Sometime around the turn of the sixteenth century, in the hills of central Japan, a Buddhist monk emerged from his seclusion, knelt before the bed of his ailing father, and composed a verse so full of worldly wisdom that it stuns us yet today:
Even at the time
When my father lay dying
I still kept farting.
The author of this flatulent ode, Yamazaki Sokan, was one of the founders of haikai—the forerunner and namesake of haiku poetry—and this poem was among the world’s very first haikus.
There’s a lot we English-speaking moderns don’t understand (and misunderstand) about haiku poetry, but perhaps our greatest error is thinking that haikus need to be serious. From its earliest days, the heart of haiku poetry was humor. These three-line, seventeen-syllable poems—composed communally and in the informal, everyday language of Japan’s lower class—tended toward the lewd and crude, the comical and lighthearted, and poets like Yamazaki Sokan were as likely to wax poetic about ponds and dewdrops as they were about excrement and urination. (Nature is nature, after all.) The roots of the haiku, in fact, are right there in the word itself: haikai literally means “comic verse.”
My own association with haiku humor began the very day I learned what a haiku was. It was freshman year of high school. I was sitting in the back of English class, steeling myself for another dreary analysis of Wuthering Heights, when Ms. Connolly brought out a laminated poster printed with a three-line poem and tacked it on the wall. It was National Haiku Day, she explained, and today we would all try our hand at poetry.
The rules of the form were simple: three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables each. If Ms. Connolly—bless her heart—thought this exercise might lull us into a state of Zen relaxation, thereby buying her an hour’s peace and quiet, she was certainly disappointed. It exploded instead into a rowdy competition, with all the aspiring class clowns trying to outwit each other in three-line, seventeen-syllable bursts. Before long, we had taken this peaceful poetic form to where adolescent boys inevitably take all things: the offensive, gross, and scatological.
In a moment of divine inspiration (with a hint of bowel discomfort), I wrote this gem:
I stare at the clock
Waiting for the bell, so I
Can finally poop.
With a better understanding of haiku history, Ms. Connolly might have bestowed upon us all bonus points for channeling the great Sokan. Instead we got pop quizzes every day for the next week.
Stand-up comedy and haiku poetry—two art forms separated by continents and centuries—have more in common than one might think. Both rely foremost on concision: Each word must be arranged in the right syllabic rhythm, with the perfect beat and punch, for the work to be effective. (Rodney Dangerfield would have been a great haiku poet. So would Mitch Hedberg.) Both employ wordplay: Traditional Japanese haiku poets leaned heavily on double entendre and puns. (Nishiyama Soin was particularly fond of the phrase tsuki idete, which could mean either moon or erection, depending on the context.) And both abide (loosely) by the Rule of Three, a principle that holds that things that come in threes are inherently funnier or more compelling than items in other denominations: the Three Stooges, Three Amigos, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and just about every bar joke you’ve ever heard (a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead; a priest, a rabbi, and a minister).
In joke telling, this three-item rule usually takes the form of two set-up lines followed by a punch line. Take this haiku by the New York comedian Myq Kaplan:
Star Wars. Star Trek. Dune.
Battlestar Galactica.
Girls don’t sleep with me.
Or this by the legendary Elayne Boosler:
Thought I saw Groucho.
Moustache, glasses, funny walk.
Close, but no cigar.
Or this shameful confession from Ray Romano:
Just killed a spider.
Didn’t have to, but he saw
Me masturbating.
A teacher friend of mine once told me that when s...
