Barney & Clyde by Gene Weingarten; Dan Weingarten & David Clark for September 27, 2021

Exact rhymes have never been a requirement for poetry.

Free-stylin’ verse!

Robert “Lord Peter Wimsey” Zimmerman.

A rabbi walks into a bar with a monocle and a harmonica…..

There once was a chap with a monocle,

Who tossed it along with his yarmulke.

Now it may have been rash,

To throw them in the trash,

But I’m glad he stopped playing harmonica.

That’s fairly bad.

McGonagle the argyle gargoyle. Rick Wakeman’s white wicker rocker.

Moshe Dayan. fool!

A German Rabbi that plays the harmonica……

Philipp Goedicke, the longtime limericist for Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, would have no compunction about accepting those as valid rhymes. The original limericist for the program, whose name escapes me, had higher standards for rhymes, but then he was a genius.

Slant rhymes are par for the course in modern poetry and classical poetry as well. Cf. "aleator classicus

Reading at Random in Classical LiteratureArchive for the ‘Catullus’ CategoryCatullus, Poems 60

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num te leaena montibus Libystinisaut Scylla latrans infima inguinum partetam mente dura procreauit ac taetra,ut supplicis vocem in novissimo casucontemptam haberes, a nimis fero corde?Was it a lioness from the Libystinian mountains or barking Scylla who produced you from the lowest part of her groin, you with your mind so harsh and foul that you hold in contempt the voice of a suppliant in the very final misfortune, from a heart too savage?

Roman poets often played with acrostics, but GP Goold seems to have been the first modern reader to notice that in this poem reading the first and last letters of each line anti-clockwise gives the hidden message ‘natu ceu aes’ (‘by birth like bronze’), a pithy summary of the whole poem." https://aleatorclassicus.wordpress.com/category/catullus/

Never trust a second-hand harmonica.

Didn’t Adam Sandler use those rhymes?

Bob Zimmerman?

An astigmatic blues rabbi walks into a bar…