In this week's contest: Recast a joke, old or new, but something with a punchline – as a rhyming poem, or “poke,” as in Gene Weingarten’s examples in this week's Invitational at bit.ly/inv-week-8. (See the whole Gene Pool at GeneWeingarten.substack.com.) As always, you can submit up to 25 entries, all at once (which we like) or separately. You don’t need any special formatting – just write it as what it ought to look like.
How to format your entries:
You don’t need any special formatting this week – just write your poem as what it ought to look like. If you're submitting more than one poem, do be sure to leave space between them.
Include as many as 25 entries in the area below where it says "Your answer." It's best to copy them in from another document so you'll have them if your computer suddenly dies or something, or if you click to submit the form and something goes wonky.
Note: Your auto-reply confirmation might be missing formatting, with everything squished into one big blob of text, but it seems that it's nothing to worry about; the entries have been coming out fine on this end..
Entry deadline is 4 p.m. ET on Saturday, March 4 (we're giving you an extra half-day or so this week). Results will be posted in The Gene Pool on Thursday, March 9. Entries will sometimes be edited by the Empress and/or Czar for space, taste and just better wording of the joke. Unfortunately, time doesn’t permit full consultations about every editing tweak.
Every entry will be personally read and ruminated on (ewwww!) every week by either the Czar or the Empress or, when there's time, by both of us.
