DOGGEREL MAGAZINE
The Weekly Magazine of Comic Verse and Bawdy Songs
Volume 1, Number 6--August 23, 2000
"In thermulas intremus"
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CONTENTS:
1. Editor's Introduction: New Day Dawning
2. Letter: Shame, Shame, Shame
3. A Toast
4. Poem: The Hootchie-Cootchie Parade (Max Sparber)
5. Poem: Opposite Sexes (Larry A. Tilander)
6. Poem: On History (Linus Huddlesworth)
7. Poem: Why I Remarried (Charelton Fiddlesticks II)
8. Poem: Vasectomy (Llewtrah)
9. Classic Doggerel: Two Classic Limericks
10. Doggerel Saint: Benjamin Franklin
11. The Final Word: An Epitaph
12. About Our Contributors
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EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION: New Day Dawning
Regular readers will note that I have moved the publication day from Monday to Wednesday. You may expect Doggerel every week on this day, approximately midway through the day, unless you are one of our subscribers who lives in Australia or Japan or India. If that is the case, you can expect Doggerel at a different time altogether.
Congratulations to the winner of last week's "Translate Our Motto" contest, E.M. in Texas, who gave a roughly correct translation of " In thermulas intremus." For those who are curious, we at Doggerel translate our motto as "Let's get in the hot tub." For her facility in the dead languages of antiquity, E.M. won a copy of the "Viper Mad Blues" CD, reviewed in last week's issue. New readers, if you are interested in glancing through some back issues of Doggerel, simply direct yourself to the Internet and point your cursor to the words "archive." With a single click of your mouse (or the button on your joystick, for those of you who have mistaken Doggerel Magazine for being some sort of odd video game) our complete history of publication will reveal itself to you.
NEXT WEEK: New vaudeville songs! Filthy verses! Vice! Madness! And all the other wonderful things you have come to expect from Doggerel Magazine.
Enjoy,
Max Sparber, editor
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LETTER: Shame, shame shame
Shame on you. SHAME ON YOU. Poetry is meant for the liberation of the human spirit through lofty, glorious, mellifluous language, and you have turned it into a base, filthy thing. Your fascination with foul sexual practices and terrible violence (both of which you seem to find *funny*) points to a shallowness of the soul and a sickness of the mind. I will pray for you tonight, but first I shall cancel my subscription. I don't know what sort of prank you thought you were pulling when you invited me to join your magazine by promising that it contained "Moral Instruction and Words of Praise," but I do not appreciate it.
Mona Christensen
----------------------- ADVERTISEMENT ---------------------------
WE KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING RIGHT NOW
Oh yes, we're always watching you. You know it too--you can feel our beady eyes upon you, staring jealously through keyholes and in through your windows at night. You can hear us snickering in the darkness and scheming, always scheming! It is enough to DRIVE YOU MAD!
Even now, one of us is under your bed with stainless steel acupuncture pins, waiting to poke them into you when you sleep and render you unable to move, unable to scream, as you watch us enter your room with our infernal devices. Distract us--quickly! Send us a copy of Doggerel Magazine! If you can keep us busy reading, we won't have time to carry out our nefarious plots, will we? ACT NOW! FORWARD DOGGEREL NOW! IT MAY ALREADY BE TOO LATE!
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TOASTS: We begin Doggerel with a toast to celebrate another week without prosecution
Though life is now pleasant and sweet to the sense
We'll be damnably mouldy a hundred years hence.
(Old pirate toast)
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POEM: The Hootchie-Cootchie Parade
by Max Sparber
Sam he was a suspicious man
With a furtive, resentful mind
He was certain there were schemes afoot
And plots to rob him blind
He carried with him a little book
And he jotted all that he saw
Noting that his boss had an unbuckled belt
And lipstick on his jaw
Sam was sure his boss despised him
And Sam he had a plan
If he could uncover an indiscretion
He could lord it over the man
Why would Sam need fear his boss
If he knew secrets of the man's life?
What peccadilloes could Sam uncover
And threaten to tell the man's wife?
