Little Miss Muffet parodies

One that’s turned up in just about every modern collection of children’s folklore:

Little Miss Muffet
sat on a tuffet
eating some curds and whey.
Along came a spider
and sat down beside her
and said “What’s in the bowl, bitch?”

This actually seems to be one of the more widespread “rhymes,” (though I guess it’s more properly a joke than a rhyme). It appears in print as early as 1962; it may go further back than that, but it’s tough to tell. Prior to about the 1970s, folklorists were still reluctant to print rhymes with actual curse words. It’s generally to be assumed that rhymes have usually been around for a while by the time they get published in a folklore journal, though. Josepha Sherman collected it from a guy named Hank who had learned it in Kentucky in 1958-59 (see her book in the sidebar on the right).

Kids repeating this would surely find it an easy way to get a laugh – kids will generally laugh at anything with a swear word in it, especially in elementary school – but someone who REALLY knows how to tell it can make it absolutely hilarious – it’s a matter of A: timing and B: the delivery of the last line. I suspect it might have started out as a nightclub routine by some standup comic (as opposed to a comedian: a comedian says funny things, and a comic says things funny. This is a joke for a comic.)

A similar joke:

Simple Simon met a pieman
going to the fair
said simple simon to the pieman
“what have you got there?”
The pieman said to simple simon
“Pies, dumbass.”

Another one Sherman collected came from Ohio, 1963:

Little Miss Muffet
sat on a tuffet
eating some curds and whey.
Along came a spider
and sat down beside her
and she ate that, too.