Volume 34
Spring-Summer
2008 |
 |
I first heard about Gershon Legman thirty
years ago from Rod Roberts, who taught
my first-year oral tradition seminar at the
Cooperstown Graduate Program. Rod had
been collecting folklore for years and once
worked with adolescent boys in an industrial
reform school in Indiana. The walls of the
youth prison sang with rhymes, stories, and
insults, but Rod had no idea what to do with
the vile and hilarious stuff he was scribbling
in his notebook. One of his teachers at Indiana
University, perhaps Richard Dorson, told
him to write to a curious character in France
to ask, as so many people did, Have you ever
seen anything like this? Legman wrote back,
and soon Rod was corresponding with “G.
Legman,” the great scholar of the forbidden,
historian of erotica, cult icon of the beat
generation, and world expert on dirty jokes
and bawdy songs.
The mail from France was remarkable, and
not just because of the artistic collage of
stamps Legman applied to every letter. The
scholar seemed unable to contain himself as
he wrote, as if he had too much to say, as if
even after the letter was finished, he couldn’t
stop writing. Startling, obscene words leaked
across the back of every envelope. It didn’t
take long for the local postmaster to show up
on Rod’s doorstep to complain: “Mr. Roberts,
you have to stop getting this mail.” The
postmaster’s reaction seems bizarre from the
perspective of 2007, but in the early 1960s,
when Rod struck up this correspondence,
letters still came stamped “Report Obscene
Mail to Your Postmaster.” Well into the era
of the “New Freedom,” the post office was
one of the main enforcers of intellectual and
literary censorship; postal inspectors tried
to prevent the importation of freethinking
or erotic publications from Europe—think
Henry Miller and D. H. Lawrence—as well
as the circulation inside the United States of
writings, art, and photographs deemed immoral.
Thus, every editor of popular books
or serious magazines had a Hell Box, a place
where he stuffed interesting but unpublishable
materials. (The phrase comes originally
from printers, who kept a small box for
broken but recyclable lead type.)
Here is Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, publisher
of the thousands of little blue books
that helped educate rural Americans for a big
part of the first half of the twentieth century,
describing the bottom left-hand drawer of
his desk:
In it I throw all unprintable obscenities
that come from readers—off-color
jokes, wicked gags, lascivious novelties,
erotic poems, and anything else that’s
amusing but unmailable. That long,
deep drawer is almost jammed. But
what will happen to the contents, I don’t
know. Maybe I’ll leave them to a seminary
library. It’s an odd collection, and
downright unfortunate that the Good
People won’t allow it to be circulated
legally. There’s a lot of cleverness going
to waste. Perhaps other times, other mores.
Were they here, my Hell Box would
appeal to Mark Twain, Jonathan Swift,
Voltaire, Clarence Darrow, Rabelais,
Balzac, Frank Harris, Lawrence Stern,
Eugene V. Debs, Isaac Goldberg, and
other lost and damned souls. (1949, 7)
My guess is that all folklorists have some
kind of a Hell Box or triple-X file—a place,
even if it’s only a mental place, where they
stash material too raunchy or nasty to share.
Bruce Buckley had one—I know because I
worked as his archivist. Lou Jones and Rod
Roberts did, too.
One of Gershon Legman’s insights—one
might say one of his obsessions—and the
idea driving all of his big projects was that
all cultures have Hell Boxes: a substrate of
material that almost everybody knows is
there, but can’t talk about in polite circles.
This material usually can’t be published by legitimate
presses or taught in university classrooms,
except perhaps by the most skilled
teachers. Gershon Legman determined early
in his life to make American culture’s rude
and bawdy materials his scholarly specialty,
and America’s resistance to his projects explains
why he was writing from the south of
France.
George Alexander Legman—Gershon
was his family name and G. was his pen
name—was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania,
in 1917 to Emil Legman and Yolanda (Julia)
Friedman, young Jewish immigrants from
the Hungarian/Romanian border area. Part
of the huge pre-World War I immigration
from Eastern Europe, Emil and Julia did not
meet until they got to Scranton. They married
young and had four children, of whom
George Alexander was the third, and the only
boy.
