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here in the hollywood house of comedy writers, we work with a few assumptions: there are "levels" to jokes there are "levels" to poetry A first level joke is generally a dick joke or a fart joke. It exists on the surface, and is (male) physical. These we put in movies for 14 year old boys. I say "we", though only the boys here are writing movies. A second level joke is based on an established context. Generally, these are funniest when existing in a context of first level joke. Ex., in _There's Something About Mary_ (not written by the boys, but by friends), the yappy dog dying joke is old, old, old. The context is first level. But the sequence of jokes about the dog becomes second level. Since the scene persists, and in two levels, the audience "gets" the second level. This is funnier than a plain yappy dog/sex joke but is not ambiguous, which second level jokes can be to those who are not paying attention. A solid pun is a second level joke. This is why so much objectivist & language poetry is funny -- tons of puns. A third level joke involves information the audience must have and put together with the other levels of the joke. Again in poetry, this can be something like the form, traditional or not. Shakespeare's funny bits are generally third-level funny as well as being first and second level funny. Since poetry stresses "levels" here, and since jokes become more ambigous, appealing to a smaller audience, with each level, except where there is a sort of "persistence", then poetry is bound to be less funny. The funniest poems I write have extended metaphors and lots of puns and first level jokes while they are making a larger joke. But truly hilarious, unambiguous poems are hard. If the form is making a third level joke, it is going to demand someone who can _hear_ form or get the joke on the first read -- a prosody expert, someone who has unravelled your puzzle poem, etc. Extended metaphors are generally seen to be bad in poetry right now, and I think, at least, they're kind of necessary for jokes. Working on a riddle unit for the class I'm teaching, Catherine Daly [log in to unmask] %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%