Word: jokes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...