The Legman parents had very different
temperaments. Emil, the son of a family
of horse traders, had to leave Romania in a hurry after he had the temerity to write a letter
to the Czar complaining of ill-treatment
at the hands of army officers. Many of the
family’s stories tell about how Emil brought
bad fortune to the Legmans through foolish
remarks and actions. Julia was beautiful, dark-haired,
and statuesque—even voluptuous.
She was as generous as Emil was scrawny and
harsh; she was as fun-loving and sensual as he
was prudish. In photographs, Emil seems the
stereotype of the tiny, unappealing husband,
next to his large, sweet wife.
Emil was a disappointed and overbearing
man. His main interest was in Orthodox
sacred study—and he would have liked to
have been a rabbi. The best he managed was
to become a butcher’s assistant in a Gentile
butcher shop. Despite his excessive piety,
Emil was also a compulsive gambler who
brought repeated disaster on the struggling
young family. He focused his ambitions on
his extraordinarily gifted son, driving him to
become a biblical scholar, giving him special
lessons on top of his public school and Hebrew
school homework, and in the process
alienating Gershon’s affections. Words and
arguments over words, their meaning and
mystical power, were the only terrain father
and son shared, but more often than not
words were the source of explosive conflicts.
All this family unhappiness and intellectual
pressure infused young Gershon’s interest in
humor and the obscene. He appears to have
been a collector from a very early age. At
about age nine he was showing a strong interest
in jokes, and like many children his age,
an interest in jokes about sex and the body.
With the help of his older sister, Ruth, he
began to cut jokes from pulp magazines and
newspapers and paste them to three-by-five
cards. Housed in a shoebox, the collection
grew in the back of a closet. Predictably, Emil
found it and thought it was sacrilegious and
disgusting—but Julia thought it was harmless,
even funny. Somehow Gershon managed to
hang on to it. The shoebox would become the
basis for his big joke books published decades
later and the habit of collecting—words, sayings,
rhymes, turns of phrase, stories, jokes,
and songs—that shaped his life’s work.
At thirteen, Gershon was sent to New
York City to attend a yeshiva, a school for
future rabbis, and there Gershon began very
close study of the Old Testament. The young
man had incredible facility with language
and a remarkable capacity for memorization,
but he detested the drill of religious training
(often sixteen hours of study a day) and
the authoritarian way the school was run by
a teacher whom students called “old Bow
Wow.” Eventually Gershon was ditching
school for months at a time. After a while
he was caught and brought back to Scranton
in disgrace. The family’s hopes for a rabbi in
the family and solid middle-class status were
dashed. Or that was the story told publicly.
In fact, Emil had slipped into compulsive
gambling again and lost the yeshiva tuition.
This moral and financial catastrophe echoed
through Legman’s life and made him determined
to find a completely different way of
life.
The yeshiva experience gave the young
man three important things. Legman shed
completely any commitment to religious
thought. When he should have been studying
the Torah, Legman had been reading
tracts, newspapers, novels, and Free Thought
literature. (Still, he retained an encyclopedic
knowledge of both testaments of the Bible
and a thorough understanding of traditional
Hebrew teaching.) He had become a lifelong
New Yorker, closely familiar with the neighborhoods
of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the
Bronx, although he would spend more than
four decades in France. And he had learned
what the streets, newsstands, and bookstores
of 1930s New York had to offer: freedom
and experimentation, a vision of a self-directed
intellectual life.
In 1934, at the height of the Great Depression,
Legman graduated from Scranton’s
Central High School, still the smartest kid in
his class and a major thorn in everyone’s side.
He had managed to publish Suppressions, an
alternative magazine (today we would call it
a zine) that attacked Central High’s censored
literary productions; it was another in a long
line of Legman’s anticensorship efforts. At
seventeen, he was five foot nine inches, with
a thick shock of his mother’s dark brown hair
and blue eyes under heavy eyebrows. Early
pictures and sketches of him make him look
a bit like a young Orson Welles, with a strong
nose in a slightly soft face and a rakishly disheveled
manner. He was popular with young
women—it is said they used to follow him
down the street—and he was crazy about
them, writing passionate multipage love letters
to girlfriends and receiving the same in
return.
His family somehow managed the tuition
at the University of Michigan, and there
Legman was introduced to some of the
modern marvels of literature that had not
been available in the Scranton public library.
