Jabberwocky: Nanny Nanny Boo Boo
The gross-out poetry of schoolyard rhymes.
by Mark Peters
July 16, 2007
The authors focused on North America and did their collecting between 1991 and 1994, talking to informants ranging from five-year-olds to nostalgic (or sheepish) adults. The year and location of sources are given, though last names are omitted, since remarkably few people of any age want their name attached to lines like "There's a monkey in the grass / With a bullet up his ass." The title was taken from one of the most commonly found rhymes. Here's one version:
Great green gobs of greasy, grimy gopher guts,
Mutilated monkey meat,
Little birdies' dirty feet.
Great green gobs of greasy, grimy gopher guts,
And I forgot my spoon.
Sherman, Bronx, NY, ca. 1960s
Twenty variations of this prototypical gross-out song are included, some containing vulture vomit, barbecued baby brains, Elvis Presley's dirty feet, chewed-up parakeets, camel snot, a barrel of pus, a tub of blood and other gak-worthy items. Though kids do delight in yuck for yuck's sake, there's more than mere grossification goingThough kids do delight in yuck for yuck's sake, there's more than mere grossification going on here. on here. As the authors note, kids take on the unpleasant, unseemly and unspeakable to "ridicule the horror with deliberately disgusting exaggeration." Kids and adults know that ridiculing the horror makes it a lot easier to get out of bed.
In addition to striking back against the forces that control or confuse them, it's hard to miss the giddy playfulness that might be a type of Funktionslust, a German word I first came across in Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy's classic look at animal emotions, When Elephants Weep. Masson and McCarthy describe Funktionslust as "pleasure taken in what one can do best — the pleasure a cat takes in climbing trees or monkeys take in swinging from branch to branch." Since language is one of the defining qualities of us hairless apes, it's pretty natural that kids take such joy in wordplay. It's just what they (and we) do.
In other words, Nanny nanny boo boo. Stick your head in . . . well, you know.
©2007 Nerve Media
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