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2001 Valentine Slam Winners (Submit,   Vote,   All couplets,  2001 Winners,  2002 Winners,   Add Slams to your site) Thanks to everyone who submitted a couplet to this year's Valentine Slam! In just two weeks we received over 600 submissions and accepted nearly 300 for publication on the site. People's choice awards We developed a randomized voting booth to collect data on which couplets our users like best and used this data to rank the submissions by popularity. Based on this popularity data (as of midnight EST on Valentine's Day), the following six poems are the first six winners of the 2001 Valentine Slam. This will be updated with author names later today. Judges' choice awards There were a number of entries that we felt were exceptionally funny but didn't make it into the top six. Here are four couplets whose authors will also win magnet sets: Please note that there were dozens of others that were hysterically funny and at least as deserving of the space above. Read all of the accepted submissions for more. Analysis What did we learn from the 2001 contest? We found that a couplet is likely to fare well in the voting arena if it has the following properties: It rhymes: Rhyme, of course, is not a requirement in poetry. But there's a reason it's such a popular technique. (Click here for more information on meter and rhyme in poetry.) It scans: For the same reasons, couplets which adhere to one of a few different meters -- such as iambic tetrameter or pentameter -- are appealing to the ear. The first line speaks an independently romantic sentiment: It's funnier if you save the vitriol for the second line, so that the first line builds an expectation that the couplet will end sweetly. The second line resolves the first line in a funny, harsh and inextricably connected way: 'You make me laugh / You smell like a giraffe.' is weak for this reason: it is merely a romantic line followed by an unromantic line.

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