In particular, he was shown a rare historical
dictionary—Farmer and Henley’s Slang and
Its Analogues—of English words that did not
appear in standard dictionaries, compiled
from sources dating back to the time of
Shakespeare. As with the dirty jokes, Legman
was hooked when he understood that
apparently one could make a living collecting
impolite words and writing books about
them.
But at Ann Arbor, Legman’s usual problems
with authority cropped up and he
left in disgrace before the end of the first
semester and eventually found his way back
to New York to make his living as best he
could. By now his personal struggles—it’s
not too much to say his conflicts with his
father—and his intellectual interests in free
thought and underground culture were coming
together in a pattern that would stay with
him for the rest of his life. He had decided
that he wanted to be a writer on censored
topics, especially sex. But he had literally
nothing to start with except remarkable talent.
It was, perhaps, easier to find forbidden
topics in 1930s America than it is today. The
United States in the early twentieth century
can be described as a psychically divided
society. Movements for women’s rights and
sexual freedom and literary modernism had
arrived early in the century, along with an
exploding popular culture of entertainment.
But American public culture was still staid
and puritanical. Cultural production was
censored through the mails, through customs restrictions on the importation of books for
sale. The National Board of Review censored
movies, and police departments and voluntary
organizations like the Society for the
Suppression of Vice kept tabs on theaters
and sellers of magazines and books. Editors
and publishers, fearing the Comstock laws,
filtered their book lists and restricted their
authors. Even basic medical information
could be hard to get. Margaret Sanger, for
example, and other women’s health activists
found themselves on the wrong side of
the law when they publicly discussed the
mechanics of contraception and distributed
information about devices like diaphragms
and condoms.
It was in this context that Legman began
a decade-long self-education project, reading
in the history of sexual medicine, language,
and literature. In the 1930s this was a daring
and even dangerous orientation for a
life’s work. Legman found an opportunity
to learn some human reproductive biology
by working for Dr. Robert L. Dickinson,
America’s most prominent gynecologist
and a birth-control activist, but at the same
time he was persuading Dickinson and later
Alfred C. Kinsey to be interested in the
cultural dimensions of sex. For Dickinson,
Legman worked on words and language. He
was becoming a folklorist, before he would
have been familiar with the term.
Dickinson provided access to the libraries
at the New York Academy of Medicine and
Columbia University, and Legman conducted
his own forays into the New York Public
Library. He was teaching himself several
European languages, including German and
French. In the rare book collection at the
New York Public Library, Legman made the
acquaintance of the great Italian humanist
Poggio (Giovanni Francesco Poggio Bracciolini,
1380-1459). A scholar and archaeologist,
Poggio was an apostolic secretary
and perhaps the first European joke-book
writer. His Facetiae (1451) is a “collection
of witty sayings, anecdotes, quid pro quos,
and insolence, mingled with obscenities and
impertinent jesting on religious subjects”
(LeJay 1911). Here was the perfect model
for Legman. Reading Poggio’s Facetiae and
Boccaccio’s Decameron showed him that his
present-day joke collections were linked to a
long oral and literary tradition reaching back
before the Renaissance in Europe, and even
drew on a global cultural fund.
Legman started as a library research assistant,
but he quickly impressed Dickinson
with his bibliographic skills and persuaded
him to fund a major linguistic and folkloristic
project. In 1936 he proposed an enormous
multilingual dictionary: “My subject matter,”
he explained in his description of The New
, a multivolume project on the history
and art of sex, “[is] simply the language
(improper, technical, colloquial, and slang)
of sexology . . . ; or in short the language of
love in its normal, medical, psychiatric, poetic,
historical, curious, and bolder aspects”
(1936). To support the work on The New
Kryptadia, Legman asked Dickinson for a
salary of sixteen hundred dollars a year. He
was prepared to scrape by in an eight-dollar-a-
week furnished room “with at least a table,
a toilet, a bathtub, and a bed” for love of his
subject matter (Legman 1936).
