From Geoffrey Chaucer to G.K. Chesterton and Augustan Satire to advertising jingles, John Updike to Vikram Seth and Victoria Wood, comic verse has, in its many forms, kept us amused for centuries. This anthology reflects the international scope of humour by bringing together poets from beyond the British Isles. Drawing on many different types of verse, from epigrams to street balleds, clerihews to music-hall, the double-dactyl to the calypso, it offers a wide range of comic pleasures. The poems in this collection are by turns subtle, down-to-earth, macabre, ingenious, acerbic, ribald, and cheerful. The established classics of comic verse, by writers such as Tom Hood, W.S. Gilbert, and Ogden Nash, are represented in force, but many unfamiliar or unexpected names are also included; as are many pieces by current or recent writers.