From limericks to social satire, The Oxford Book of Comic Verse offers a remarkable collection of outstanding light poetry. John Gross has brought together the finest writers in the history of the English language - from Chaucer and Skelton to Shakespeare and Swift, Lord Byron to Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson to John Updike, as well as witty song lyrics from such artists as Irving Berlin and Cole Porter - offering delightful examples of their comic verse. Drawing on many different types of verse, including epigrams, street ballads, advertising jingles, clerihew, music-hall lyrics, and the doubledactyl of the calypso, this highly entertaining collection offers an exceptionally wide range of comic pleasures. The poems are by turns subtle, down-to-earth, macabre, ingenious, acerbic, ribald, and cheerful. Written to amuse, they call forth laughter and delight in equal measure. Compiled by one of our finest critics and anthologists, this reissue boasts a stylish new design and a fresh contemporary feel. `Review from previous edition the laughter quotient is greatly boosted by many unfamiliar delights' Times Literary Supplement`Mr Gross has put enough plums in his pudding to cheer the most melancholy reader.' Ned Sherrin, Evening Standard`John Gross has rightly relied on instinct, selected widely, and spared us too much agonising about what constitutes comic verse.' Literary Review`hugely enjoyable' London Evening Standard`Almost every quotation in this new Oxford collection amused me ... This is a good anthology.' F.E. Pardoe, Birmingham Post`it is hard to voice any complaint whatever about an anthology so replete with riches - one, moreover, upholding the idea of humour as a by-product of an idiosyncratic vision, with ease-of-manner resulting from a cast-iron control ... True comic verse, as we find here, is always inseparable from comic verve.' Gerald Jacobs, The Spectator From limericks to social satire, The Oxford Book of Comic Verse offers a remarkable collection of outstanding light poetry John Gross was editor of the Times Literary Supplement from 1974 to 1981, and is currently theatre critic of the Sunday Telegraph .