Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

The first thing to say about this special ‘Humour’ issue of Dream
Catcher is that we hope it makes you laugh, and the second thing to
say is that we know it won’t. Well, not all of it, anyway. Some of it will. Some of it will make you laugh out loud. Some of it will make you smile and go ‘Hmph.’ Some of it will make you think: ‘That’s funny’, but it won’t make you laugh or smile. And that’s because your sense of humour is like your fingerprints and the back of your neck: it’s completely unique to you.

   As a young man starting to write poems and stories there were
certain writers and certain comedians who made me laugh and made
me want to be like them. I read a lot of columnists in newspapers, and my favourites were Patrick Campbell and Keith Waterhouse.
Campbell had a weekly column in the Sunday Times and they were
700-word gems that made me weep with laughter and envy. I
remember one about being on a high road in the French mountains,
driving so high up that a plane flew underneath. I can quote the last
line of the column, when Campbell is back in his hotel room and his
wife wants him to go out for a drink: ‘I like it where I am, under the
bed, holding on to the floor.’ I love the rhythm of that sentence, its
matter-of-factness. Say it aloud, though: it sings. Keith Waterhouse,
before he wrote for The Daily Mirror newspaper, wrote a column for the short-lived Mirror Magazine which I think was trying to be like The New Yorker. I remember cutting out the columns by Waterhouse and Campbell and others and sticking them in a scrapbook, reading them again and again until the bones shone.

   Speaking of The New Yorker, the Waterhouse and Campbell
columns sent me looking for other columnists, and in Darfield
library I found books of columns by American writers SJ Perelman
and James Thurber. Perelman has fallen out of favour these days
but his columns are full of long baroque sentences and diversions, and Thurber was odd, and strange, and weird. I bought the books and based much of my own writing on them; I do a weekly column for The Yorkshire Post and one for the Barnsley Chronicle these days and I hope you can spot my humorous literary antecedents.

   I remember, too, being very struck as a lad by a quotation by Tony
Hancock where he said he was looking for a ‘comedy without jokes’ and this sent me not only into comedians like Spike Milligan, but also writers like Samuel Beckett and Ted Hughes’s book Crow, which my English teacher Mr. Brown introduced to me as ‘a hilarious book by a Northern comic’ and which taught me a lot about humour, and about reading, and about poetry.

   So, enjoy this edition of Dream Catcher; some of it will make you
laugh, some won’t. As you read it, think about what humour is, think
about what piece of writing or performance first made you laugh or
smile, and then have a go at writing something funny. But don’t worry if nobody laughs.