From Geoffrey Chaucer to G. K. Chesterton, Augustan satire to advertising jingles, John Updike to Vikram Seth and Victoria Wood, comic verse, has in its many forms, kept us amused for centuries. This superb anthology, notable above all for its breadth, reflects the international scope of humour by bringing together poets from far beyond the British Isles. Drawing on many different types of verse - epigrams, street ballads, clerihews, music-hall lyrics, and the double-dactyl - it offers an exceptionally wide range of comic pleasures. The poems are by turns subtle, down-to-earth, macabre, ingenious, acerbic, ribald and cheerful; written to amuse, they call forth laughter and delight in equal measure. This book is intended for buyers of poetry, anthologies, humorous books.