How to write a limerick

The form in one minute

A limerick is a five-line comic poem with a fixed rhyme scheme, AABBA, and a bouncing rhythm. Lines one, two and five are long and share a rhyme. Lines three and four are short and share a second rhyme. The last line is the punchline, and the joke should land on its final word.

The form is older than anyone can pin down, but it was made famous by Edward Lear, whose A Book of Nonsense appeared in 1846. This is one of his, and it is a good place to start because it shows the shape so clearly:

Two things are worth noticing. The short lines are a list, which speeds the poem up, and the last line pays the list off. That is the limerick’s whole engine: setup, acceleration, payoff.

The rhythm, and how to hear it

The limerick bounces because it is written in a galloping beat of two light syllables and one strong one: da-da-DUM. Poets call this foot an anapest. The long lines have three strong beats; the short lines have two.

You do not need to count syllables, and you should not try to. Most limericks run to eight to ten syllables on the long lines and five to seven on the short ones, but the rule that matters is the beat. The easiest test: tap the table on every strong syllable while you read aloud. Three taps on lines one, two and five. Two taps on lines three and four. If you stumble, or have to rush to fit words in, the line has a problem.

The first light syllable of a line is optional. There ONCE was a FELlow named CLIVE starts with one light syllable, not two, and nobody notices. What you cannot do is put a strong syllable where the beat expects a light one, or pile three light syllables together.

How to write one, step by step

1. Choose a subject with one ridiculous detail

   A limerick about “my funny friend” will be flat. A limerick about the friend who burns every barbecue writes itself. Find the one habit, disaster or obsession that everyone who knows the person will recognise. That detail is your joke.

2. Pick your A rhyme before anything else

   You need three words that rhyme, so choose an ending with plenty of partners. -ay, -ee, -ate, -ill, -ed, -ight and -ore have dozens. -orange, -month and -ilver have none. Write a quick list of ten rhymes for your ending and look for the funniest one: that word belongs at the end of line five.

3. Write the last line first

   This is the trick most people miss. The punchline is the hardest line and the only one that really matters, so write it while you still have every option open. Then build the other four lines to lead up to it. Writing top to bottom almost always produces a limerick that runs out of joke before the end.

4. Set it up in lines one and two

   Line one introduces the character and fixes the A rhyme. Line two gives the situation. Keep them plain: their job is to make the listener expect something, so that line five can deliver something else.

5. Turn it in lines three and four

   The short lines are the complication: the thing that goes wrong, the escalation, the list. They move fast, so use them for action rather than description. Their rhyme (B) should be quick and easy; do not waste your best rhyme here.

6. Read it aloud and fix the limp

   Tap the beats. Cut filler words. Check that the last word is the funniest word in the poem. If it is not, rearrange line five until it is.

A worked example

Subject: a friend called Clive who burns every barbecue. A rhyme: Clive gives us drive, alive, five, hive, arrive, survive, thrive. The funniest option: arrive, because the punchline can be about what happens when he turns up.

Line five first: To go out when they heard him arrive. Three beats, lands on the joke. Now it needs a setup where people have reason to leave.

Lines one and two: There once was a fellow named Clive / Whose barbecues few would survive. The classic opener, and survive exaggerates just enough.

Lines three and four: the complication has to connect the barbecue to the people leaving. A first draft, His cooking was bad / And it made people sad, scans fine and says nothing. The rewrite puts in something you can picture: The sausages burned, / And the neighbours all learned. Learned is the hinge: it tells you this happened more than once.

That is the whole process. If you want to see what a dozen variations on the same idea look like, put a name and a detail into the limerick generator and press the button a few times.

Names that rhyme, and names that don’t

Ending line one on the person’s name is the classic move, and some names make it easy:

Other names are awkward: Olivia, Jennifer, Timothy, Elizabeth. There are three ways round it. Use a nickname (Liz rhymes with fizz and quiz). Put the name in the middle of the line and end on something rhymable: A woman called Olivia Rose. Or end on a place instead of a name: An accountant from Hull called Olivia sets up Hull, dull and skull without asking anything of her name at all.

Five mistakes that kill a limerick

1. Twisting the grammar to reach a rhyme. And to the shop he quickly went is the sound of a writer who has given up. If a line needs inverted word order to rhyme, change the rhyme.
2. Near-rhymes. Time and line do not rhyme. In a form this short, the listener hears every miss.
3. Too many syllables. A long line with four beats instead of three makes the reader rush, and a rushed punchline is a dead punchline.
4. The joke arrives early. If the funny part is in the middle of line five, move it to the end. The last word is where the laugh goes.
5. Rhyming a word with itself. Lear did it, and it was charming in 1846. Today it reads as a missed chance for a better punchline.

Clean, cheeky and rude

The limerick has always had two lives. There is the clean, nonsense tradition of Lear, and there is the bawdy spoken tradition that was passed around pubs, barracks and dinner parties long before anyone printed it. The folklorist Gershon Legman, who compiled the largest scholarly anthology of limericks, went as far as arguing that the true folk limerick is almost always obscene.

Both are real limericks, and the form suits both for the same reason: a fixed shape with a guaranteed punchline is perfect for a joke, whatever the joke is. The generator on this site lets you choose. Its heat dial runs from clean enough for a classroom, through cheeky enough for the office, to rude enough for adults only.

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