When he wasn't writing science fiction, writer Isaac Asimov was composing his Lecherous Limericks, dirty little ditties he wrote for his own amusement. So what does Asimov's bawdy poetry sound like?
In the foreword to his first Lecherous Limericks volume, Asimov explains that he wrote his first limerick in 1974 while aboard the Queen Elizabeth II:
There was a sweet girl of Decatur
Who went to sea on a freighter.
She was screwed by the master
-An utter disaster-
But the crew all made up for it later.
After that, he began writing down limericks by the dozen, publishing five volumes of dirty poems, two of them with famed poet John Ciardi. They would each write a gross of poems, sometimes making fun of one another. Here's a limerick Asimov wrote about Ciardi:
To make friends with the lumpish John Ciardi
Needs a spirit uncouth, rough, and hardy.
When in line for a bit
Of amusement and wit—
Did he get it? Why, no, he was tardy.
And here are a few of his lecherous limericks:
Upon high Olympus, great Zeus
Muttered angrily, "Oh, what the deuce!
It takes spiced ambrosia
To get the nymphs cosier
And Hera supplies grapefruit juice."Cleopatra's a cute little minx
With a sex life that's loaded with kinks
Marcus A. she would steer amid
The palms and Great pyramid
And they'd screw on the head of the sphinx.Said an ovum one night to a sperm,
"You're a very attractive young germ.
Come join me, my sweet,
Let our nuclei meet
And in nine months we'll both come to term.""We refuse," said two men from Australia,
"Bestiality this saturnalia.
For now, we bethink us,
The ornithorhynchus
Is our down-under type of Mammalia."Said a certain young man with a grin,
"I think it is time to begin."
Said the girl with a sneer,
"With what? Why, your pee-er
Is scarcely as big as a pin."
Not all of Asimov's limericks consisted of sex jokes, however. In 1984, he released Isaac Asimov's Limericks for Children, which were, presumably, clean.
[via Dangerous Minds]