The Japes of Wrath

NO LAUGHING MATTER: RATIONALE OF THE DIRTY JOKE, 2ND SERIES by G. LEGMAN 992 pages. Breaking Point. $18.

Have you heard the one about the dog with a bucket of hot water who chased two people riding on a tandem bicycle? Do you know why Lucky Pierre is a sui generis joke in English-language humor, or why the gag whose punchline is "Don't make any waves" is one of America's favorites?

These jokes, plus 2,000 others, plus answers to questions most readers have never dared to consider, can be found in Gershon Legman's obsessive--and useful--collection of sexual and scatological humor. The first 811-page volume by the world's leading scholar on the subject was published in 1968 (Grove Press). Bound in nursery-blue covers, the book is suitable for mixed company. Volume II is clad in outhouse brown and concentrates on what Legman calls the "nasty nasties," divided under the headings Homosexuality, Prostitution, Sex and Money, Disease and Disgust, Castration, Dysphemism and Insults.

Libidinous Filth. Out of their locker-room context, where hidden anxieties and hostilities trip the giggle reflex, the jokes are not at all funny. Even to Legman they are shocking. "The book is full of material so disgusting that it will make any decent, clean, healthy person want to throw up," he declares. Why then did he spend 41 years collecting and writing the text that accompanies these Augean sweepings of the human psyche? Legman tells us that he began his harvest as a teen-ager in Scranton, Pa., where he was born in 1918. "I got myself in the habit," he recalls, "to top my own father, a notable teller of tales." The psychoanalytically inclined may draw their own conclusions. But it is fairly clear that Legman enjoys a magnificent case of outraged moralism and is trying to housebreak his readers by rubbing their noses in libidinous filth.

As editor of Neurotica, a daring little Freudian quarterly of the late '40s. Legman published his polemical essays attacking violence in comic books. He was an early critic of censorship that allows children to watch dramatizations of murder and mayhem but prevents them from seeing people making love. Lenny Bruce frequently goaded his nightclub audiences with the same point. Legman, never one to be upstaged by a comic, now claims authorship of the slogan "Make Love Not War."

The Neurotica essays were later published together as Love and Death, which has had considerable influence on many social and literary critics, most notably Leslie Fiedler (Love and Death in the American Novel). But Legman is no advocate of the so-called new freedom. The sex practiced in Last Tango in Paris revolted him no less than the plastic horrors of Jaws.

Back in the early '50s, the U.S. Post Office found Love and Death obscene and refused to deliver mail to Legman's Bronx home--a small, rundown cottage furnished ceiling to floor with books and cats. Shortly thereafter, he and his wife packed their belongings, including one of the world's largest private collections of erotic and scatological literature, and moved to France. Since the death of his wife in 1966, he has remarried and fathered three children. The Legman home is on fifteen acres in Valbonne.

Legman has remained in Europe, with the exception of a misspent year teaching at the San Diego campus of the

University of California in 1964-65. His principal subject was folklore, but his favorite activity seems to have been creating the Legend of Gershon Legman. "The kids would space out, disappear," he says. "I used to burn bonfires of pot in a living-room grate. The campus was rotten with drugs. At one stage, I got banned from speaking to the students because I ran two courses called Orgasm I and Orgasm II. They were about literature. If it had been Violence I and II, there would have been no problem."

Pocked Dignity. Legman's revenge was Fake Revolt (1967), an overheated assault on the youth rebellion. "COOL," he concluded, "is the new venereal disease." Despite such desert-prophet eruptions, Legman's scholarship continued. The Limerick is a massive accumulation of the world's most suggestive examples. The Horn Book contains studies in erotic folklore. The Guilt of the Templars is about heresy and sexual perversion in the medieval order of the Knights Templar. Ora genitalism is an elegantly written and anything but smutty study subtitled "Oral Techniques in Genital Excitation." Legman is also an authority on origami, which is not a sexual technique but the gentle Japanese art of paper folding.

It is as the Diderot of the dirty joke that Legman will be best remembered, although Rationale contains enough ravings against the inauthenticities of popular culture to earn him another title --the Carrie Nation of kitsch. He is also the Joe McCarthy of heterosexuality who looks for gays under every bed, a man who professes to love woman but whose opinions reveal a lover of the Vic torian idea of Woman, and a Jeremiah who sees the world ending in nuclear war or a fecal flood of pollution.

Throughout Rationale, Legman is concerned with a transcendent purity every bit as excessive and unattainable as the perfect body cleanliness of the deodorant-happy culture he abhors. His views on the psychological roots of dirty jokes, while delivered with ingenuity, verve and color (Legman will always call a spade a goddam shovel), belong to the Freudian orthodoxy as laid down by the master in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905).

Trying to be more Freudian than Sigmund, Legman plays many varia tions on his single theme: smut springs from unconscious fears and rages and is usually directed by males against females. His illustrations on the war be tween the sexes range from the earliest skirmishes to a cocktail-party confrontation: a beautiful woman propositions a man. "My place or yours?" he asks.

"If it's going to be such a hassle for you," she replies, "forget it."

Rationale of the Dirty Joke is an un deniable presence, a work of majestic ego that was weathered by new attitudes and ideas long before completion. In the future, it will be plundered, measured and thumbed through for titillation. But the book will remain impervious in all its pocked dignity, authenticity and embattled romanticism.

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