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AngryLips

The Canon

Things you know by heart, with the good words taken out

You know how these lines are supposed to go. That's the whole joke — the straight man is a sentence already sitting in your head. Fill in the blanks without reading the passage, then find out what you've done to Melville, or to Lincoln, or to a nursery rhyme.

58 passages, all out of copyright. Some of them only land if you've had to read the book.

Books

Openings and famous passages. Some of these you had to read at school.

Songs and rhymes

The strongest material here, because you don't just know these — you know them by heart, so you hear the wrong word before you've finished reading it.

Fairy tales

The oldest material we have and the best for young players — folk tales belong to everybody, so these are our own retellings rather than somebody's translation.

Speeches and documents

Four score and however many years you like. The Bill of Rights is in here because it's the most-quoted legal cadence in the country — the words do the work, and we keep our opinions out of it.

Why these ones

Everything here is out of copyright in the United States, and all of it is an English original — a translation earns a fresh copyright of its own, which is why there is no Homer, Kafka or Dostoevsky however much their openings deserve it. The books and songs were published before 1931; Lincoln and Jefferson wrote for the government; Shakespeare needs no help from us. Where a tune is still sung today we use the original words, not a modern arrangement, because an arrangement earns its own copyright even when the song underneath is free. If you want to read any of it properly — and you should — it is at Project Gutenberg.