The poem 'A Funny Man'

What makes you laugh? Clowns, cartoons, a dog chasing its own tail, a puppy barking at itself in a mirror? The second text in Unit 2, 'A Funny Man' by Natalie Joan, is a poem where everything is the wrong way round!

"One day a funny kind of man / Came walking down this street / He wore a shoe upon his head / And hats upon his feet." We wear hats on our heads and shoes on our feet; he's swapped them!

His manners are perfect, though: "He raised the shoe and smiled at me, / His manners were polite." Raising your hat is the polite way to greet someone, and he does it exactly right, except his 'hat' is a shoe! "But never had I seen before / Such a funny sounding sight."

Then: "Allow me to present / Your Highness with a rose," and he takes out a currant bun (a small bun with dried fruit in it) and holds it to her nose! She staggers back against the wall: "Well! I never saw a rose with such / A funny looking smell."

"He then began to sing a song, / And sat down on the ground; / You never heard in all your life / Such a funny feeling sound."

Finally she asks the obvious: "My friend, why do you wear two hats / Upon your feet?" He doesn't answer. "He turned the other way about, / And hopped home on his head." Upside down, bouncing home on his head!

Notice what the poem does with the senses: a "funny sounding sight", a "funny looking smell", a "funny feeling sound". Each time the wrong sense is attached to the wrong thing, just as the man has put hats and shoes in the wrong places. The nonsense is in the words as well as the pictures!