Funniest/Dirtiest Shakespearean Jokes

Cafe Society
1

Some other lit-geeks and I were having this conversation outside of the library after an exam today. My two favorites are as follows:

Cymbeline, 2.3 - Cloten has hired musicians to play at Imogen’s door in hopes of getting to speak to her and seduce her, making an unintentional double-entendre when instructing a musician.

Titus Andronicus, 4.2 - Tamora, empress of Rome, gives birth to a black baby, which everyone knows won’t please the emperor. Her angry sons, Chiron and Demetrius, find her Moorish boyfriend, Aaron.

I think my favorite clean(ish) jokes are during the play-within-a-play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare indulges in a little Elizabethan MST3K and has a few characters taking shots at the actors as they watch. And the Philostrate’s comments about the show before it’s performed… hehe

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1

Anyone else?

LC

2

“For I can take, and Pistol’s cock is up,
And flashing fire shall follow!”

  • Henry V

“What, with my tongue in your tail?”

  • Taming of the Shrew
3

Well, the Titus Andronicus joke was the first thing that came to mind when I read the thread title, but I see you beat me to it.

As far as clean ones go, I love Hotspur’s skeptical retort to Glendower:

“I can call spirits from the vasty deep.”

“Why, so can I, or so can any man,
But will they come when you do call for them?”

4

You kinda have to quote the whole exchange, not just the punchline:

Petruccio:_Come,_come,_you_wasp,_i’_faith_you_are_too_angry.
Katherine:_If_I_be_waspish,_best_beware_my_sting.
Petruccio:_My_remedy_is_then_to_pluck_it_out.
Katherine:_Ay,_if_the_fool_could_find_where_it_lies.
Petruccio:_Who_knows_not_where_a_wasp_does_wear_his_sting? In_his_tail.
Katherine:_In_his_tongue.
Petruccio:_Whose_tongue?
Katherine:_Yours,_if_you_talk_of_tales,_and_so_farewell.
Petruccio:_What,_with_my_tongue_in_your_tail?

5

Damn. I swear those underlines were not there when I hit “submit!”

6

Only somewhat dirty, but I think my favorite Shakespearean joke is the Belgium, Netherlands bit from the end of the Geography of Nell, in The Comedy of Errors. It doesn’t stand too well out of context, though.

7

Hamlet (to Ophelia) “Lady, shall I lie in your lap?”
Ophelia: “No, my lord.”
Hamlet: “I mean my head upon your lap?”
Ophelia: “Ay, my lord.”
Hamlet: “Do you think I meant country matters?”
Ophelia: “I think nothing, my lord.”
Hamlet: “That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs.”
Ophelia: “What is, my lord?”
Hamlet: “No thing.”

I especially like the use of “country.” Great pun, but not as obvious now as it was in Shakespeare’s time.

8

Malvolio:By my life, this is my lady’s hand, these be her very C’s, her U’s, and her T’s…
Sir Andrew:Her C’s, her U’s, her T’s: why that?
-Twelfth Night

Not especially dirty, but still makes me smile.

9

In Much Ado About Nothing, Benedick tells Beatrice, “I will live in thy heart; die in thy lap; and be buried in thine eyes.” Which doesn’t sound dirty, unless you know that “die” was slang for orgasm.

10

Wasn’t it “Be born in thy eyes, live in thy heart, and die in thy lap?”

11

Noo! Badandi you forgot…'with which she makes her great ‘P’s!’

12

I don’t get the “nothings” in Hamlet and the C’s and the U’s and the T’s.

13

Noo! Badandi you forgot…'with which she makes her great ‘P’s!’

14

One of my favorite *Hamlet *passages.

15

A clean one from Hamlet, that I’ve always liked, that has the MST3K-ness to it:

HAMLET: What did you enact?

LORD POLONIUS: I did enact Julius Caesar: I was killed i’ the Capitol; Brutus killed me.

because, of course, in telling Hamlet, he’s telling Burbage, the actor who played Brutus.