News You Can Bruise for 2006 March 3

I thought this comic verse would be pretty funny, but upon examination none of it is as good as the stanza that made me laugh in the first place:

  The Bard subsists on simpler food:
    A dinner, not severely plain,
  A pint or so of really good
        Champagne--

I don't understand anything about poetic meter or why one meter is funny and another one is serious, but that one's funny. It's a meter with a punchline.