Limerick Prompts
Quick answer: Limerick prompts for wit with a mechanism: AABBA rhymes, galloping metre, and setups from office kitchens to garden gnomes, twist saved for line five.
The limerick is the only poetic form that arrives pre-loaded with a grin, which makes it deceptively hard: the reader is already expecting to laugh, so you have to out-time their expectation. The machinery is strict, five lines, AABBA, a galloping triple rhythm, and the whole contraption exists to deliver line five, which must land like a trapdoor. Edward Lear wrote hundreds, though he often wasted line five repeating line one; the modern limerick spends it on a twist instead.
Treat it as joke engineering. The first line names a person and place, the middle builds the situation, and the last line betrays the setup as economically as possible.
The Prompts
Setups only; the punchlines are your problem. Remember the rhyme for the place name is chosen in line one, so pick towns you can actually rhyme.
- A man in the office kitchen has been microwaving fish every Friday for years. Write the limerick of the colleague who finally snaps.
- There was a young woman whose houseplant turned out to be running the household. Reveal the arrangement in line five.
- Write a limerick about a garden gnome that has begun appearing in slightly different positions each morning, from the gnome's point of view.
- A vicar, an atheist and a wasp attend the same summer fete. One limerick; the wasp decides the theology.
- Compose a limerick about a sat-nav that has developed opinions about your life choices, not just your routes.
- There was an old man of your actual home town: write it, with a rhyme for the town name that no one has dared before.
- A cat schedules a meeting with its humans to discuss performance concerns. Minutes of the meeting, in limerick form.
- Write a limerick where the twist is grammatical: the reader discovers in line five that the poem's I was the dog all along.
- A yoga instructor gets stuck in a pose mid-class. The class's polite British response fills lines three and four; the fire brigade fills line five.
- Write the world's politest neighbour dispute as a limerick, escalating from a borrowed ladder to a land war conducted entirely through passive-aggressive notes.
- A limerick about autocorrect ruining a marriage proposal, where you never state the wrong word, only the fiancee's face.
- There was a young poet of somewhere, who could not make anything rhyme there: write the limerick about failing to write it.
- A seagull with a criminal record moves to a seaside town and goes straight, briefly. Write its parole hearing.
- Write a limerick in which grandma's famous secret recipe is finally revealed at the funeral, and it is a shop-bought item.
How to Use These
Build backwards. Professional comic verse almost always starts at the punchline: find your line five first, then choose the two A rhymes that make it inevitable-but-unexpected, then write toward it. Say the rhythm out loud as you draft, da-DUM-da-da-DUM-da-da-DUM for the long lines, because a limerick that scans badly is not a limerick with flaws, it is a paragraph with pretensions. Feminine rhymes, rhyming on two syllables, are funnier than single ones; scandal and handle beats cat and hat.
Volume is the second secret. Draft five limericks in a sitting and expect one keeper; the form is small enough that failure costs you three minutes. Keep them clean enough for your intended room, sharpen the verbs in lines three and four where the gallop tends to sag, and never explain the joke after line five. Trapdoors do not come with handrails.
What poets can take from this
- Write line five first and reverse-engineer the rest.
- Two-syllable rhymes are funnier than one-syllable rhymes.
- Scan it aloud; rhythm failures kill more limericks than weak jokes do.
- Lines three and four must advance the plot, not mark time.
- Draft five, keep one; the form rewards volume.
Try it yourself
Write a limerick cycle of three: the same neighbourhood incident, a bin fire, an escaped tortoise, a wedding gone loud, reported by three witnesses who contradict each other.
Questions
What is the exact limerick structure?
Five lines rhyming AABBA. Lines one, two and five carry three stressed beats; lines three and four carry two. The rhythm is anapaestic, a light gallop, and the fifth line should deliver a twist rather than repeat the first.
Do limericks have to be rude?
No, only surprising. The bawdy tradition exists because shock is an easy twist, but a clean limerick with a genuinely unexpected fifth line is harder and better. Aim for wit you could read at both a pub and a prize-giving.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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