Word: legman
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...