He followed his boss that day after work
And was sure he had done so unseen
And Sam found himself at a vast old mansion
With a great hall and mezzanine
And guests arrived in fives and tens
All flappers and top-hatted men
And Sam he wrote down all he saw
And Sam he hid and peered at them
A band they played a Dixie song
Called "The Hootchie-Cootchie Parade"
And the flappers they hoisted up their skirts
And they danced as the band played
The men took off their tophats
And then they dropped their drawers
And some of the men did handstands then
And some crawled around on all fours
As the music grew louder the party did too
And caused Sam to clutch at his heart
A couple he saw were atop the piano
And three atop the drink cart
There was a group of maybe seven
All unbuttoned and undone
Some from the group climbed atop the others
And some atop the chaise longue
Some they carried a bathtub in
And they filled it up with gin
And they tore the clothes right off a flapper
And then they pushed her in
They proceeded to drink with much delight
By lapping with their tongues
And the flapper she called out with glee:
"I hope for this you're hung!"
Sam he felt his head go light
And he slumped down on the floor
And his book and pencil left his hands
And Sam could write no more
He was not noticed for many hours
As the guests were occupied
And by the time they saw him there
Well, poor old Sam had died
They all stood above him then
And looked and shook their heads
He could have joined in what we did
But instead, look here, he's dead!
While we were in actus coitu
This fool was taking notes
So write these words upon his tomb:
"What he should have done, he wrote."
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POEM: Opposite Sexes
by Larry A. Tilander
Well little Susie said to Johnny,
"This all makes me cry
Are you the opposite sex, John,
Or could that sex be I?"
"Well," Johnny said to Susie, "then
I'm stumped, now let's compare;
Just come with me behind the barn,
I'm sure the answer's there."
Then standing there out in the woods
Young Johnny answered plain,
"The answer's clear, no doubt at all--
No need to ask again.
I swear the opposite is you;
'Tis plain when clothes we doff:
You're so opposite, you went
And tore your stuff all off!"
Then Susie said to Johnny, "Then
I'll share your stuff with you."
He told her, "Not a chance, I'm scared
You'll rip this piece off too!"
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POEM: On History
by Linus Huddlesworth
Our founding father, Benjamin Franklin
Was celebrated for his love of spanklin'.
When he'd spankled schoolgirls, forty score,
He turned and spankled forty more.
So those who like floggings had best be a-thanklin'
Our founding father, Benjamin Franklin.
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POEM: Why I Remarried
by Charelton Fiddlesticks II
Take your first novel and throw it in the ocean;
It can't possibly be good, Hemmingway said.
But I forgot my damned manuscript
On that day I went yachting,--
So I flung in my first wife instead.
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POEM: Vasectomy
by Llewtrah (to commemorate Humpto's vasectomy woes)
Scrotum
It is fucking enormous,
For three days it's been swelling,
Now it resembles
Two watermelons
Now my scrotum has filled up with blood,
And my balls begin to ache.
Bollocks
Hurt like fuck when I get wood,
Should this really be happ'ning?
No I don't think it should,
I remember
First night they were like tennis balls
Let my scrotum shrink again.
Cut the gusset,
From my pants
'Cos every seam was chafing,
Swollen bollocks,
No more sexual frolics,
My bollocks took a pasting [1]
Grapefruit,
Just last night they were grapefruit,
Then I got an infection,
My balls are bleedin' wrecks,
When the horn comes,
It's fucking agony too,
Will I ever again have sex?
Swollen bollocks, hemorrhaging,
Cannot stand this swelling,
Watering eyes,
Can't do up my flies,
Over these damn melons.
Touch me?
Oh please do not touch me!
I've just had a vasect'my
And infection's set in.
If you touch me
You'll understand what agony is, [2]
Look my ball-bag is swelling.
Notes:
[1] UK slang. Take a pasting = to be severely beaten up
[2] Humpto's family also understood what vertical take-off was!
For those who wish to sing along, this poem can be set to the melody of "Memories" from the musical "Cats"
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CLASSIC DOGGEREL: Two classic limericks
A certain young sheik I'm not namin'
Asked a flapper he though he was tamin',
"Have you your maidenhead?"
"Don't be foolish," she said,
"But I still have the box that it came in."
There was a young man from St. Paul's
Who read Harper's Bazaar and McCall's
Till he grew such a passion
For feminine fashion
That he knitted a snood for his balls.
