Haikus / Sonnet / Shakespeare

We've been doing a lot of laughing

Which is good, uh, for a comedy show on a comedy CD, but what we haven't been doing is a lot of thinking

And I'd like to do that now, I've written some haikus

Haikus are Japanese poems consisting of 17 syllables, three lines

Five, seven, five

And I find them to have a certain

Philosophical construct, there's a certain, uh

Soundness in their simplicity, a clearness in their cogency, if you will

So hopefully what we'll do right now is read these haikus, think for a bit

And then when we go back, uh, to the

You know, the jokes and the laughing

They'll have benefited, uh, from the time we took to think

So um, you guys just sit back and indulge me and just think for a bit and then we'll go back to the jokes

Uh, can I get some blue light to set the mood?

Perfect

For those of you listening on CD, the lights didn't change which made it funny

I saw a rainbow

On the day my grandma died

Fuckin' lesbian

For fifteen cents a

Day you can feed an African

They eat pennies

Old peoples' skin sags

Because it's being pulled toward

The underworld

Do unto others

As you would have them do to you

Said the rapist

My aunt used to say

Slow and steady wins the race

She died in a fire

Even if he is

Your friend, never, ever call

An Asian person

And finally

Bono, if you want

To help poor people, sell your

Tinted shades, you cunt

Thank you, this next piece is called "Sonnet 155", or "If Shakespeare Had Written a Porn", and it goes like this

I saw the morning dew betwixt thine thighs

As I removed my source of Grecian power

As if King Midas dared to touch the skies

Upon thy body fell a golden shower

Thy body's temples, two church bells had rung

Upon thy chest, a row of pearls bestowed

The sun had set, thy set with wary hung

I thought, "How black a night and blue a lode"

I said, "What light through yonder beaver breaks?

It is the yeast"

And now my belly's yellow

My pole gives cause to storms and earthy quakes

But 'tis not massive, I am no Othello

And when that final moment came to pass

Like Christ I came-a riding on an ass

Thank you very much

William Shakespeare, uh

William Shakespeare was a verbal cun-tortionist

He could bend his words in the way a contortionist bends his frame without hope that he could with a name like William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare, some, some of you seem lost, look

Say your name was Robert Frost and you couldn't write, that would suck

Well, I guess you could always go as Bobby Frost and own an ice cream truck

He was balanced like a simile and could stack metaphor five, six at a time and rhyme into the very last line of a soliloquy which finally said outright with a previous 77 rolling hinting at

He had puns and quips and tons of trips of sons with ships with nuns with hips and buns and lips, but I had something that Shakespeare never had

Penicillin

See, it hadn't been invented yet, back then they only had "quill"-icillin

Hey, it's not that hard, bard

I'm sorry, I got a bone to pick with you, William

So if you could just listen up here and listen to this theater queer's theater query here and maybe act like a real artist for once in your life

Say Van Gogh, and

Lend me your ear

You're not a writer

You're a writer like fucking Hulk Hogan's a street fighter

You write these dramas

You accumulate your wealth

You hold nature as to a mirror of yourself

Just because you're messed up doesn't mean we are too

Just because you want to bang your mom doesn't mean Danish princes do, what

Who? Yeah, Hamlet, Shakespeare, that's right, the young prince whose father died at the hands of his uncle with whom his mother lied, sound familiar?

It's the fucking Lion King

You stole from a Disney movie, you androgynous douche, what's next

The story of a French king on a quest to find his lost son, Nemo?

Oh, and by the way, poetic talent is really easy to fake when thy sentences doth no fucking sense make

"To be, or not to be

That is the question, whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them? To die

To sleep, no more, and by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to

'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep

To sleep, perchance to dream, ay

There's the rub, for in that sleep of death what

Dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause"

Pft, like what?

This next song is about quantum mechanics

(Plays nonsense on the piano)

This next song

I was raised very well, like a field of corn

You know, I was also raised very Christian, like the Children of the Corn

And Christians get angry at me 'cause I say things like, "Why the long nose, Pope-nocchio?"

They'll think I'll go to Hell

The truth is, I've been to Christian Hell

And I actually wrote a song about it

Hitler was there

And so were all the Jews, yeah

So it got a little awkward