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Who is the funniest poet?

The funniest poet is Spike Milligan, according to For Reading Addicts' account (2017) of the 1998 UK-wide poll that voted his On the Ning Nang Nong the favourite comic poem, because his nonsense verse sounds like a child inventing noises for ordinary things.

Updated · Based on For Reading Addicts (April 16, 2017), The Christian Science Monitor (October 5, 1990) and The Spectator (November 19, 2005)

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That 1998 vote put Milligan's 1959 poem ahead of the nonsense classics by Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, and the Children's Poetry Archive notes that a BBC poll a year later called him the funniest person of the last 1,000 years. Among American writers of light verse, Ogden Nash is the usual answer, and Billy Collins won the Poetry Foundation's Mark Twain Poetry Award for humor. Milligan's edge was sound: his lines are built from noises a kid could make up, delivered with total confidence.

The pick: Spike Milligan

Comic poet and Goon Show writer, 1918–2002

His On the Ning Nang Nong won the 1998 UK-wide vote for favourite comic poem, ahead of Carroll and Lear.

Also in the running

  • Ogden Nash (American writer of light verse): Reviewing his biography in The Spectator in 2005, Sam Leith wrote that the main thing about Nash "was that he was funny."
  • Billy Collins (American poet): Received the Poetry Foundation's $25,000 Mark Twain Poetry Award in 2005 for his contribution to humor in American poetry, as Ploughshares recorded.
  • Lewis Carroll (English author of Jabberwocky): Finished behind Milligan in the 1998 comic-poem vote, with nonsense verse that Milligan's poem was measured against.
  • Edward Lear (English nonsense poet): The other Victorian nonsense master Milligan outpolled in 1998, according to the poem's Wikipedia history.

What made them funny

Milligan came to verse from radio. He wrote most of The Goon Show, which ran from 1951 to 1960 and made Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe household names, and a 2002 essay in Children's Literature in Education credits those scripts with seeding the surreal streak in British comedy that led to Monty Python. His poems kept the radio habit of treating sound as the joke: Wikipedia's history of On the Ning Nang Nong describes its words as nonsense a child could easily invent.

On stage he liked to start in earnest and fall through the floor. Christopher Andreae, watching him at the Edinburgh Fringe for The Christian Science Monitor in October 1990, saw him read serious poetry before sliding into absurd verse and jokes, moving from a normal situation into one where wires cross and separate worlds collide. Andreae counted 37 children's books among his output by then, beside the war memoir Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall and the novel Puckoon.

Nash, the American runner-up, worked the opposite way: tight rhythm, then a rhyme bent so far out of shape that the strain itself gets the laugh. Sam Leith called it good bad verse, artful where William McGonagall's was simply inept.

Techniques to take into your videos and sets

  1. 1. Give the noise a job

    What they did

    In On the Ning Nang Nong, published in Silly Verse for Kids in December 1959, Milligan gives cows, monkeys and teapots made-up sounds and states them as plain fact. Nothing is explained; the noises simply are what those things do in that place.

    Why it works

    A made-up sound is instantly shareable because anyone can say it back, and stating it flatly, like a field guide, makes the audience do the imagining.

    Example (original, written by Shutap)

    Our office printer doesn't jam. It goes ka-chunk, ka-chunk, pfft, which is printer for "ask Kevin."

    Try it

    Pick the one machine or animal in your story, write down the noise it actually makes, then translate that noise into a full sentence.

  2. 2. Solemn title, tiny payoff

    What they did

    At his 1990 Edinburgh Fringe reading, Andreae reports, Milligan announced "a Poem for the Lonely" and then simply greeted the room with "Hullo!" The weighty title promised grief and the poem delivered a hello.

    Why it works

    The audience braces for depth and gets the smallest literal answer to the title, so the laugh comes from relief as much as surprise.

    Example (original, written by Shutap)

    This next video is called "On Loss." It's me lifting every couch cushion looking for the left AirPod.

    Try it

    Give your next clip a title worthy of a funeral, then show the most trivial version of it in the first three seconds.

  3. 3. Win the argument from the grave

    What they did

    Milligan's preferred epitaph, recorded in Children's Literature in Education in December 2002, was "I told you I was ill." The last word on his whole life is a man finally being proved right in a small household argument.

    Why it works

    It shrinks the biggest event there is down to petty vindication, and everyone recognizes the satisfaction of an "I told you so," however late it arrives.

    Example (original, written by Shutap)

    When my houseplant finally gives up, the label on the pot is going to read: "I did mention the sunlight."

    Try it

    Find the moment in your story where something finally broke, and give it one last line that proves an old complaint right.

  4. 4. Stretch the rhyme until it squeaks

    What they did

    Nash, as Sam Leith described him in 2005, kept his rhythm careful and made his two-syllable rhymes land somewhere nobody expected, so lines that look clumsy turn out to be engineered.

    Why it works

    Viewers hear the rhyme coming and enjoy watching you force a word into it; the more visible the effort, the bigger the payoff.

    Example (original, written by Shutap)

    I meal-prepped on Sunday with fierce dedication; by Tuesday the chicken had filed for emancipation.

    Try it

    End a caption on a long, serious word, then make the second half of the line rhyme with it using the least dignified thing in the frame.

Before you quote them

Milligan's headstone wording is often quoted two ways. Children's Literature in Education gives his preferred epitaph as "I told you I was ill," while IrishCentral gives the inscription in Irish and translates it as "I told you I was sick." We could not fetch the original 1998 BBC News report of the comic-poem vote; the result is confirmed by For Reading Addicts and by Wikipedia, which cites that report. The 1999 funniest-person poll is as reported by the Children's Poetry Archive.

Questions people ask

Who is the funniest poet?
Spike Milligan is the best-supported answer. For Reading Addicts (2017) records that his On the Ning Nang Nong was voted the UK's favourite comic poem in a 1998 nationwide poll, ahead of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, and the Children's Poetry Archive notes a 1999 BBC poll naming him the funniest person of the last 1,000 years.
Who else is considered a funny poet?
Ogden Nash, whose biography Sam Leith reviewed in The Spectator in 2005, saying the main thing about him was that he was funny. Billy Collins won the Poetry Foundation's $25,000 Mark Twain Poetry Award for humor in 2005, Ploughshares noted. Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear trailed Milligan in the 1998 vote.
What is Spike Milligan's most famous funny poem?
On the Ning Nang Nong. It first appeared in Silly Verse for Kids, published by Dobson Books in December 1959, and won the 1998 vote for the UK's favourite comic poem. Milligan recorded a version in 1969 as a B-side to the theme of his BBC2 sketch show Q, according to Wikipedia.
Did Spike Milligan's gravestone really say "I told you I was ill"?
That was his preferred epitaph, as Children's Literature in Education recorded in December 2002. The stone itself carries the line in Irish; IrishCentral translates that inscription as "I told you I was sick," so both English versions circulate.
What kind of humor did Spike Milligan use?
Surreal nonsense built on sound. Christopher Andreae of The Christian Science Monitor wrote in 1990 that Milligan moved from a normal situation into an unexpected one where separate worlds collide, a habit carried over from writing The Goon Show between 1951 and 1960.

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Sources

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