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DOGGEREL SAINT: Benjamin Franklin
Even a diligent historian would be hard-pressed to find a more celebrated figure from American antiquity. Benjamin Franklin's accomplishments are so voluminous, they can only be expressed as a list, like this: Successful printer, inventor of bifocals, the only person to sign all four major documents of the founding of the United States (the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Treaty of Alliance with France, the Treaty of Peace with England), founder of the American Library system (along with hundreds of other public works). Here I must pause to gasp for air, and I have hardly begun to recount the extraordinary details of this fascinating historical character. For example, I have not yet mentioned the cult of celebrity that sprung up around Franklin when he was America's first ambassador to France. The French were so taken with him that hundreds of them began to affect Franklin's modest, Puritan-style of dress--and his one great flamboyance, a coonskin cap.
But we are not here to praise Franklin, we are here to bury him. Because while the man might have dressed modestly (when he was dressed at all, as Franklin was a notorious early nudist), and while his autobiography includes his ruminations about how he would begin each morning asking "what good can I do today," Benjamin Franklin had a side to him that isn't taught in school.
Humorless American teachers to this day continue to fill the ears of little children with treacly words of advice from Franklin's popular "Poor Richard's Almanack," such as "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise" and "A penny saved is a penny earned." But these words only tell part of the story of Franklin, and as he himself once wrote, "Half the Truth is often a Great Lie."
There is more to the "Almanack" then these teachers let on, and more to Franklin then the honeyed words teachers adore. After all, only recently the blackly comic cannibalism film "Ravenous" paused briefly to quote Franklin. Picking at a stew made from butchered soldiers, actor Robert Carlyle considers a particularly thick bit of gristle. "Eat to live," he proclaims, "don't live to eat."
This scene comes close to the lost Benjamin Franklin, who was so famous for his satirical edge that, according to a recent republication of the "Almanack," when "Franklin helped draft the Declaration of Independence ... reportedly the other Founding Fathers did not trust him to write the proclamation for fear he might put a joke in it." This is, after all, the writer who included such bits of wisdom in his "Almanack" as "Ne'er take a wife till thou hast a house (and a fire) to put her in" and "Love well, whip well." While the latter undoubtedly inspired Mr. Huddlesworth's ode to Franklin in this issue of Doggerel, you can be sure that Huddlesworth did not first hear this excerpt from a prim grade school teacher.
Neither is it likely that any teacher has explained Franklin's ingenious method of undermining the competition for the "Almanack": Franklin simply declared that the publisher of the most popular competing almanac would die soon. Franklin wrote of his competitor, "He dies, by my calculation, and at his request, on Oct. 17, 1733, 3 ho., 29 m., P.M., at the very instant of the [here Franklin inserted several symbols from the horoscope]." Titan Leeds, the competitor who Franklin had just sentenced to death, was justifiably bewildered and furious, and began his next almanac by declaring Franklin to be "a Fool and a Lyar." Ah, Mr. Leeds, but it is Franklin who graces the American $100 bill, and not you.
Franklin enjoyed this sort of prank--perhaps too much. Throughout his career as a writer and publisher (most of which predated his fame as an American statesman), he had a habit of writing satirical pieces, and then printing them under a pen-name, without explanation that they were meant as satire. In 1747, for example, Franklin wrote "The Speech of Miss Polly Baker," a hoax that was widely reprinted. In it, Franklin writes from the viewpoint of the fictional Polly Baker, a woman who is giving testimony while being prosecuted in a New England court for having given birth to a bastard child. There is little that is funny about the story; It is, for the most part, a passionate argument against then-current laws and morality, which Franklin obviously felt was unduly harsh toward a woman who has had a child out of wedlock. However, when Franklin reaches his final paragraph, his passion grows to a point of absurdity, very nearly becoming an argument in favor of free love. As Polly Baker, Franklin writes these words:
"What must poor young Women do, whom Custom have forbid to solicit Men, and Who cannot force themselves upon Husbands, when the Laws take no Care to provide them any; and yet severely punish them if they do their Duty without them; the Duty of the first and great Command of Nature, and of Nature's God, *Encrease and Multiply*. A Duty, from the steady Performance of which, nothing has been able to deter me; but for its Sake, I have hazarded the Loss of the Publick Esteem, and have frequently endured Publick Disgrace and Punishment; and therefore ought, in my humble Opinion, instead of a Whipping, to have a Statue erected to my Memory."
