Laughing in Haiku

The ancient history of haiku as vehicles for humor

Hello, Desert Wanderers!

When is the last time you wrote a joke?

why did the skeptic
get a ticket? She doesn’t
believe signs are real

Laughing in Haiku

One of the things many people forget about haiku is that evolved as a form of light verse in contrast to the extremely formal Japanese court poetry protocols. Haiku were meant to be fun.

This is best shown in the poetry of the haiku master Issa. Issa lived in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He wrote over 20,000 haiku¹, and many of them are hilarious. He used a lot of body humor. If I was going to teach haiku to middle schoolers, I would use a few examples of Issa writing haiku about people pooping in fields or farting in the middle of the night.

in the middle of the field
the high priest’s parasol—
taking a dump

flooded fields—
wild geese take wing
shitting on the farmers’ hats

Issa lived a tragic life. He left home early in life when his mother died, and his father married a woman who hated Issa. Issa would later also endure the premature death of his wife and daughter.

He practiced a form of Buddhism called Pure Land Buddhism, and while he could write incredibly beautiful and touching poems, he could also write witty and silly haiku.

One of my favorites is this one about one of Issa’s experiences at a festival or, possibly, a moon-watching party:

three pennies’ worth
of haze -that’s all I see
through this telescope

In Issa’s poetry, he is often the butt of the joke. He also likes to write about the absurd. After viewing a collection of Mount Fuji souvenirs, including some models, Issa wrote:

little snail
inch by inch
climbs Mount Fuji

Issa makes it clear in his journal that he is referring to a snail climbing the fake Fuji, not the real mountain.

Issa is my favorite of the ancient haiku masters because of his sense of humor. He refuses to give into despair. While many of his poems are poignant and heartbreaking, you are also never far from a joke when you read his work.

This attitude seems to come, at least in part, from his understanding of Buddhism. In Pure Land Buddhism, life is pain, and we suffer until we learn to surrender our desires to be free of that pain. The goal is to let go of our attachments to our pain. Issa’s way of releasing his attachments was to laugh and make light of the ridiculousness of the human condition.

Another Issa haiku I love works on a spiritual level and is also another one of his surreal jokes:

don't kill that fly
it is making a prayer to you
by rubbing its hands and feet

The fly is, of course, just doing what a fly does. But Issa makes light of the fly to make a serious point that we should not needlessly kill creatures because we are all connected, even bothersome flies.

Have you ever tried to make a joke in a haiku? Have you ever tried to write about something humorous or use a haiku to write satire?

Try writing a funny haiku today, you won’t start improving until you begin practicing.

Artist Note

My haiku is not nearly as witty as any of Issa’s. However, I do love puns and wordplay. One of the categories of haiku in my spreadsheet is called, I Didn’t Meme It, and the poems are all like the one at the opening of this newsletter, that is, they are all based on silly wordplay.

I do think that there is a connection between spirituality and humor. I think that gods make jokes. If we cannot laugh at ourselves, we are in a truly sorry state. Just like noticing and making beautiful things is an act of rebellion, humor is the bedrock of resistance to tyranny.

Be the weird you want to see in the world!

Cheers,

Jason

1. There is a lot of debate about whether many of Issa’s poems are truly haiku or if they are senryu. Senryu is a related form that deals with the foibles of mankind as opposed to nature. I would argue that in English, there is not a real distinction between haiku and senryu. I would also argue that humans are a part of nature and that we tend to get into trouble when we believe we are somehow above it.