In Popular Culture
The poem has become a staple of American humor, both as an iconic example of dirty poetry and as a joking example of fine art, whose vulgarity and simple form provides an unexpected contrast to an expected refinement.
A few examples: In Woody Allen's 1966 film What's Up, Tiger Lily?, the protagonist Phil Moskowitz reads the opening line of "ancient erotic poetry": "There once was a man from Nantucket". In Steven Soderbergh's 2002 film Solaris, the male protagonist tries to impress his girlfriend with his knowledge of poet Dylan Thomas, but when she asks him for his favorite poem he comes up with "the one he is most famous for, which starts, um, 'There once was a young man from Nantucket'". The animated sitcom The Simpsons make numerous references to the limerick, including in "Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo", where Homer comments that he "once knew a man from Nantucket" but "the stories about him are greatly exaggerated", and in "Diatribe of a Mad Housewife", Marge begins her book with the verse "There once was a girl from Nantucket". In the children's animated television program Hey Arnold!, Harold, as an example of his knowledge of poetry, recites "There once was a man from Nantucket", and is promptly cut off by Mr. Simmons. A similar incident occurs in the SpongeBob Squarepants episode "Squidward's School for Grown-Ups."
Read more about this topic: There Once Was A Man From Nantucket
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers another.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)