Bravo! A sentiment certainly worthy of Doggerel, even if its form is not poetic. But had Benjamin Franklin written nothing but prose, he would not find his way to these pages. Fortunately for us, the man was as poetic as he was satiric, and often combined the two into short couplets that seem surprisingly well-suited to the pages of Doggerel. For example, there is this ode to deafness, from the "Almanack":
Deaf, giddy, helpless, left alone,
To all my friends a Burthen grown,
No more I hear a great Church Bell,
Than if it rang out for my Knell:
At Thunder now no more I start,
Than at the whisp'ring of a Fart.
Nay, what's incredible, alack!
I hardly hear my Bridget's Clack.
Then there is Franklin's song of tippling, which he titled "The Antediluvians Were All Very Sober," which reads:
The Antediluvians were all very sober
For they had no Wine, and they brewed no October;
All wicked, Bad Livers, on Mischief still thinking,
For there can't be good Living where there is not Good Drinking,
Derry Down.
'Twas honest old Noah first planted the Vine,
And mended his Morals by drinking its Wine;
He justly the drinking of Water decried;
For he knew that all Mankind, by drinking it, died.
Derry Down.
From this Piece of History plainly we find
That Water's good neither for Body or Mind;
That Virtue and Safety in Wine-bibbing's found
While all that drink Water deserve to be drowned.
Derry Down
So For Safety and Honesty put the Glass aorund.
Bodily functions? Drinking songs? Why, Franklin couldn't be better suited to Doggerel if he had written bawdy songs--which, in fact, he did. Here, then, is his poetic meditation on the subject of cuckoldry, titled "Time to Learn":
Says Roger to his Wife, my dear;
The Strangest piece of News I hear!
A Law, 'tis said, will quickly pass
To purge the matrimonial Class;
Cuckolds, if any we have here
Must to a man be thrown i' th' River.
She smiling cried, My dear, you seem
Surprised! *Pray, han't you learned to swim?*
Let us close with a few more learned words from Benjamin Franklin, one of the fathers of the American Revolution. Again, we feel sure that these important Moral Lessons for the Edification of the Very Young and Innocent have yet to be taught in any classroom:
A Man of Words and not of Deeds,
Is like a Garden full of Weeds.
A Man of Deeds and not of Words
Is like a Garden full of _______.
(I have forgotten the Rhime, but remember 'tis something the very Reverse of a Perfume.)
More of Benjamin Franklin's satirical stories and verses can be found in the book Fart Proudly, edited by Carl Japikse. Order the book from Amazon.com.
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THE FINAL WORD: An epitaph
Here doth lie the bodie
of JOHN FLYE, who did die
By a stroke from a sky-rocket
Which hit him on the eye-socket.
(Durness, Scotland)
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ABOUT OUR CONTRIBUTORS:
MAX SPARBER is the editor of Doggerel Magazine, as well as being a published author of science fiction and fantasy.
LARRY A. TILANDER has written this poem, by way of introduction:
I was born in Toronto in the fall of fifty seven
Learned to read when very young and books took me to Heaven
Moved out to the country in the year of sixty five
Fought with all the yokels, man I hardly stayed alive
The two room school in Marlbank was primative indeed
On about grade six it closed, they bussed us all to Tweed
High school was in Madoc and we smoked a lot of pot
Met a gal named Norma, the library was our spot
Didn't graduate back then, said, "Screw the quest for knowledge."
Worked a while then turned around and headed back to college
Many long years later someone said, "Are you a fool?
Gotta finish what you start, go back and do high school."
Graduated finally then in nineteen ninety eight
Haven't gotten married yet, I hafta masturbate
Hold a job, but lazy and don't like to work too hard
Working in security, I like to be a guard
Write a lot of stories now, and poems, all sorts of bunk
Come and see my website and start reading all the junk
LINUS HUDDLESWORTH was once voted "The Most Elegant Man in Bringham," but his title was stripped from him when it was noticed that he only polished the pearl buttons on his chaps fortnightly, rather than weekly.
CHARELTON FIDDLESTICKS II is the pen-name of one of the most famous stage actors currently strutting the boards in Bangladesh.
LLEWTRAH is the pseudonym of 35-year-old female British bawdiologist with taste for bawdry due to working in male-dominated environments such as her informal position as ometime archivist and poet-in-residence for rugby-loving colleagues. Llewtrah is currently researching/writing an article on female attitudes to bawdy/scatological/generally perverted verse, collecting rude schoolyard rhymes, and local variants of classic bawdry. She has been writing poetry since age of seven, and dirty ditties from mid-teenage years, but has never mastered the art of reading music!