After years of almost living in the New
York Public Library, his bibliographic
knowledge of the erotic and the suppressed
was unparalleled. During the 1930s and ’40s
Legman turned his skills to a few sub-careers:
he was a translator for publishers of not-so-legal
books, and he occasionally worked as
a book scout, haunting book dumps, library
discard rooms, and house sales and scooping
up occasionally remarkable materials
for resale. This made him a knowledgeable
go-between for the sellers of used books and
the collectors of valuable books. In turn, his
work with rare book dealers gave him entrée,
allowing him to begin to collect from a world
of arcane and prohibited books: medical
and anthropological texts on subjects the
American authorities found obscene.
It was during these years that Legman
developed his methods for collecting and
studying folklore. In a way that was quite
advanced for the 1930s, he combined several
techniques for gathering material to study.
Legman’s method was not a dry one: he was
a modern folklorist in that he worked both
in the library and in what we loosely call “the
field,” interacting with and listening to ordinary
people play with words in a multitude
of ways. He corresponded voluminously
with other scholars, amateur and professional,
who were interested in folklore, and
especially its censored aspects. They were,
among others, H. L. Mencken, Zora Neale
Hurston, Alan Lomax, Alan Walker Read,
John Greenway, Wayland Hand, Austin and
Alta Fife, Maria Leach, Vance Randolph,
Richard Dorson, Benjamin Botkin, Tristram
Coffin, and almost everybody involved with
the Journal of American Folklore in the 1940s,
senior and junior scholars who were in the
process of shaping an academic discipline.
At the same time he cultivated a brilliant crew
of amateurs and part-time collectors. Dr.
William T. MacAtee, for example, a physician
from Chicago, was an amateur word collector
with a special interest in what he called
“off-color” names for birds and places.
Legman raided other people’s Hell Boxes,
including Haldeman-Julius’s, adding their
collected folklore manuscript materials to
his, along with the field-worker’s notes.
He helped Vance Randolph, for example,
publish his collections of unprintable Ozark
folklore by doing much of the editorial work
when Randolph became too ill. Most importantly,
he spent time with people, listening
without judging. In the 1930s he hung out
in burlesque theaters with the actresses and
scouted “all the grimier shit houses around
Broadway,” collecting graffiti (Legman n.d.).
From his early fieldwork, he wrote and published
the first lexicon of homosexual slang,
an ethnographic document that is cited by
New York historians to this day. Interestingly,
Legman was one of the first Westerners to
study Japanese paper folding, and he used
origami as an opening gambit when talking
to strangers. In a train station or at a bus stop,
he would sit down, pull a sheet of paper out
of his pocket and begin a fold, and soon he
and his new acquaintance were swapping
jokes.
Over the decades, he gathered an enormous
collection that included stories, songs,
rhymes, vocabulary, and much more, using
his opportunistic combination of methods.
In the early 1950s, censorship pressure forced Legman to leave the United States,
and somehow he managed to pack up his
enormous folklore archives and ship it to
France where he could work on it undisturbed.
For several decades he alternated
between long-term publishing projects and
occasional short-term ghostwriting to support
his family. He could afford to return to
the United States only rarely to give lectures
and visit his mother and father.
In 1968, after years of collecting, writing
and editing, and more years of analysis,
Legman completed the first volume of his
masterwork, Rationale of the Dirty Joke. Appropriately,
he dedicated the book to the spirit
of Poggio, “lover of books, folk-humor, and
women”; like the Facetiae, it contains a huge
sweep of folk humor, but here collected
in United States between about 1929 and
1960.
Rationale of the Dirty Joke was the first full-length
scholarly book to bring into print
folk material that had been until the 1960s
unprintable. The book was a hit, and it’s
not an accident that it landed in the United
States in a year when everything seemed to
be coming apart—not least, sexual mores.
Rationale was perhaps most popular with
people who leafed through it lightly, and
less popular with those who struggled to
understand Legman’s larger project. In
Rationale, Legman does more than celebrate
jokes: he has made a brilliant and hilarious
collection. He subjects sexual humor to his
own analysis and ends up laughing to keep
from crying. What Legman meant by the
“rationale” is not the sense or the meaningfulness
of sexual humor, although that is
one of his topics, but that people use humor
to rationalize what is otherwise unbearably
difficult knowledge. In Legman’s view, folk
humor deals with the hard truths of human
relationships, especially between parents and
children, husbands and wives.
