There was an old fellow named Lear/
Now marking his 200th year/
And so, since last May/
I have tweeted, each day/
A series of limericks here.
A year ago, when I first had the idea of writing news limericks on Twitter, I first searched to see if anyone else was doing it, and only then discovered that May 12th was World Limerick Day. It was, in fact, Edward Lear’s 199th birthday, at which point I decided to see if I could keep it going until the 200th.
The limerick had been around for centuries by the time Lear came along, but more spoken than written, and generally rude – the kind of verse that could be recited in the pub by those without power, to poke fun at the bosses, the clergy and the aristocracy.
Lear popularised the limerick in his Book Of Nonsense and More Nonsense (of which I have an old, battered, hardback family copy). But his absurd but clean verses were not typical of the form. The repetition of the first line in the last makes it easier, as you don’t need to find a third rhyme, but throws away the opportunity for a punchline.
So although twitmericks don’t, as a rule, rely on bawdy humour (the Bishop of Buckingham and Jeremy Hunt being irresistible exceptions) I see them as a continuation of the oral tradition of the limerick, as an easily memorable verse that takes the piss out of the powerful.
That, of course, is something for which social media, especially Twitter, are now providing a useful forum. And certainly, looking back over the year, the most popular twitmericks have been those lampooning, the Murdochs, Berlusconi, etc.
Many people have expressed surprise that it’s possible to fit a limerick in a tweet. But though I sometimes have to resort to abbreviations or & signs, it really can be done. Only rarely to I expand the blog version by a few characters to undo a compromise from the Twitter version.
And indeed, I’ve discovered over the last year that there is a community of us. Not all try to compress the limerick into a tweet, but @LimericksEcon in the New York and @TheLimerickKing in Canada both rhyme on mainly economic news, while @limerickreview in Australia writes film reviews.
Twitmericks has built up a Twitter following of over 1,400, and got pickup in the New Statesman and Washington Post online versions (links below). And Mick Twister’s alter-ego @Mickhodgkin was named in the Observer’s Top Twitter Feeds You Need to Follow by David Shrigley, who wrote: “He invents limericks on politics, which I think is quite admirable”. (That’s my secret identity well and truly blown!)
So I think the limerick is in good health, and I hope Edward Lear would have appreciated our Twitter efforts – though they’re fairly different from his nonsense rhymes.
Here’s the tribute I wrote for him a year ago:
There was an old man name of Lear
We remember this day every year
If he’d had Twitter then
He’d’ve put down the pen
And written a limerick here.
And here are two of the last year’s twitmericks that borrowed his original opening line (in the second case, the first two lines), followed by Lear’s own verses:
There was an old man with a beard
Who said it is just as I feared
The ethical schism
In Anglicanism
Has grown – time that I disappeared!
There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, ‘It is just as I feared!
Two Owls and a Hen,
Four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!’
——————————–
There was an old man from the Nile
Of odious crocodile smile
But as every dictator
Should sooner or later
Mubarak is now standing trial.
There was an Old Man of the Nile,
Who sharpened his nails with a file;
Till he cut off his thumbs,
And said calmly, “This comes–
Of sharpening one’s nails with a file!”
Oh, and having completed a year, I don’t intend to stop yet. It’s much too much fun, and too addictive.
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/12/odious-crocodile-smile-later
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/may/06/twitter-top-feeds-celebrity-tweeters?CMP=twt_gu
twitmericks 
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