Read more Doggerel!
The Weekly Magazine of Comic Verse and Bawdy Songs
Volume 1, Number 6--August 23, 2000
"In thermulas intremus"
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CONTENTS:
1. Editor's Introduction: New Day Dawning
2. Letter: Shame, Shame, Shame
3. A Toast
4. Poem: The Hootchie-Cootchie Parade (Max Sparber)
5. Poem: Opposite Sexes (Larry A. Tilander)
6. Poem: On History (Linus Huddlesworth)
7. Poem: Why I Remarried (Charelton Fiddlesticks II)
8. Poem: Vasectomy (Llewtrah)
9. Classic Doggerel: Two Classic Limericks
10. Doggerel Saint: Benjamin Franklin
11. The Final Word: An Epitaph
12. About Our Contributors
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EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION: New Day Dawning
Regular readers will note that I have moved the publication day from Monday to Wednesday. You may expect Doggerel every week on this day, approximately midway through the day, unless you are one of our subscribers who lives in Australia or Japan or India. If that is the case, you can expect Doggerel at a different time altogether.
Congratulations to the winner of last week's "Translate Our Motto" contest, E.M. in Texas, who gave a roughly correct translation of " In thermulas intremus." For those who are curious, we at Doggerel translate our motto as "Let's get in the hot tub." For her facility in the dead languages of antiquity, E.M. won a copy of the "Viper Mad Blues" CD, reviewed in last week's issue. New readers, if you are interested in glancing through some back issues of Doggerel, simply direct yourself to the Internet and point your cursor to the words "archive." With a single click of your mouse (or the button on your joystick, for those of you who have mistaken Doggerel Magazine for being some sort of odd video game) our complete history of publication will reveal itself to you.
NEXT WEEK: New vaudeville songs! Filthy verses! Vice! Madness! And all the other wonderful things you have come to expect from Doggerel Magazine.
Enjoy,
Max Sparber, editor
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LETTER: Shame, shame shame
Shame on you. SHAME ON YOU. Poetry is meant for the liberation of the human spirit through lofty, glorious, mellifluous language, and you have turned it into a base, filthy thing. Your fascination with foul sexual practices and terrible violence (both of which you seem to find *funny*) points to a shallowness of the soul and a sickness of the mind. I will pray for you tonight, but first I shall cancel my subscription. I don't know what sort of prank you thought you were pulling when you invited me to join your magazine by promising that it contained "Moral Instruction and Words of Praise," but I do not appreciate it.
Mona Christensen
----------------------- ADVERTISEMENT ---------------------------
WE KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING RIGHT NOW
Oh yes, we're always watching you. You know it too--you can feel our beady eyes upon you, staring jealously through keyholes and in through your windows at night. You can hear us snickering in the darkness and scheming, always scheming! It is enough to DRIVE YOU MAD!
Even now, one of us is under your bed with stainless steel acupuncture pins, waiting to poke them into you when you sleep and render you unable to move, unable to scream, as you watch us enter your room with our infernal devices. Distract us--quickly! Send us a copy of Doggerel Magazine! If you can keep us busy reading, we won't have time to carry out our nefarious plots, will we? ACT NOW! FORWARD DOGGEREL NOW! IT MAY ALREADY BE TOO LATE!
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TOASTS: We begin Doggerel with a toast to celebrate another week without prosecution
Though life is now pleasant and sweet to the sense
We'll be damnably mouldy a hundred years hence.
(Old pirate toast)
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POEM: The Hootchie-Cootchie Parade
by Max Sparber
Sam he was a suspicious man
With a furtive, resentful mind
He was certain there were schemes afoot
And plots to rob him blind
He carried with him a little book
And he jotted all that he saw
Noting that his boss had an unbuckled belt
And lipstick on his jaw
Sam was sure his boss despised him
And Sam he had a plan
If he could uncover an indiscretion
He could lord it over the man
Why would Sam need fear his boss
If he knew secrets of the man's life?
What peccadilloes could Sam uncover
And threaten to tell the man's wife?