The first volume was wide-ranging, but
it barely touched the surface of Legman’s
collections. He followed it a few years later
with a second volume, No Laughing Matter:
Rationale of the Dirty Joke, a collection of jokes
so hostile and unpleasant he hadn’t included
them in the first book. Legman—along with
other folklorists like Bruce Jackson, Alan
Dundes, Kenneth Goldstein, and Roger
Abrahams—was looking at folklore in general
and joking in particular as a layered
process of communication around a culture’s
most difficult problems. In contemporaneous
articles, Dundes and Goldstein argued
that the touchiest issue was race, while Legman
felt certain that Western culture’s third
rail was sex.
Legman had collected jokes in their American
forms, but in many cases he was able to
trace their histories back to sixteenth-century
Italy—and some times before that, to their
Asian and Middle Eastern roots. Rationale
and No Laughing Matter are troves of fascinating
examples, filled out with argumentative
hypothesizing and points for further investigation.
One of Legman’s techniques was to
categorize jokes by theme, or we might even
say obsessions. His themes were drawn from
Freud’s theories about the difficult process
of growing up in a repressive society.
I want to focus on only one of Legman’s
interests in the collection of humor, and
that is the question of foolishness, idiocy,
and generally non compos mentis behavior
by people in pursuit of sex. Legman found
in his thousands of jokes a preoccupation
with idiots and goofballs, people who make
dunderheaded mistakes, and people who
are blind because they will not see. As Stith
Thompson wrote in his classic study The
Folktale, first published in 1946, fools have
populated European folktales for as long as
we have a record. In the immigrant and multiethnic
United States, fool jokes frequently
appear to trade in ethnic, racial, or regional
stereotypes. For example, take the Yoopers
or Michiganders from the Upper Peninsula
who put fresh air in their tires for a trip to
Milwaukee (Leary 1999, 248), or the fishermen
who make a mark on the water so that
they can find the fish again later, or the new
international fool, the “dumb blonde.”
All fools share generic problems of perception
and create problems for themselves
based on misunderstanding. There is mistaken
identity: “A numbskull is convinced
that the pumpkin which he is sitting upon
is an ass’s egg which he has hatched out”
(Thompson 1977, 190). Such misunderstanding
“results in inappropriate and absurd
actions,” as for example the fool who “sees
his cow chewing cud and kills her because
he thinks she is mimicking him” (Thompson
1977, 190). Living in a mental world of his
own, the fool “may endow objects or animals
with any qualities that suit his passing fancy”;
for example, he “feeds meat to cabbages
because he imagines they must be hungry”
(Thompson 1977, 191). A fool may try to dig
up a well and take it home or dig a hole “so
as to have a place to throw the earth from
the excavation he is making,” or he may try
to send a pair of boots by Western Union by
leaving them hanging on the telegraph pole
(Thompson 1977, 192). The fool misunderstands
“elementary natural laws” and “sows
grain or salt hoping to produce more of the
same. Or he sows cheese to bring forth a cow,
or plants an animal’s tail in order to produce
young animals” (Thompson 1977, 192).
Naturally, he or she misunderstands human
love, sex, and reproduction, too. Legman
found that foolishness combined with
sex was the subject of many of the jokes he
collected. One of Legman’s projects was to
rescue sexual fools from historical oblivion
and show the deep connection over time
between them and accounts of more general
foolishness. After the sixteenth century, as
late Renaissance elite culture became more
polite, most joke collectors censored their
own work. Like his friend Poggio, Legman
preferred his doofuses unvarnished. He
tended to present them as the joke tellers
he favored found them: oversexed, dirty,
and mentally deficient. Legman found fools
who bore the familiar marks of ethnic, racial,
and religious stereotype, but he thought this
wasn’t especially important. Although fools
wear all kinds of disguises, according to
Legman, “In fool jokes the surface identity is
entirely misleading.” The joke may look like
it is about dumb blondes or flatlanders, but
on closer examination, the fool has a core
that persists underneath the shifting surface
costume, and in real life, “there is no fool to
be encountered of quite the sort one meets
in jokes” (Legman 1968, 113)
Sexual fools also have problems of perception. (“Anybody can make a mistake,” as the
hedgehog said to the hairbrush.) Fools misrecognize
the opposite sex, as, for example,
when the dirty trickster comedian Borat
(Sasha Baron Cohen) mistakes Mrs. Barbara
Bush, the former first lady, for a man. But
Legman saw sexual fools as making more
disturbing errors. There is the male fool who
is so stupid he mistakes female genitals for
an animal or a strange man with a beard and
becomes alarmed. There are fools who don’t
realize sexual opportunity when it’s offered
them:
The traveling salesman is told he will
have to sleep either with the baby or in
the barn. Having visions of the baby
crying and wetting him in his sleep,
etc., he picks the barn. In the morning
a beautiful young girl comes into milk
the cow. “Who are you?” he asks.
