The Inklings Laughed

[Bêthberry]

Years ago--not quite so far back as the Third Age but possibly before some Downers were born--I had the great pleasure of chatting with an eminent Old English scholar at a pub in his honour after he presented a paper. Truth be told, I cannot recall his name nor the subject of his paper. If I did, I suspect, given how small the Old English coterie is world wide, I would realise I had been six degrees of separation from The Professor himself. (No, I'm not saying it was Him, but a colleague.)

What I do remember from chatting with him was his light hearted approach to research, footnotes, bibliographies and academic rigour. He lauded the habit of making two lists of books influential to one's work: those for a respectable list of the highest forms of scholarship, and those which really make a mark on thought, imagination, enjoyment. Suffice to say, it was the second list we discussed at the pub.

Which brings me to the Inklings. We have a long habit here on the Downs of discussing the serious stuff as regards Tolkien, Lewis, and the other members of the Inklings--Scandinavian sagas, Finnish lays, Old German folks tales, philology, theology, Welsh tales. (Some of these of course would make both of those lists I mentioned above.) But what made them laugh? They couldn't have spent every meeting at the Bird and Baby or in Lewis' rooms being eminently serious about their own writing or research. There is, in short, a gap in our knowledge, a gap in our understanding of what they sought out in literature to read to each other.

Enter Amanda McKittrick Ros, a late Victorian schoolteacher who apparently was An Author So Bad She's Good. According to this blog, Books So Bad They're Good: The Inklings Laughed (scroll down past the discussion of Eye of Argon, the Inklings would read her aloud until they peeled over in fits of laughter. I haven't verified this with either the Letters or Carpenter's biography, but I can certainly see them reacting to gems such as this:

Originally Posted by "The Little Belgian Orphan", Ros

Go! Meet the foe undaunted, they're rotten cowards all,
Present to them the bayonet, they totter and they fall,
We know you'll do your duty and come to little harm
And if you meet the Kaiser, cut off his other arm.

One immediately of course recalls Tolkien's beloved school friends who formed the T.C.B.S. and their possible understanding of the good fight that was WWI.

Or this remarkable appreciation of Westminster Abbey:

Holy Moses! Have a look!
Flesh decayed in every nook!
Some rare bits of brain lie here,
Mortal loads of beef and beer,
Some of whom are turned to dust,
Every one bids lost to lust;
Royal flesh so tinged with 'blue'
Undergoes the same as you.

So, after this long a preamble, and hoping any of you reading this far have not yet fallen asleep, what other works do we know that the Inklings favoured with oral recitations?

In short, does anyone have any other examples of writers who tickled the Inklings' funny bones? What kinds of senses of humour did they have?

(And if our Modess wishes to move this thread to Mirth, so be it.)