He followed his boss that day after work
And was sure he had done so unseen
And Sam found himself at a vast old mansion
With a great hall and mezzanine
And guests arrived in fives and tens
All flappers and top-hatted men
And Sam he wrote down all he saw
And Sam he hid and peered at them
A band they played a Dixie song
Called "The Hootchie-Cootchie Parade"
And the flappers they hoisted up their skirts
And they danced as the band played
The men took off their tophats
And then they dropped their drawers
And some of the men did handstands then
And some crawled around on all fours
As the music grew louder the party did too
And caused Sam to clutch at his heart
A couple he saw were atop the piano
And three atop the drink cart
There was a group of maybe seven
All unbuttoned and undone
Some from the group climbed atop the others
And some atop the chaise longue
Some they carried a bathtub in
And they filled it up with gin
And they tore the clothes right off a flapper
And then they pushed her in
They proceeded to drink with much delight
By lapping with their tongues
And the flapper she called out with glee:
"I hope for this you're hung!"
Sam he felt his head go light
And he slumped down on the floor
And his book and pencil left his hands
And Sam could write no more
He was not noticed for many hours
As the guests were occupied
And by the time they saw him there
Well, poor old Sam had died
They all stood above him then
And looked and shook their heads
He could have joined in what we did
But instead, look here, he's dead!
While we were in actus coitu
This fool was taking notes
So write these words upon his tomb:
"What he should have done, he wrote."
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POEM: Opposite Sexes
by Larry A. Tilander
Well little Susie said to Johnny,
"This all makes me cry
Are you the opposite sex, John,
Or could that sex be I?"
"Well," Johnny said to Susie, "then
I'm stumped, now let's compare;
Just come with me behind the barn,
I'm sure the answer's there."
Then standing there out in the woods
Young Johnny answered plain,
"The answer's clear, no doubt at all--
No need to ask again.
I swear the opposite is you;
'Tis plain when clothes we doff:
You're so opposite, you went
And tore your stuff all off!"
Then Susie said to Johnny, "Then
I'll share your stuff with you."
He told her, "Not a chance, I'm scared
You'll rip this piece off too!"
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POEM: On History
by Linus Huddlesworth
Our founding father, Benjamin Franklin
Was celebrated for his love of spanklin'.
When he'd spankled schoolgirls, forty score,
He turned and spankled forty more.
So those who like floggings had best be a-thanklin'
Our founding father, Benjamin Franklin.
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POEM: Why I Remarried
by Charelton Fiddlesticks II
Take your first novel and throw it in the ocean;
It can't possibly be good, Hemmingway said.
But I forgot my damned manuscript
On that day I went yachting,--
So I flung in my first wife instead.
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POEM: Vasectomy
by Llewtrah (to commemorate Humpto's vasectomy woes)
Scrotum
It is fucking enormous,
For three days it's been swelling,
Now it resembles
Two watermelons
Now my scrotum has filled up with blood,
And my balls begin to ache.
Bollocks
Hurt like fuck when I get wood,
Should this really be happ'ning?
No I don't think it should,
I remember
First night they were like tennis balls
Let my scrotum shrink again.
Cut the gusset,
From my pants
'Cos every seam was chafing,
Swollen bollocks,
No more sexual frolics,
My bollocks took a pasting [1]
Grapefruit,
Just last night they were grapefruit,
Then I got an infection,
My balls are bleedin' wrecks,
When the horn comes,
It's fucking agony too,
Will I ever again have sex?
Swollen bollocks, hemorrhaging,
Cannot stand this swelling,
Watering eyes,
Can't do up my flies,
Over these damn melons.
Touch me?
Oh please do not touch me!
I've just had a vasect'my
And infection's set in.
If you touch me
You'll understand what agony is, [2]
Look my ball-bag is swelling.
Notes:
[1] UK slang. Take a pasting = to be severely beaten up
[2] Humpto's family also understood what vertical take-off was!
For those who wish to sing along, this poem can be set to the melody of "Memories" from the musical "Cats"
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
CLASSIC DOGGEREL: Two classic limericks
A certain young sheik I'm not namin'
Asked a flapper he though he was tamin',
"Have you your maidenhead?"
"Don't be foolish," she said,
"But I still have the box that it came in."
