon Legman

1 HARDCOVER BOOK WITH DUST COVER(small piece gone from top, front edge)

Genres: Nonfiction, Poetry, Humor

729 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Gershon Legman (1917-1999) was an American cultural critic and folklorist, best known for his books The Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1968) and The Horn Book: Studies in Erotic Folklore and Bibliography (1964).

Born in 1917 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Legman was the son of Emil and Julia Friedman Legman, both of Hungarian-Jewish descent. He was educated at Scranton's Central High School, where journalist Jane Jacobs and screenwriter and film director Cy Endfield were classmates. He enrolled in the University of Michigan for one semester in the fall of 1935, but left without sitting for his exams. He then settled in New York City where for a number of years he was a part-time freelance assistant to the physician and sexological researcher Robert Latou Dickinson at the New York Academy of Medicine while simultaneously working in the bookshop of Jacob Brussel, where a brisk business was done in publishing and selling contraband erotica. He also spent long hours at the New York Public Library acquiring an autodidactic education. In the late 1940s he became the editor of the little magazine Neurotica.

Throughout his career Legman was an independent scholar without institutional affiliation, except for one year during 1964-1965 when he was a writer in residence at the University of California, San Diego, in the first year of the new campus' undergraduate programs. He pioneered the serious academic study of erotic and taboo materials in folklore.

(source: Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Venus Maneater · Rating 5 out of 5]

A necrophile named Ab
Sneaked into the coroner's lab.
He went down on a stiff
Who had died of the syph,
And choked to death on a scab.

Today a very proper gentleman came to the thriftstore I work at and asked if we were interested in selling this book. Hell yes, gimme that ye olde naughty stuff.

This book is GOLD! Every. Single. Star. Well. Earned.

It is filled with 2750 dirty dirty DIRTY limericks, spread over chapters such as GOURMANDS (naughty people putting naughty bits in their oral cavities) and ABUSES OF THE CLERGY. (I'll just let you figure that one out!)
And I love each and every one of them.

Bless mister Legman, bless his heart and his beautifully obscene ways. He wasn't sloppy about it either; many pages are spend on an extensive bibliography and amazing footnotes. Seriously, the Notes & Variants alone are wildly entertaining, with Mr. Legman referring to footnotes just to say things like "Wow, reader, wasn't that last sentence marvelous?", but also to explain certain lingo and give us some history lessons.

You can bet your ass that from now on each and every birthday card I send will contain a limerick or two.

Here's one for the road:

When a virile young Butcher named Gossage
Catches ladies purloining a sausage,
He offers his own-
Not a gift but a loan-
It cuts down his big sausage-lossage.

[Pat Cummings · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here are neatly turned odes of small span,
Much concerned with our bodily plan.
And the intercorporeal
Highly sensorial
Lovelife of woman and man.

The New Limerick, edited by G. Legman, is a delightful compendium of thousands of limericks, many of which had never been widely published. (I keep my copy in a bathroom, for those odd moments when a reading diversion is required.) Even the limericks everyone knows (There once was a girl from Nantucket…) are freshly enjoyable in this context.

LITTLE ROMANCES
A delighted, incredulous bride
Remarked to her groom at her side:
I never could quite
Believe til tonight
Our anatomies would coincide.

Legman's Introduction is a scholarly treatise that discusses the art and artistry of the limerick, and wonders why this is usually (though not exclusively) an English form. Although an Italian canto treating the lewder aspects of the lives of the saints is cited, it seems obvious to the editor that the terse character and abundant homonyms of English lend themselves to the limerick form.

ORGANS
There was a young lady from Byer
Whose hemlines got higher and higher.
But the size of her thighs
Provoked merely surprise,
And extinguished the flames of desire.

What makes this catalog of limericks even more impressive is that it is the second such volume. The first, The Limerick, included “only” 1,700 examples of the verse form, but generated such a stream of new examples that the editor was compelled to create this larger sequel.

STRANGE INTERCOURSES
There was a young girl with a bust
Which roused a French cavalier’s lust
She was since heard to say,
About midnight: “Touché!—
I didn’t quite parry that thrust.”

Isaac Asimov introduced his own book A Grossery of Limericks (one of several limerick collections written with John Ciardi) by saying, “Limericks come in many forms, dirty, lewd, obscene and otherwise. None of the limericks in this collection are otherwise.” Like the pun, the limerick relies on the surprise of the wry twist in the terminal line. And for many limericks, as for puns, the sincerest applause is a resounding groan from the audience.

ZOOPHILY
A libidinous peasant named Jack
One time with a spider did shack.
You may get oddball kids
Sleeping with arachnids
But oh! those eight legs round your back!

There may also be a charm to the limerick beyond the rhythm and the rhyme. So many limericks build from a personal or geographical name, cleverly rhymed but never used again, that the editor contends this may be one of the draws of the craft. However, this does not explain my own personal favorite:

ENGINEERING
To barbarity man says adieu
As brilliant inventions accrue.
To create wheel and lever
Was really quite clever,
But divinely inspired was the screw.

And while a large majority of limericks insist on the youth of the main character, a substantial percentage rely equally on venerable age and experience:

PARSING WORDS
A learnèd old justice of Trent
Defined what obscenity meant:
He said, “Duck is not clean,
But three-quarters obscene;
And fudge is foul forty percent.

Limericks in the U.S. became as common as filk songs for the science fiction aficionado (hence Asimov’s entry into the field). An entire category of science-fiction limericks refers to space opera topics, and widens even further the list of person- and place-names available to lampoon.

FILK FICTION
Flash Gordon, when looking for fun,
Poked Dale with his little space gun.
Murmured she, “I’m not shy,
But, quick, button your fly—
In comics, that just isn’t done!

There are 2750 limericks in this book, including the execrable (in the “Chamber of Horrors”), the unquotable (in “Buggery” and “Abuses of the Clergy"), and the simply over-the-top (in “Virginity”). I have had to work hard to select those that do not contain one of Carlin’s infamous Seven Words.

To read all the others, I highly recommend this book.