Arts and Humanities Commons^™

When Poetry And Humor Get Hitched, Christian Hartselle

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Through humor, poetry explores the imagination and the mind just as it does through other means of expression. Comic poetry finds the truth in the illogical and in the absurd; it finds what unsettles us through its use of surprise; it finds delight and play in the unknown and uncertain. By its very nature, comic poetry clings to the edges of what we know, so pinpointing its characteristics is tricky. But the shared characteristic of all comic poetry is the permission the poet grants herself to disobey boundaries. The poet chooses not to fit her works within the reader’s expectations, …