There was a young man from St. Paul's
Who read Harper's Bazaar and McCall's
Till he grew such a passion
For feminine fashion
That he knitted a snood for his balls.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
DOGGEREL SAINT: Benjamin Franklin
Even a diligent historian would be hard-pressed to find a more celebrated figure from American antiquity. Benjamin Franklin's accomplishments are so voluminous, they can only be expressed as a list, like this: Successful printer, inventor of bifocals, the only person to sign all four major documents of the founding of the United States (the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Treaty of Alliance with France, the Treaty of Peace with England), founder of the American Library system (along with hundreds of other public works). Here I must pause to gasp for air, and I have hardly begun to recount the extraordinary details of this fascinating historical character. For example, I have not yet mentioned the cult of celebrity that sprung up around Franklin when he was America's first ambassador to France. The French were so taken with him that hundreds of them began to affect Franklin's modest, Puritan-style of dress--and his one great flamboyance, a coonskin cap.
But we are not here to praise Franklin, we are here to bury him. Because while the man might have dressed modestly (when he was dressed at all, as Franklin was a notorious early nudist), and while his autobiography includes his ruminations about how he would begin each morning asking "what good can I do today," Benjamin Franklin had a side to him that isn't taught in school.
Humorless American teachers to this day continue to fill the ears of little children with treacly words of advice from Franklin's popular "Poor Richard's Almanack," such as "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise" and "A penny saved is a penny earned." But these words only tell part of the story of Franklin, and as he himself once wrote, "Half the Truth is often a Great Lie."
There is more to the "Almanack" then these teachers let on, and more to Franklin then the honeyed words teachers adore. After all, only recently the blackly comic cannibalism film "Ravenous" paused briefly to quote Franklin. Picking at a stew made from butchered soldiers, actor Robert Carlyle considers a particularly thick bit of gristle. "Eat to live," he proclaims, "don't live to eat."
This scene comes close to the lost Benjamin Franklin, who was so famous for his satirical edge that, according to a recent republication of the "Almanack," when "Franklin helped draft the Declaration of Independence ... reportedly the other Founding Fathers did not trust him to write the proclamation for fear he might put a joke in it." This is, after all, the writer who included such bits of wisdom in his "Almanack" as "Ne'er take a wife till thou hast a house (and a fire) to put her in" and "Love well, whip well." While the latter undoubtedly inspired Mr. Huddlesworth's ode to Franklin in this issue of Doggerel, you can be sure that Huddlesworth did not first hear this excerpt from a prim grade school teacher.
Neither is it likely that any teacher has explained Franklin's ingenious method of undermining the competition for the "Almanack": Franklin simply declared that the publisher of the most popular competing almanac would die soon. Franklin wrote of his competitor, "He dies, by my calculation, and at his request, on Oct. 17, 1733, 3 ho., 29 m., P.M., at the very instant of the [here Franklin inserted several symbols from the horoscope]." Titan Leeds, the competitor who Franklin had just sentenced to death, was justifiably bewildered and furious, and began his next almanac by declaring Franklin to be "a Fool and a Lyar." Ah, Mr. Leeds, but it is Franklin who graces the American $100 bill, and not you.
Franklin enjoyed this sort of prank--perhaps too much. Throughout his career as a writer and publisher (most of which predated his fame as an American statesman), he had a habit of writing satirical pieces, and then printing them under a pen-name, without explanation that they were meant as satire. In 1747, for example, Franklin wrote "The Speech of Miss Polly Baker," a hoax that was widely reprinted. In it, Franklin writes from the viewpoint of the fictional Polly Baker, a woman who is giving testimony while being prosecuted in a New England court for having given birth to a bastard child. There is little that is funny about the story; It is, for the most part, a passionate argument against then-current laws and morality, which Franklin obviously felt was unduly harsh toward a woman who has had a child out of wedlock. However, when Franklin reaches his final paragraph, his passion grows to a point of absurdity, very nearly becoming an argument in favor of free love. As Polly Baker, Franklin writes these words:
"What must poor young Women do, whom Custom have forbid to solicit Men, and Who cannot force themselves upon Husbands, when the Laws take no Care to provide them any; and yet severely punish them if they do their Duty without them; the Duty of the first and great Command of Nature, and of Nature's God, *Encrease and Multiply*. A Duty, from the steady Performance of which, nothing has been able to deter me; but for its Sake, I have hazarded the Loss of the Publick Esteem, and have frequently endured Publick Disgrace and Punishment; and therefore ought, in my humble Opinion, instead of a Whipping, to have a Statue erected to my Memory."