“I’m the baby of the family. Who are
you?”
“I’m the jackass that slept in the
barn.” (Legman 1968, 123)
The ultimate sort of fool, Legman thought,
is one who does not understand the most
basic fact of the adult world: “how to perform
sexual intercourse, or who does not
recognize it when he sees it being engaged
in” (1968, 126). This ultimate “fool is the
child who has grown up”—we might say
managed to grow up—“without learning
the meaning of sex.” Legman surmised that
these jokes ridicule “those who have allowed
themselves to remain in sexual darkness, to
their own detriment,” and thus congratulate
“both teller and listener on the sexual enlightenment
they themselves have achieved”
(1968, 114).
For example, the foolish bridegroom does
not know how to perform intercourse, has
to ask for directions, and naturally gets the
directions all wrong. Or he takes his instructions
literally. The fool wonders what to do
on his wedding night: he is told to “watch
the animals” with a variety of ridiculous and
unpleasant results, including peeing against
the bedpost. There is a lascivious female
fool, disguised as an anxious bride who can
be tricked into thinking her husband has two
penises—a small one for the wedding night
and a big one for later. When she asks him
to produce the second one, he says he sold
it to a friend. Later, he meets her leaving
the friend’s house—and she tells him he’s
made a bad bargain (Legman 1968, 128).
Most dangerously, for Legman, there is the
fool with totally befuddled perceptions: he
is too foolish to know his wife is in bed with
another man. “At the wedding, the fool finds
the best man in bed with the bride. He goes
downstairs and brings up all the wedding
guests to see, chortling, “Why, he’s so drunk
he thinks he’s me!” Says the fool who has
lost his house key to the police, “Sure, it’s
my house. This is my hall, that’s my carpet,
this is my bedroom, that’s my bed, that’s my
wife, and see that man in bed with her? That’s
me!” (Legman 1968, 128). Legman thought
that monogamy is the most anxiety producing
modern arrangement and found in these
jokes evidence of anxiety about fidelity.
Today there’s no shortage of sexual imagery,
at least in the mass media, and there
has been a veritable explosion of what some
feminists call “raunch culture.” Although
health and sex education curricula stumble
along in schools, parents are concerned,
as they were in the twentieth century, with
sexually explicit images and stories available
through films, television, computer games,
and the Internet. Dirty jokes seem to be the
last cultural form that anyone would worry
about—or need to censor—amid a tide of
imagery Legman’s generation would have
found almost unimaginable. It doesn’t seem
as if there could be any unenlightened fools
left in the real world. Yet, in this wised-up
age, old ideas about sexual idiocy, expressed
in humor, seem to be at the heart of popular
culture, indicating that Legman and his
storehouse of jokes may still have a lot to tell
us. Several recent hit films are exactly about
sexual nincompoops: I’ve already mentioned
Borat (2006), which details the American
misadventures of Borat Sagdiev, a journalist
from the People’s Republic of Kazakhstan.
We could also think of The 40-Year-Old Virgin
and, in a different vein, The Aristocrats, both
released in 2005.
Borat himself is vigorously and irreverently
sexual, but his sexuality is moronic
and perverse. He regularly comments about
fornicating with his sister and other female
relatives. Borat the character shares the
traditional ingredients of American jokes
told about rural people and immigrants in
the early twentieth century. Kazakhstan has
replaced the backwoods, but the fool attracts
the same collection of slurs. He has a bizarre
inability to apprehend modern life. Borat
mistakes a toilet bowl for a face basin and an
elevator for his hotel room; he calls a tortoise
“a cat in the hat.” These misunderstandings
multiply into insults, and worse. All this and
more add up to a total boor, an unbearably
ignorant foreigner.
