Three Wise Men of Gotham

History & Origin

"Three Wise Men of Gotham" is one of the shortest nursery rhymes in the English canon, and among the most wryly self-aware. The three "wise men" sail out to sea in a bowl — already a precarious choice — and the bowl, being insufficiently seaworthy, does not hold. The narrator notes, with admirable restraint, that if the bowl had been stronger the song would have been longer.

The rhyme belongs to a long tradition of jokes at the expense of the men of Gotham, a village in Nottinghamshire whose inhabitants were famous in English folklore for their deliberate foolishness. The "Merry Tales of the Mad Men of Gotham" collected by Andrew Boorde in the sixteenth century present the Gothamites as performing spectacularly unwise acts — sometimes, it is suggested, to avoid obligations to the Crown. Whether wise fools or simple ones, the men of Gotham became a byword for comic absurdity.

The brevity of this rhyme is itself a kind of joke: the song is as short as the bowl's voyage, which is to say, very short indeed.