Bravo! A sentiment certainly worthy of Doggerel, even if its form is not poetic. But had Benjamin Franklin written nothing but prose, he would not find his way to these pages. Fortunately for us, the man was as poetic as he was satiric, and often combined the two into short couplets that seem surprisingly well-suited to the pages of Doggerel. For example, there is this ode to deafness, from the "Almanack":
Deaf, giddy, helpless, left alone,
To all my friends a Burthen grown,
No more I hear a great Church Bell,
Than if it rang out for my Knell:
At Thunder now no more I start,
Than at the whisp'ring of a Fart.
Nay, what's incredible, alack!
I hardly hear my Bridget's Clack.
Then there is Franklin's song of tippling, which he titled "The Antediluvians Were All Very Sober," which reads:
The Antediluvians were all very sober
For they had no Wine, and they brewed no October;
All wicked, Bad Livers, on Mischief still thinking,
For there can't be good Living where there is not Good Drinking,
Derry Down.
'Twas honest old Noah first planted the Vine,
And mended his Morals by drinking its Wine;
He justly the drinking of Water decried;
For he knew that all Mankind, by drinking it, died.
Derry Down.
From this Piece of History plainly we find
That Water's good neither for Body or Mind;
That Virtue and Safety in Wine-bibbing's found
While all that drink Water deserve to be drowned.
Derry Down
So For Safety and Honesty put the Glass aorund.
Bodily functions? Drinking songs? Why, Franklin couldn't be better suited to Doggerel if he had written bawdy songs--which, in fact, he did. Here, then, is his poetic meditation on the subject of cuckoldry, titled "Time to Learn":
Says Roger to his Wife, my dear;
The Strangest piece of News I hear!
A Law, 'tis said, will quickly pass
To purge the matrimonial Class;
Cuckolds, if any we have here
Must to a man be thrown i' th' River.
She smiling cried, My dear, you seem
Surprised! *Pray, han't you learned to swim?*
Let us close with a few more learned words from Benjamin Franklin, one of the fathers of the American Revolution. Again, we feel sure that these important Moral Lessons for the Edification of the Very Young and Innocent have yet to be taught in any classroom:
A Man of Words and not of Deeds,
Is like a Garden full of Weeds.
A Man of Deeds and not of Words
Is like a Garden full of _______.
(I have forgotten the Rhime, but remember 'tis something the very Reverse of a Perfume.)
More of Benjamin Franklin's satirical stories and verses can be found in the book Fart Proudly, edited by Carl Japikse. Order the book from Amazon.com.
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THE FINAL WORD: An epitaph
Here doth lie the bodie
of JOHN FLYE, who did die
By a stroke from a sky-rocket
Which hit him on the eye-socket.
(Durness, Scotland)
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ABOUT OUR CONTRIBUTORS:
MAX SPARBER is the editor of Doggerel Magazine, as well as being a published author of science fiction and fantasy.
LARRY A. TILANDER has written this poem, by way of introduction:
I was born in Toronto in the fall of fifty seven
Learned to read when very young and books took me to Heaven
Moved out to the country in the year of sixty five
Fought with all the yokels, man I hardly stayed alive
The two room school in Marlbank was primative indeed
On about grade six it closed, they bussed us all to Tweed
High school was in Madoc and we smoked a lot of pot
Met a gal named Norma, the library was our spot
Didn't graduate back then, said, "Screw the quest for knowledge."
Worked a while then turned around and headed back to college
Many long years later someone said, "Are you a fool?
Gotta finish what you start, go back and do high school."
Graduated finally then in nineteen ninety eight
Haven't gotten married yet, I hafta masturbate
Hold a job, but lazy and don't like to work too hard
Working in security, I like to be a guard
Write a lot of stories now, and poems, all sorts of bunk
Come and see my website and start reading all the junk
LINUS HUDDLESWORTH was once voted "The Most Elegant Man in Bringham," but his title was stripped from him when it was noticed that he only polished the pearl buttons on his chaps fortnightly, rather than weekly.
CHARELTON FIDDLESTICKS II is the pen-name of one of the most famous stage actors currently strutting the boards in Bangladesh.
LLEWTRAH is the pseudonym of 35-year-old female British bawdiologist with taste for bawdry due to working in male-dominated environments such as her informal position as ometime archivist and poet-in-residence for rugby-loving colleagues. Llewtrah is currently researching/writing an article on female attitudes to bawdy/scatological/generally perverted verse, collecting rude schoolyard rhymes, and local variants of classic bawdry. She has been writing poetry since age of seven, and dirty ditties from mid-teenage years, but has never mastered the art of reading music!
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