For Competition 3448 you were invited to supply a joke in verse form.Apologies for an ambiguous brief; I was actually after an existing joke retold in verse form rather than expecting you to invent a new joke, but either approach was permissible.

The challenge was a popular one and yielded a large and jolly entry. I appreciated Bob Turvey’s accompanying note – ‘Do you think my work stanza chance? – and David Shields’s Longfellowesque submission.

Over to the winners, who each earn a £25 John Lewis voucher.

When Faustus found his way to hell,
They cheered him to the rafters,
And said he might select the site
To pass his ever-afters:
A furnace-full of smouldering souls?
A wasteland white as icing?
With souls as cold as arctic rolls,
Well… neither was enticing.

He chose at last the sewage circle:
Though the aeons would be done,
Waist-deep in waste, each place was graced
By tea and scones for one.
Poor Faust – he took his tray and place
Among the sipping dead,
The tannoy spoke: ‘That’s tea-break, folks –
All souls back on your heads!’

Nick Syrett

Two old galoots from Arkansas
Went on a trip for shooting game.
One witnessed, to his shock and awe,
His comrade topple. What a shame.

He felt his chest, could find no breath.
He panicked, then picked up the phone
To first report his buddy’s death
Which left him tragically alone.

‘You did well to report this fall,
But first you need to know he’s dead.
There needs to be no doubt at all.
Make sure,’ the paramedic said.

Although it put him on the spot
The hunter did what he was tasked.
The paramedic heard a shot.
‘What next?’ the lone survivor asked.

Basil Ransome-Davies

Anna Peest, late of London north-west three,
Mired in the murky swamp of poetry,
Would prowl, pontificate on Hampstead Heath,
Declaim ghastly ghazals through yellowed teeth.
Rossetti she was not, nor Emily D,
Had not the basic grasp of prosody;
Denounced the damsels in the Ladies’ pond;
Downed snakebites, of which she was overfond.
Her strange (for Hampstead) next-door neighbour, Laurie,
Would text ‘Dnt Mss with me or Yule B sorry.’
Anna was clueless, credulous, naive –
How could she not know, quite fail to perceive
That neighbour Laurie, when at liberty
Was given to bouts of anthropopagy?
The epitaph, succinct, records her gruesome fate:
‘Here Lies Anna Peest, the poet Laurie Ate.’

Mike Morrison

I broke down outside Basingstoke
Beside a pub, the Royal Oak.
When help arrived the breakdown bloke
Considered long, before he spoke;
‘I’m sorry but your piston’s broke,
You’ll need a tow, and a de-coke,
You’ll have to wait, you’re not bespoke,
Your cover’s just for hard-up folk.’
So wait I did, and sipped a Coke.
A man emerged, to have a smoke,
His drunken query more a croak.
I said, ‘My car’s not okey-doke,
The piston’s broke, and that’s no joke.’
He slurred, ‘Me too, I’m pissed’n’broke.’

Elizabeth Kay

The goatherd, lonely on the hill,
Among the edelweiss,
Thought of Maria yodelling,
And things he thought were nice.

His goats were grazing happily
And each one wore a bell.
Why? Though it must be obvious
His thoughts refused to gel.

What need had they of do-re-mi?
His sicklied brow grew pale.
For goats, to climb Swiss mountains
Was not a major scale.

I can reveal the answer now,
Before you go berserk.
Goats need those bells around their necks
Because their horns don’t work.

Bob Newman

I believed my success would be final –
The way that Humanity does –
When Evri delivered the vinyl;
It gave me a fabulous buzz,
For ‘Sounds of the Wasp’ said its label!
I hauled out my period deck
And placed the disc on the turntable
Sounds of the Wasp? Was it heck!
Instead of a wasp’s bombination
Was a sound quite demonstrably fake.
‘Grr! I’ll take this absurd imitation
And hurl the thing into the lake!
Or else take a trip to the seaside
And cast it out into the drink!’
But wait! I WAS PLAYING THE BEE SIDE!
(I think that my brain’s on the blink.)

Frank Upton

What d’you call a line
Of tourists on Mount Fuji?
A high queue. Get it?

David Silverman

No. 3451: Acrostic

You are invited to supply an acrostic poem praising or dispraising a public figure in which the word spelled out by the first letter of each line directly contradicts what the poem is saying. Please email entries of up to 16 lines to competition@spectator.co.uk by midday on 20 May.<//>