Computational Limericks

This was a very interesting article. The article begins by stating what us as readers might be thinking, which is “ why is this relevant”. Lessard and Levison stated that limericks represent the stage between puns and jokes. In short, unlike crass jokes, these jokes have a loose structure. We are then given three models of limericks.

The first of these is exhaustive generation. The text was a little unclear as to what this entails, but I gathered that this is writing whatever you are thinking, no matter how senseless. I assume that this can clear ones’ mind, and also give a bank of ideas to go back to. The next step is production, followed by backtracking and editing, restricted by a set of rules. The third is multiple constraint satisfaction.. This , as the article states, “ is the production of a text that obeys multiple constraints”.

After we are given a summary of the rules that govern a limerick, we get an explanation of what a limerick actually is. I would rather have this come before the specifics, but I digress. For those that don’t know, ( and trust me, I was a part of this group before I read this article) a limerick is a 5 line poem that is generally humorous. The poem has an aabba rhyme scheme, and lines 1, 2 and 5 have 9 syllables. Lines 3 and 4 have six syllables.

The articles talks in detail about how the limerick is dictated by the rhyme scheme, which I found to be interesting. Obviously any type of set rhyme scheme is self restricting, and it is this restriction that ironically can bring out some pretty creative limericks. As the article states, this rhyme scheme sets about a right to left approach of writing the lyric, where the writer may choose the word that will rhyme first, and then base the rest of the line off of that word. When the Limerick begins, the writer sometimes chooses to make a skeleton of the overall poem. For example, If I was writing one, and was including my name, I would try and compose a list of words that rhyme with Zach ( quack, sack, rack, tack, etc).

The article talks about how most limericks have some lexical similarities within the poem. For example, many of the words could be dealing with the same topic. The example we are given is food preparation, with many of the words having to deal with this topic ( the limerick contains the words roasted, boiled, baked, toasted, stewed). Also there is such a thing as a historical limerick, which generally follows a certain plot structure, if you will. A limerick about the crashing of the Hindenburg would start out with the motivation, the act, the factor that made it crash, and the consequences.

Limericks also deal with a great bit of wordplay. Generally the sound of the word is very important. For example, we are given a limerick about a dog that plays a musical instrument and keeps thieves away. Given its relation to music, we see some clever wordplay on the word bark. Almost anyone vaguely familiar with music knows of Bach, so the limerick states at the end” For its Bach was much worse than its Bite”. All in all, I found this article to be interesting because I didn’t realize that something so seemingly simple could have such complexity.