Dhugal Lindsay on humour in haiku

Humour in Haijin (eng/jpn)
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Humour in Haijin

Rather than concentrate on the role of humour in haiku poetry per se, perhaps it is more relevant to concentrate on the sense of humour of the haiku poets themselves. Why? My personal view is that the overt inclusion of humour in a haiku detracts from the poem, often lowering its standing to that of vulgar verse. However, I also believe that humour is an integral part of the haiku tradition. How can these differences be reconcilable?

A haijin's philosophy on life is steeped in humility. When "asking the pine about the pine and the bamboo about the bamboo", the haijin will throw away all preconceptions and predetermined ideas about the object in order to experience it as if they were a young child. When the resulting haiku, which was "found and not formed", is recorded and then read by another party it brings a fresh insight to our day-by-day minds. This fresh insight often strikes us as humorous.

As an example, one of my own:

upon my palm / the jellyfish comes face to face / with eyeballs

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Lifting the jellyfish up to get a closer look, to touch, to smell—suddenly I was aware that it was not me who was looking at the jellyfish but rather my eyeballs that were looking. Quickly I dropped the poor jellyfish, whipped out my notebook and jotted down the words as they came to me. Reading the poem thereafter I was struck by the similarities of eyeballs to jellyfish and to some kind of humour finding its own way into the poem.

To me, humour in haiku occurs when either an entity contained in the poem or the use of a word differs to that which would be expected. This poem remains a haiku, rather than a senryu or some other kind of short humorous verse, when the inclusion of the unexpected entity/entities or word/s is extraordinary to our sense of logic but somehow makes sense on another plane of consciousness. Sometimes the revelation that the two entities are related in some way gives us an insight into the real nature of the entities involved—it uncovers a Truth. And sometimes this insight strikes us as humorous due to it being fresh and removed from our everyday thought patterns in an irreverent way.

The haijin's philosophy on life, their humility and the corresponding perceived irreverence for the thought patterns and norms ingrained in society, translates into humour. This humour, which the haijin harbours in their subconscious, finds its way into truly humorous haiku—rather than there being a conscious act to include humour in the haiku for humour's sake. This is why I believe that it is the "humour in the haijin" rather than the "humour in the haiku" that is all-important when considering the role of humour in this shortest of poems.

Dhugal Lindsay
May 21, 2001

Humour in Haijin (eng/jpn)
haiku page 1 | haiku page 2 | haiku page 3
biography and credits