Word: legman
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...having to leave his Manhattan brownstone on a case), relish for properly chilled beer (12 bottles a day), reliance on significant small gestures ( a tiny circle traced on a desk top with one finger indicates speechless fury). Wolfe's associates are brightly sketched, notably his slangy, hard-boiled legman Archie Goodwin, whose active role in and narration of Wolfe's Holmesian episodes ties them also to the U.S. tough-guy school of Hammett and Chandler. Even such quirks as Wolfe's penchant for recondite words like "gibbosity" and "usufructs" and for scrupulous vocabularies of all kinds...
...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...
...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...
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...
...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...