Friday, Jan. 17, 1969
The Humor of Hostility
Those indefatigable human detergents, the censor and the prude, have utterly failed to launder, much less expunge, man's lowest literary form: the dirty joke. What accounts for its lusty and unabashed survival? Freud suggested that the smutty story verbalizes male aggressive instincts against the highly disturbing opposite sex. Somewhat embellished, this theory lies at the heart of Gershon Legman's Rationale of the Dirty Joke (Grove Press; $15), which beyond all doubt qualifies as the most bizarre book of research in recent years. Legman's study is an 811-page anthology of dirty jokes, complete with explanatory texts, notes on dates and country of origin, and references to leading variations.
A Beethoven-loving American expatriate who now lives in France, Legman has written five books on aspects of erotica, and once worked as a bibliographer for Indiana University's Kinsey Institute for Sex Research. Bulky as it is, Rationale of the Dirty Joke is only the first of two volumes he has written on the subject--and, as Legman warns in his preface, the "cleaner" one at that. Legman's approach to his subject is at once serious, scholarly and slightly disquieting. Any reader who grazes beyond the italics is likely to think twice before telling another dirty joke, or even before listening to one.
Key to Character. Legman contends that a man's taste in coarse humor is the key to his character, and also reveals the depth of his anxiety about Western civilization's three great sexual hang-ups: venereal disease, homosexuality and castration.
The dirty joke, says Legman, owes its popularity to the urgent male need to allay this anxiety. One of the most effective antidotes to fear is laughter, and man has been guffawing for years at fears of his own sexual inadequacy or of the menacing, potentially castrating accomplice who lurks in the conjugal equation.
Legman analyzes jokes in the light of their fear quotient. The fear buried in jokes about adultery, he contends, is that of homosexuality. There is an understood linkage between the cuckolded husband and his wife's traducer in the familiar story about the wife who admits to adultery while her husband was out of town. Husband: "Who was it, Finkelstein?" Wife: "No." "Cohen?" "No." "Shapiro?" "No." "What's the matter-none of my friends are good enough for you?" Concludes Legman: "In the relationship with the other man that is crucial to adultery, it is the triumph over him, rather than the sexual conquest of his wife, that is understood to be the adulterer's real thrill."
Potency jokes--another rich vein of Legmanian source material--invariably conceal the fear of inadequacy or impotence behind outrageous boasts: First woman: "Did you hear about the woman who had quadruplets? I understand that only happens once every 60,000 times." Second woman: "My goodness, when does she get her housework done?" Although the characters are women, the perspective is male; as Legman notes, women never compose dirty jokes but are nearly always the butt of them. The alleged insatiability of the female also runs as an undercurrent through that story--providing a way for the male who is worried about his sexual adequacy to blame it on his partner. This principle comes clear in the joke about a wife whose doctor informs her that her husband is suffering from the physical effects of dissipation: "Dissipation? But doctor, that's impossible. Why he's been home every night since we were married."
Across the Threshold. Legman's arguments are buttressed by an informed understanding of psychoanalytic theory and by a wide acquaintance with the classics. He makes a convincing case for the naked hostility hidden in most vulgarisms for the sex act. Two examples are the transparent sexuality of the most romantic of marriage rituals ("Carrying the bride across the threshold really means crossing the threshold of the bride, doesn't it?"), and the homosexual tendencies of the Don Juan ("The actual meaning of the urge to get through intercourse as fast as possible is that one hates the woman, or women"). All this suggests the obsessive quality of man's erotic fears--and the cathartic character of the dirty joke.
"People do not joke about what makes them happy or what is sacred to them," Legman says. "They joke only about what frightens or disturbs them." He agrees with Freud that "it is not our hatred of our enemies that harms us: it is our hatred for the people we really love that destroys us." By giving vent to this ambivalence, unacceptable at the level of consciousness, the dirty joke plays a small but necessary part in preserving man's emotional balance.
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