 There is a winding passage that leads up to my heart and what comes down this passage is commonly called a fart. The fart is very useful, it sets the mind at ease and warms the bed on wintry nights and disinfects the fleas. Humour is an important component of children's play and nowhere is this more apparent than in their verbal play. It serves a wide range of purposes allowing children to challenge, undermine and disarm adult power and seriousness, to explore taboo topics as various as sex or toilets and to experiment with dazzling displays of verbal dexterity. Many funny rhymes are ones which accompany specific games, activities such as counting out, clapping or skipping. Rude variations of Popeye the Sailor Man for example accompanied clapping games in the mid 20th century. Others are simply performed and passed along for fun. Their humour, their cheek, their rhyme and rhythm, imagery, play on words and frequent parodic traits are all reasons why they appeal to children and why they're memorable. An important class of verbal humour is parody. The history of children's language play abounds in parodic versions of different genres Christmas carols, pop songs, advertising jingles, Valentine's Day rhymes, happy birthday, football chants, musicals, TV theme songs. The wide variety of genres involved demonstrates a real mixing bowl of popular cultural references where everything is up for grabs, nothing is sacred and the punchline is all. The sources are equally diverse, other children, adults, comics, books, television, films and the internet. The OP audio collection, selections of which appear here, has a good many rude rhymes in particular, more than have appeared in today's well-regulated playgrounds. This may be partly because their collections include games and songs played in the street in London Council estates and parks as well as school playgrounds. In the changed geography of childhood, the street as a place for play has drastically diminished, while playgrounds tend to be more scrupulously overseen by teachers, learning assistants and play workers. Either children produce fewer rude rhymes in these circumstances or they keep it more carefully hidden.