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Cleri Who's Who
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Four lines rhyming AABB - scansion, rhythm, metre and all that malarkey is as random as-u-like. Oh yes - the featured subject, usually a person, is mentioned in the first line.
Here's a full and frank(ly better) intro by Thos along with some that were made earlier.
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Ran so fast no one could catch her
While her embarassing non-identical twins
Raided Oddbins
Richard Milhous Nixon
Was married to an alcoholic vixen
Whereas James Earl Carter (irach) The founder of Fucks Fox News?
Married his next door neighbour, who certainly was less of a lush but not much smarter.
Dwight David Eisenhower
Wielded supreme executive power
So, alas, did Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili
Who ruled with a firm iron fist, albeit willy-nilly.
George MacDonald Fraser
Rarely went out without his Household Cavalry blazer
Quite unlike Norman Stanley Fletcher, old lag
Who never went out at all while he was banged up for a blag.
Thomas Stearns Eliot
A Yank, and Nobel Prize Laureate
Was,like William Butler Yeats,
A poet frequently called upon to open fêtes
William Topaz McGonagall
Wrote much deathless verse, such as his lament on the Tay Bridge disaster, which will never pall
whereas e e cummings
had all his teeth. removed without. Numbings.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Had he been born a couple of centuries later, would probably have ended his days as a minor celebrity who showed up in second-rate quiz shows on the telly.
As it was, he died in 1822
Which made Mary blue
Julius Henry Marx
Amused us with his larks
While George Bernard Shaw
Was rather more of a bore.
Jeremy John Durham Ashdown
Often pictured with a frown
Not becoming Prime Minister must have been a bit annoying
But he made up for the disappointment with his quasi-military envoying.
Simon Phillip Hugh Francis Neil Callow
Has achieved the unlikely feat of making reality TV even more shallow
In bold, obviously
Openly gay and acts the part
Wherever do his talents start?
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde
Comitted buggery and was then reviled
He started his days within the Pale
But was later found guilty in a court of law, convicted, and sent to jail.
Harry S. Truman
Was human, all too human
He insisted the S was a name and shouldn't have a period after it, but wrote the period in his own signature himself
Perhaps this was a conscious attempt at irony, but he also ran the camp canteen at Ft. Still and it's entirely possible he just snitched one too many bottles off the shelf.
Jaramogi Oginga Odinga
Was the Octogenerian of Kenyan politics.
For African democracy, he was a key thinker ABAB then?
Although his sense of rhyme often went for six.
Edmund Clerihew Bentley why not?
Never treated scansion particularly gently
Rhyme and coherence, though, were the sine qua non
'Tis a pity we sometimes get it wrong. ;-)
Patrick Edmund Pery, the Earl of Limerick
Was considered by The Sun a big Tory stick
While Edward (middle name unknown) Lear, the original Limerick King
Was a much less political thing
Masaoka Shiki
May have been chosen for this clerihew because to the average Westerner, unversed in Japanese pronunciation, rhyming his surname doesn't seem too tricky
Unlike, say, the common Japanese name Kinoshita
Which apparently rhymes with Peter
U Thant
Has done something that many men can't
But apparently he only had one name
His other, Pantanaw, having been discarded when he achieved, as General Secretary of the United Nations, diplomatic fame
rab Is that allowable as the start of a clerihew?
Why not him at the start of clerhew; we'll take a stab
Of course, we can't promise anything stellar
But he is a remarkable feller.
Tuj Yes, it's allowable
Of whom we are all the judge
Now stands on trial
For casting a shadow, thereby blocking the public's ability to make use of the park sun-dial.
penelope curses, caught again
Likes to see how things developpy
Whereas flerdle
Prefers to let things curdle oblig, Nowt personal :o)
Chalky rolling on
Lost her doorkey
While she normally keeps it in a jar made of china,
The frail vessel cracked, and now the thing might be anywhere from Cannes to Carolina
Darren NO-ONE is safe
Once hiked the Kalahari, which as everyone knows, is very barren
Fortunately, the local tribesmen explained how water may be found
Underground
Rosie (in that case)
Has a cherished prize posession- a tatted Victorian tea cosy
He wears it on his head
While checking the weather from his shed.
Software
Dare
Says I Say, Potter!
Well, at least he oughtta. Dubious pronunciation to fit whether or not that was a typo
Bill Gates (Chalky) How did you know that?
Mates
But Steve Jobs' not the apple of his eye
You won't find Bill gently stroking Steve's thigh
The inscrutable irach - [Rosie] Just a hunch
Is undoubtedly aware of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Paul Dirac (Chalky) Actually I haven't got a hat of any kind. :-)
But the one he really feels for
Is the misshapen form of Patrick Moore.
Niels Bohr
Was rotten to the core
A singular view, it must be said
Since his study on the way electrons orbit around the atomic core to a Nobel Prize led!
Michael Faraday
Made it a point to frequent at least one bar a day
His consumption of the odd pork scratching
Kept his ideas of electromagnetism hatching.
Dorothy Leigh Sayers
Baked a cake of many layers
One for each circle of hell, in fact, which meant that it was kind of flimsy [irach] You should have shown up an hour sooner :-)
Her pastry concoctions being known for their allegoric connotations, and not for their whimsy
Dara O'Briain
Dreams of being Brendan Behan
Excepting, perhaps, the manner of his death
And alcohol tainted breath
Linus Pauling
Whose intake of vitamin C was quite appalling
Though he lived to be a great old age
Nuclear tests filled him full of rage
Romulus, brother of Remus
Said to Scotty, "To Rome will you beam us"
Or at least, that's what Babelfish translated it to from the original Latin
Which means it's about as likely that Mars' sons wanted to go to Manhattan actually, I wish babel DID do latin translations...
