Poetry

Ring Lardner is remembered as a master of American comic prose — the baseball busher of You Know Me Al, the vernacular monologues of “Haircut” and “The Golden Honeymoon.” But for years he was also a writer of verse, filling his daily Chicago column “In the Wake of the News” with parody, light verse, and nonsense. This collection gathers that comic verse, drawn largely from the column and from his two slim books Bib Ballads (1915) and Regular Fellows I Have Met (1919).

The mood is cheerful and the touch is light. Bib Ballads is the fond, mock-sentimental vein — a young father's funny verses on a small son and the comic havoc a baby visits on a household. Regular Fellows I Have Met is the sociable vein — short, affectionate, ribbing portraits of friends and the everyday types a sportswriter met on his rounds. Around them run the column's parodies of popular song and sentimental newspaper verse, and the plain nonsense Lardner loved for its own sake.

Two signatures carry it: the vernacular ear that made Lardner's stories immortal, here turned to rhyme, and the parodist's instinct for cliché — the borrowed solemn shape punctured by exactly the wrong-right word. Beneath the fooling runs a satirist's impatience with cheap sentiment, and in the deadpan nonsense a forward glance toward the absurdist one-act plays Lardner would later write.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor's foreword on Lardner's verse, its comic character, and its craft, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.