Analysis of The Played-Out Humorist
William Schwenck Gilbert 1836 – 1911
Quixotic is his enterprise, and hopeless his adventure is,
Who seeks for jocularities that haven't yet been said.
The world has joked incessantly for over fifty centuries,
And every joke that's possible has long ago been made.
I started as a humorist with lots of mental fizziness,
But humour is a drug which it's the fashion to abuse;
For my stock-in-trade, my fixtures, and the goodwill of the
business
No reasonable offer I am likely to refuse.
And if anybody choose
He may circulate the news
That no reasonable offer I'm likely to refuse.
Oh happy was that humorist - the first that made a pun at all -
Who when a joke occurred to him, however poor and mean,
Was absolutely certain that it never had been done at all -
How popular at dinners must that humorist have been!
Oh the days when some stepfather for the query held a handle out,
The door-mat from the scraper, is it distant very far?
And when no one knew where Moses was when Aaron blew the candle
out,
And no one had discovered that a door could be a-jar!
But your modern hearers are
In their tastes particular,
And they sneer if you inform them that a door can be a-jar!
In search of quip and quiddity, I've sat all day, alone, apart -
And all that I could hit on as a problem was - to find
Analogy between a scrag of mutton and a Bony-part,
Which offers slight employment to the speculative mind:
For you cannot call it very good, however great your charity -
It's not the sort of humour that is greeted with a shout -
And I've come to the conclusion that my mine of jocularity
In present Anno Domini, is worked completely out!
Though the notion you may scout,
I can prove beyond a doubt
That my mine of jocularity is utterly worked out.
Scheme | ABXXAXXXCCCC DXDX EFXEFFXF GHGHXEBEEEE |
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Poetic Form | |
Metre | 010111001010101 1111110111 0111010011010100 010011100110111 11010100111101 1110111010101 11101110001110 10 11000101110101 0110001 111001 11100010110101 1101110001110111 1101011110101 101010111011111 11001101110011 1011110101010101 01110101110101 0111111011101010 1 01110101011101 1110101 0110100 011110111011101 01110111110101 01111111010111 0100010111000101 11010101010001 1110111011011100 1101111110101 0111001011111 01010100110101 1010111 1110101 11111110011 |
Closest metre | Iambic hexameter |
Characters | 1,677 |
Words | 322 |
Sentences | 11 |
Stanzas | 4 |
Stanza Lengths | 12, 4, 8, 11 |
Lines Amount | 35 |
Letters per line (avg) | 38 |
Words per line (avg) | 9 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 333 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 80 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:38 min read
- 30 Views
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"The Played-Out Humorist" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 28 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/41320/the-played-out-humorist>.
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