Beneath Genteel Externals

A man telling an obscene limerick is not just a man trying to amuse his friends. Such is the conclusion of Dr. Raoul Weston LaBarre of Uniontown, Pa., social anthropologist who has studied the customs of Bolivian Indians, done psychiatric research at the Topeka clinic of Dr. Karl Augustus Menninger (The Human Mind, Man Against Himself). Young Dr. LaBarre, observing gatherings of limerick-telling U. S. males, and analyzing the content of the limericks, decided that he was in the presence of otherwise normal people unconsciously betraying their repressions and inhibitions. These categories of limericks indicated to him these inhibitions and repressions in their narrators as well as composers:

1) A prevalent Oedipus complex, broadened to encompass resentment of authority and pompous persons in high places, is betrayed by a number of limericks which demean the King of Siam, the King of Baroda, the Queen of Baroda and other dignitaries, public and private.

2) Feelings of sexual inadequacy are betrayed by limericks which describe persons with deficient or fantastic sexual equipment, and by others which represent sex relations as difficult, impossible, or attended by disheartening accidents.

3) Feelings of sexual frustration are manifested by limericks which ridicule women (the frustrators) or describe sadistic practices perpetrated upon women.

Dr. LaBarre's conclusion: "Such repression is merely the price which our culture must pay to support its genteel social externals."

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