Everyone knows poets don’t get into poetry to make money. But we also know no one gets into poetry to make people laugh.

History has taught us that poetry is a serious sport which is supposed to work around themes of romance, political commentary, death, and creative descriptions of sunlight entering windows. And since poetry’s inception, thought to date back 2500 to 3000 years BC with the carving of “Hymn to the Death of Tammuz” into a tablet of clay, never has one, feeling a little low in mood and in need of a good laugh, raised an index finger in the air and thought, ‘Ah, yes, poetry, that oughta do it.’

So where does humour belong in poetry?

In so many places. And for so many reasons. I’ll discuss some with you now.

Poets certainly aren’t known for their hilarity. When you picture a poet, an image of elbow patches and male pattern baldness may come to mind, perhaps a greying woman with tiny glasses, or a guy with a goatee and a beret who speaks no French mansplaining Proust.

These present as largely unfunny characters, it must be said. I personally don’t know any poets who are also stand-up comedians, though many poets are creatures of quick wit.

Humour, being a natural device for ducking and weaving around emotionally difficult situations in my daily life with amusing or sarcastic comments, could not help but burst through the door into my writing. So, if for no other reason than this, humour belongs in poetry if it serves that originating purpose of revealing our inner self.

But as for the ducking and weaving, I suppose that’s one of the reasons humour exists in poetry: a way of getting to or accessing harder, less funny things.

Philip Larkin’s most famous poem This Be The Verse, for instance, opens with this stanza:

‘They fuck you up, your mom and dad / They may not mean to, but they do / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you.’

A pretty whimsical approach to the subject matter of generational trauma, if you ask me. But the comic spirit feels right.

I also tend to think that good poems move and swerve around, and humour is one way for taking a poem in a different direction. In the sonnet form, we know the volta is the turn of thought or direction, in Petrarchan or Italian sonnets it happens between the octave and the sestet, and in Shakespearean or English before the final couplet (funny, right?).

We can go as far back as Shakespeare, to Sonnet 130—in which Shakespeare describes his mistress as a wiry haired, smelly woman with dull boobs, putting the brakes on just before the end to declare that despite her apparent vulgarity, their love is beautiful and worthwhile after all—to see how turning poems into and and away from humour has been a technique for quite some time. Or maybe Shakespeare just grew bored with comparing his lovers to particularly seasonal days, who really knows?

My personal favourite example of this technique is a poem called What I Want by George Bilgere, though I won’t spoil the fun by giving away the joke.

A poem’s premise can also be amusing, focusing in on some minor detail to comedic effect, of which Billy Collins is an expert. His poem titled I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey’s Version of “Three Blind Mice” begins: “And I start wondering how they came to be blind.” The entire poem then becomes an investigation of this thought…

“Was it a common accident, all three caught / in a searing explosion, a firework perhaps? / If not, / if each came to his or her blindness separately, / how did they ever manage to find one another? Would it not be difficult for a blind mouse / to locate even one fellow mouse with vision / let alone two other blind ones?”

If anyone has ever said to you, ‘Do you want to hear a joke?’, you’ll know that the question almost invariably defeats the possibility of laughter. It is the wet blanket of comedy. As with humour in life, humour in poetry seems to prosper in its spontaneity.

I would refer to Charles Bukowski as someone who seemed to enjoy dramatizing the reveal of humour in his work. His poem 8 count is short enough for me to include in its entirety.

“from my bed / I watch / 3 birds / on a telephone / wire. / one flies / off. / then / another. / one is left, / then / it too / is gone. / my typewriter is / tombstone / still. / and I am / reduced to bird / watching. / just thought I'd / let you / know, / fucker.”

That said, a poem’s title can signpost playfulness to come.

Sharon Olds’ poem The Pope’s Penis amuses me before I begin, and delivers on its promise with the opening lines:

“It hangs deep in his robes, / a delicate clapper at the center of a bell.”

So too does the poem To the delete button by Matthew Yeager, an ode in praise of the backspace key, which says, “you have changed / literature like the pill / changed sex”.

I’ll leave it there. The next time you sit down to write poetry, don’t be shy to think about laughter as a response as worthy as someone thinking your poem is smart or meaningful, doing your bit to help to shift the public image of poets away from the pretentious few who in conversations at parties across the world are dragging our good name through the mud.

Joshua John Smithe is a poet and writer from Melbourne, Australia. See more of his work at: https://www.joshuajohnsmithe.com/