Looking Back: Ogden Nash - Zany Humour
One day in English class in 1967 someone slipped me a small book of poems. It was entitled “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” and happened to be one of about 20 books of poetry that humorist poet Ogden Nash had written during his remarkable career. He was, hands down, probably the best humorist poet in the United States ever. Make that the world.
I was in a class where we were studying poetry structure, boring fixed forms for composition. Yawn! And then along comes Ogden with his wacky collection of unpredictable verse rhyming, made up words to make lines rhyme and witty observations. Sneaking a read here and there left me consumed with laughter and, I might add, got me kicked out of English class for the day.
It wasn’t until some 50 years later that I discovered that, what little my dearly departed wife Lorraine had acquired from her father’s passing was a collection of three small plain red books of Nash’s works. The- I’m a Stranger Here Myself was among them and with anticipatory delight I once again found myself drawn into his unconventional and hilarious couplets that he wove into poems. Because you know, everyone needs a laugh now and then.
I am a limerick fan and have memorized dozens of them, mostly bawdy ones. No I won’t share one, they are just too dicey. Nash was more inclined to craft four, not five line ditties, quatrains that are commonly referred to as limicks. An example of his would be,
“The turtle lives ’twixt plated decks,
Which practically conceal its sex.
I think it clever of the turtle,
In such a fix, to be so fertile.”
Of course his compositions were so varied and zany you never knew what was coming next as you wend your way through his creative misspellings. You get drawn deeper in and the books take you over A quatrain format often could wind up with eight lines not four... an octet if you will, that throws iambic pentameter out the window. Here then are eight lines of manipulated English of his in a verse entitled, “The Third Jungle Book”. It reads,
”Why does the pygmy
Indulge in polygmy?
His tribal dogma
Frowns on monogma.
Monogma’s a stigma
For any pygma.
If he sticks to monogmy
A pygmy’s a hogmy.
So words were recrafted to rhyme so that each lyme has its own tyme to resonate. That is a pretty poor takeoff but you get the gist.
He would also toss off one or two liners of observation on occasion like,”God in his wisdom made the fly. And then forgot to tell us why”. Probably one of his most quoted two liners was, “Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.
Nash’s compositions can have lines that come close to small paragraphs, followed by perhaps an eight word line which is a brief aside comment about life in America observations. A case in point would be a rather long and convoluted piece called, “Cousin Euphemia Knows Best” or “Physician Heal Somebody Else”. In this poem Nash lays a tongue-in-cheek dandy out there, about dubious medical advice from relatives. It has a rhyming ending that will make you chuckitle. You will see at the end why that odd word I chose fits.
Take a deep breath before you start! Remember that no matter how long each sentence is he will inevitably rhyme the endings. So here then is Cousin Euphemia Knows Best-:
“Some people don’t want to be doctors because they think doctors don’t make a good living,
And also get called away from their bed at night and from their dinner on Christmas and Thanksgiving,
And other people don’t want to be doctors because a doctor’s friends never take their symptoms to his office at ten dollars a throw but insert them into a friendly game, of gin rummy or backgammon,
And ask questions about their blood count just as the doctor is lining up an elusive putt or an elusive salmon.
These considerations do not influence me a particle;
I do not want to be a doctor simply because somewhere in the family of every patient is a female who has read an article.
You remove a youngster’s tonsils and the result is a triumph of medical and surgical science,
He stops coughing and sniffling and gains eleven pounds and gets elected captain of the Junior Giants,
But his great-aunt spreads the word that you are a quack,
Because she read an article in the paper last Sunday where some Rumanian savant stated that tonsillectomy is a thing of the past and the Balkan hospitals are bulging with people standing in line to have their tonsils put back.
You suggest calamine lotion for the baby’s prickly heat,
And you are at once relegated to the back seat,
Because its grandmother’s cousin has seen an article in the “Household Hints” department of Winning Parcheesi that says the only remedy for prickly heat is homogenized streptomycin,
And somebody’s sister-in-law has seen an article where the pathologist of Better Houses and Trailers says calamine lotion is out, a conscientious medicine man wouldn’t apply calamine lotion to an itching bison.
I once read an unwritten article by a doctor saying there is only one cure for a patient’s female relative who has read an article:
A hatpin in the left ventricle of the hearticle. !
So did it make you chuckitle? Rather long but oh so much fun to work your way through. I mean c’mon, he rhymed streptomycin with itchy bison. Who does that? Still I am a bit confused by the statement, “I once read an unwritten article!” I guess he is imagining an unspoken piece of medical advice. Ogden made up hundreds of words designed to make a verse rhyme, regardless of the fact that each line was often totally different in length.
You may recall that the American writer and satirist Dorothy Parker once quipped the famous line, “Men seldom make passes/ At girls who wear glasses.” Well, of course, Ogden thereafter cranked out a four liner retort to that, that went,
“A girl who is bespectacled
May not get her nectacled.(neck tickled)
But safety pins and bassinets
Await the girl who fassinets.(fascinates)
Wow, don’t you just love how he takes such hilarious liberties. Wouldn’t it be fun to just make up words that fit. Well, in some fashion, blending words is sort of that. Portmanteaus are just that, blended words. Like brunch, smog or staycation. Motel is another one (motor plus hotel) , but I have cheekily noticed that motel spelled backwards is letom (let him).
How lovely it must be to sit and contemplate and then craft a poetic offering of your thoughts is such a zany fashion. To be playfully satirical about any subject matter. Methinks, before I shuffle off this mortal coil, Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished!
Author’s Note: Wow did I ever have a battle with spell check on this piece. At the end of the review a giant question mark showed up on my screen with the letters wtf underneath.