New York City
Big, loud, glitzy, fast, exciting but probably not pretty
Whereas San Francisco
Has only one disco.
Pablo Neruda
Used to rewrite Gabriel Garcia Marquez' limericks in order to make them cruder
Whereas Thomas Bowdler, hardly a writer
Removed the less moral parts of the human body in order to make it lighter
Greyfriars Bobby
Had to find an appropriate place in the graveyard to do a little jobby
But Jennings
Searched for pfennings.
Managing Director of the IMF, Rodrigo de Rato y Figaredo
Whirls in and out of the office like a tornado
While Director-General of the WHO, Dr. Lee Jong-Wook
Just pops in now and then to borrow a book
William Morris
Was very fond of young Doris
However she
Was far too young for some pervy old 19th Century designer who was just too old for she.
I appreciate that was rubbish, but I had to get it out of my system.
Thelonious Sphere Monk
Botherer] ...as the author of The IT crowd should have said.
Not for him the crudities of Punk
His thunk was melodious
And he considered Punk Rock as wretched as Hell...odious
The good Saint Valentine
Had a hearty penchant for sipping too much red wine
So now we commemorate
Him by getting drunk while out on a date
Sir David Frost Bile, please
Has always been determined to get himself on TV whatever the cost
He'll shortly be broadcasting from Qatar
What a way he has to earn his bread and butter!
Richard Dimbleby
No symbol he.
His style was very proper
'Though not a show stopper
General de Gaulle
To the UK's entry into the EU said "non" and that was not all
He took out a big hanky and blew his nose
This act spoke more eloquently of his feelings than any bombastic prose
Nicolas Copernicus
Flatly refused to subscribe to the astronomical model proposed by the Catholic church and thus published De revolutionibus
Thus, and with no pun intended, he precipitated a revolution
Which was to presage a similar one which erupted a few centuries later when Darwin proposed his theory of evolution!
Goya
Painted the Dutchess of Alba nude, but (thankfully) never got to similarly paint Jackson, i.e., LaToya
Instead, he painted himself
Which, in the opinion of the Kray twins, "wa'n't no good for 'is 'elf"
Van Gogh Pronunciation - please yourselves. ©Frankie Howerd.
Whenever asked to pronounce his own last name would fake a loud cough
While not entirely anatomically intact at the end of his tragic life, his brush strokes were bold and fearless
Painting sunflowers? Peerless!
Georges Seurat
His last Hurrah
Got to the point with impressionism
Which interested him more than hedonism.
Moammar Khadaffi
Makes excellent salt-water taffy
Whereas his counterpart in Tunisia
Has no time for such things, being much busier
Alan Ball
No genius but gave his all
Do we mean the screenwriter or football player?
Neither, our local carpet layer
Stephen King
Wrote that thing
Full of horror
Where Carrie started fires and the evil gor 'er.
Julius Caesar
Was a bit of a geezer
Whilst Brutus
Threatened to shoot us
Nefertiti
Was a bit of a sweety
But what she thought of King Tut
Would have to be editorially cut
Karl Friedrich Gauss
Wrote most of his mathematical formulae on cocktail napkins at his local Bierhaus
However, it is not known if he had a magnetic personality
But he certainly had German nationality.
Jerry Lee Lewis
Never met Peter Brewis
While Dean(and Steve)Martin
Were found dead with a carton.
Brian Perkins
Amassed a vast collection of blond and brunette merkins
While on the other hand, the lovely Charlotte Brown
Would not, despite her alleged horniness, on someone who thus misnamed her, go down.
Peter André
Does his landré
In a place so very large
It resembles a theatre stage rather than un cage
Jaap de Hoop Scheffer
Being Dutch, loves the Fresian heffer
The heifer is not amused
Although, admittedly, somewhat confused
Pete Tong
Has not been around that long
Not everyone's name has passed into Cockney rhyming slang
Not even The Emperor Wang.
Pele
Was never involved in a goalmouth mêlée
Unlike Bobby Tambling
Who, as a Jehovah's Witness, preached in the goalmouth and was oft accused of rambling
Lord Reith (Softers) Yeah, nobody's perfect, but 200 goals will do me nicely.
The first director of the BBC who ruled it like a feudal chief [Rosie] Yes, despite what some people think, football is not a religion.
Determined to inform, educate and entertain
The way it is now would have driven him insane.
Ronan O'Rahilly
Always signs his e-mails with a smiley
Quite unlike Ronan Tynan
Who sends emails without signin'.
Yanni
Probably does not speak Azerbaijani
Which may have helped his defence when accused of domestic battery by his his girlfriend, Silvia Barthes
He wouldn't have done anything to harm his hands, his lawyer says
W. G. Grace
Had a hairy face
But what was really weird
Is that he wore a false beard
Ernest Hemingway
Never wrote a play
Except in Key West
A place most detest.
Steve Punt
****!
Hails from Hackney Wick
D***
Armando Iannucci
A Glaswegian Italian, though never wears Gucci
When he is reminded of the Friday Night Armistice
Dithers around like a Useless Eustace
Dylan Moran
Was wonderful in Black books, but opinion is divided about his lead in the forthcoming Ken Loach production of Desperate Dan
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