Commentators across the political spectrum
have tried to figure out who this Borat
character represents and what we are laughing
at (albeit uncomfortably) in his performances.
To my knowledge, no folklorists
have weighed in. My guess is that if Legman
were alive to see the movie, he would note
that Borat is joking around with the explosive
materials of anti-Semitism and homophobia,
thus treading the minefield he explored in
No Laughing Matter. He would point out that
while Baron Cohen’s Borat may be asking us
to laugh at immigrants, homophobes, Southern
conservatives, and militarists—all very
contemporary people—he is also the classic
fool from jokes and folktales, an archetype
of ignorance so unhinged and unknowing
that he is brilliant.
Legman thought that in all these fools we
are meeting a kind of wisdom: the person
who is so simple or so mad and dumbfounded
by the world that he is actually wise
and tells us some truth. The wise or holy
fool is allowed “some unwitting freedom of
speech or damaging frankness,” but he is not
the butt of the joke—“the butt is the father,
teacher, officer, doctor . . . who is, as it were,
defied or denuded by the fool’s frankness”
(Legman 1968, 113). He is so stupid that he
is brilliant at bringing out others’ stupidities.
As one Borat reviewer put it, “it is as if he
were outraged by the business of our being
human” and is making an assault on all of
us (Lane 2006, 106). As many scholars have
noticed, the fool is much like a ventriloquist’s
dummy or the head on a stick that many medieval fools carried: it could speak frankly
what could not be said by a real person.
Legman pointed out that fools in jokes are
closely related to fools in their ritual roles
in festivals and other performances. Such
fools mock propriety, received wisdom, and
authority to show how arbitrary the order of
the world is. In this view, the nincompoop in
a joke is almost a disembodied voice, floating
in from another room, asking important
questions that no one present can raise.
This discussion of a tiny part of Legman’s
joke collections is too brief, but it has focused
on what Legman thought were compelling
questions: sexual knowledge and sexual ignorance.
In part because of the circumstances
of his family and upbringing, and in part
because of the shape of American culture
in his time, these became the lenses through
which he focused his provocative analysis.
Although Legman is not well remembered today, we owe him a huge debt for collecting
materials that few others would touch and
beginning an analysis of the role of folk
humor in human relationships.
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Susan Davis holds an M.A. in American
folklife studies from the Cooperstown
Graduate Program and a Ph.D. in folklore
from the University of Pennsylvania. A
professor of speech communication and
library and information science at the
University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign,
she is at work on a book-length study of
Gershon Legman’s life and times. This
article was originally presented as a
Bruce Buckley Memorial Lecture in Cooperstown,
New York, on April 19, 2007.
One of Gershon Legman’s insights—one
might say one of his obsessions—and the
idea driving all of his big projects was that
all cultures have Hell Boxes: a substrate of
material that almost everybody knows is
there, but can’t talk about in polite circles.
Works Cited
Haldeman-Julius, Emanuel. My First 25
Years: Instead of a Footnote, an Autobiography.
Girard, Kansas: Haldeman-Julius Publications,
1949.
Lane, Anthony. November 6, 2006. In Your
Face: Borat and Volver. New Yorker: 106.
Leary, James, ed. 1999. Wisconsin Folklore.
Madison: University Of Wisconsin
Press.
Legman, Gershon. 1936. Legman archive.
Privately held, courtesy of Mrs. Judith
Legman. Opio, France.
——.1968. Rationale of the Dirty Joke:
An Analysis of Sexual Humor. New York:
Grove Press.
——. 1975. No Laughing Matter: Rationale of
the Dirty Joke. New York: Bell Publishing.
——. n.d. Peregrine Penis: An Autobiography
of Innocence. Unpublished
manuscript. Privately held, courtesy of
Mrs. Judith Legman. Opio, France.
LeJay, Paul. 1911. Giovanni Francesco Poggio
Bracciolini. Catholic Encyclopedia, vol.
XII. New York: Robert Appleton. www.newadvent.org/cathen/12177a.htm.
Thompson, Stith. 1977 (1946). The Folktale.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
This article appeared in Voices Vol. 34, Spring-Summer 2008. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society today.
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