Does anyone know who wrote this and where it came from ??

Question

I'm guessing the friend (now enemy) who told me this years ago didn't make it up - as they aren't that inteligent. I think it may be by someone famous but i'm not sure, can you help ?

ladies and gentlemen, gents and germs
cross eyed mosquitos and bull legged worms
entrance is free, just pay by the door
pull up a chair and sit on the floor
one fine day, in the middle of the night
two dead boys got up to fight
back to back, they faced each other
drew their swords and shot one another
a deaf policeman heard the noise
and came to kill the two dead boys
if you don't believe this story is true
just ask the blind man, he saw it too

Clever i know, but who wrote it ??

Answer 1

It most certainly was _not_ Spike Milligan.

It is a folk rhyme and has very old origins. See link below for good info.

Answer 2

It's definitely a folk poem, although I'd guess that it's of relatively recent origin. It does not appear in any of the published works of Spike Milligan, insofar as I've been able to check my (fairly but not totally comprehensive) collection of his stuff. It doesn't even resemble his work stylistically (he isn't that logical, and his metre is seldom that regular). I'm pretty sure that the core section ('One fine day in the middle of the night') is in Iona and Peter Opie's 'Oxford Book of Nursery Rhymes' but I haven't a copy to hand right now so can't check.

Answer 3

Although the Two Dead Boys poem (“One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night”) is often referred to as a nonsense rhyme, the description is not strictly accurate. It is clearly understandable in any of its many forms and versions and the impossibilities in the story are no more than sensible words and phrases that have been transposed. An example of a true nonsense rhyme can be seen for instance in the first four lines of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” from Through the Looking Glass, which goes:


‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogroves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
One can get a feeling for the severe, gathering darkness of the poem from Carroll’s introductory lines but, until Humpty Dumpty explains it in its entirety, the poem, and particularly these first four lines, makes no sense at all.

As to the history of “One Fine Day…” it appears to have evolved from tangle-worded couplets that have been popular in Miracle Plays and the folklore and folksongs of the British Isles since the Middle Ages. Tiddy, in his book The Mummers’ Play [1923, Oxford, Oxford University Press], cites the earliest known example of this type of humour as appearing in the manuscript of Land of Cockaigne about 1305 [Tiddy 1923, p. 116] and a 15th century manuscript in the Bodleian Library [MS Engl. poet. e. 1: c.1480] includes four lines that are directly related to our rhyme. These can be translated into modern English as:


I saw three headless [men] playing at a ball,
A handless man served them all.
While three mouthless men laughed,
Three legless [men] from them ran.
In a similar form the lines remained in Scottish tradition to the mid 19th century in the Lying Song [Shoolbraid, Bairnsangs, unpublished manuscript, 2004].

Answer 4

Used to write a version in autograph books at school in Trinidad. I guess anon y mouse wrote it. Our version went
One fine day in the middle of the night
Two dead men got up to fight
A lame donkey came trotting by
And kicked those two dead boys twice sky high.

Answer 5

Spike Milligan

Answer 6

It is a British folk poem originating from the 18th century

Answer 7

It's a really old English nonsense poem, no-one knows who first wrote it but there are loads of different variations.

Answer 8

i remember a few lines of one . ' i went to the cinema tomorrow
i took a front seat at the back
# cant remember the rest

Answer 9

This is a funny poem. i like it. im not sure who wrote it, i tried to search on google but couldn't come up with anything. thumbs up to u.

Cheers!!

Answer 10

My mum used to recite this to me when I was a nipper.

Haven't a clue what it's about or who wrote it, sorry.