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From: Lee Rudolph <lrudolph@panix.com>
Subject: Legman Report, Part 1 [March 22, 1995]

This is the first part of a report on {\it Rationale of the Dirty Joke: An Analysis of Sexual Humor, Second Series}, by G. Legman, published in 1975 by Breaking Point, Inc., New York, later reprinted by the University of Indiana, but now--alas--out of print. This is not intended to be a ``book review''; rather, I've tried to take note of the various overlaps between Legman's book and alt.folklore.urban's recurrent themes and obsessions. As time permits, I will endeavor to complete my report on the Second Series (my interlibrary loan is overdue, and I haven't even finished my second pass through ``Castration''), and perhaps work up a similar report on the First Series (of which I own a copy). Throughout, I will use pseudoTeX conventions to mark italics, etc., as above--in particular, I will enclose {topics} in curly braces to set them off (and facilitate grepping). The report is organized by the same Subjects as the book.

INTRODUCTION.

Getting his introductory essay ``No Laughing Matter'' off to a good start, Legman (p. 6) summarizes {Milgram's ``Behavioral Study of Obedience''} but does not mention the same social psychologist's seminal study of {Six Degrees of Separation}.

On p. 15, he makes a point about joke transmission that seems to me equally applicable to Urban Legends: ``Since the jokes that are told are really only being repeated from previous listening, in the deepest sense {\it teller and listener are indivisible and identical}. The favorite jokes of one are -- by & large -- the favorite jokes of the other. Otherwise these jokes would not survive, through centuries and civilizations hundreds of years and thousands of miles apart. The favorite jokes, this time of the large mass of teller-listeners, have therefore been chosen again and again by an almost always unconscious bent or selection from the larger float of jokes that any one person may have heard. Only the special favorites are retained, or are transmitted very often.''

Again, on p. 30, Legman's comment on joke transmission via telephone and telegraph uncannily adumbrates Usenet. ``I have known, in New York and Chicago, particularly in advertising, the theatre and the arts, men who would sit up until late at night, telephoning at fabulous expense to California all the `new' jokes they had heard that day, and which would therefore arrive in California four hours ahead of the sun. I have also been informed by Mr. Joseph Fliesler, complier of the original {\it Anecdota American} (1927) and former publicity director in America for UFA Films, that telegraph operators `in the old days' -- meaning before the advent of the teletype machines, which would leave a guilty record in the morning -- would keep the wires open all night by retailing jokes in this way over enormous distances. I have heard, too, of Army walkie-talkies being used in this same way, since World War II, to transmit the latest joke on the commanding officer and his wife to the front line of the battle during the silent, nerve-wracking waits of the night and early morning.''

Still from the Introduction: ``{Humor-as-ordeal} is a subject that has never been handled.'' He mentions here the supposed use of body parts in medical-school hazing.

HOMOSEXUALITY.

Much of the first 70 pages of this chapter is devoted to Legman's own neo-Freudian psychological theories. There is a passing reference to one-time net.kook candidate Fred Cherry, and many references to Legman's earlier book {\it The Guilt of the Templars}, which seems like it would be a good read for the conspiracy theorists among us. Not until p. 111 did I come upon more traditional AFU fodder, namely, an allusion to fratboy circlejerks, without, however, an explicit mention of the {soggy biscuit} motif. On p. 112 we are told that ``the investiture of the Pope involves a very sober examination -- on a special openbottomed chair set upon a dais -- to determine whether or not `{\it Testiculos habet,}' and his foreskin as well.''

A probable precursor of {the chloroformed roommate} is attributed (p. 156) to Sir Richard Burton, in his Terminal Essay to his (plagiarized, according to Legman) translation of the {\it Arabian Nights} (1888), who ``ascribes it as a true incident'' (but involving champagne, and a bellboy in a hotel rather than a roommate in college or barracks).

On p. 160, Legman asserts without documentation that ``Arabs today still castrate or pedicate their captives in war.'' Paging alt.folklore.military!

No mention of the {candiru}, but--perhaps even more interesting--on p. 162 we find that ``Paranoid fears of pedication by snakes are transformed by South American Indians into the superstition of the {\it ca\"inero,} described by Henri Michaux in {\it Ecuador}, and Jean Hallier in {\it Chagrin d'Amour} (1974): {\it The ca\"inero is `a small red fish in the Amazon river . . . that penetrates the imprudent bather through the fundament, and slowly devours his heart!}' (Motif G328, `rectum-snake;' and compare Freud's `Rat-man' case.''

On p. 181, there's a bonafide reference to {\it Reader's Digest}!!! namely, a ``Humor in Uniform'' squib about an overbearing admiral who is mocked, when in the hospital for a minor condition, by having a daffodil inserted in lieu of a rectal thermometer. (April, 1958, p. 134, it says here.)

PROSTITUTION.

Legman seems to think (p. 197) that Swiss Army Knives symbolize winkies. We know better, though, don't we?

No one ever substantiated, to Bill Nelson's satisfaction at least, the traditional status of {a two dollar bill} as being a harlot's hire. Bill won't be impressed, I'm sure, by Legman's bland assertion (p. 210) that the punchline of an 1888 only works because of ``the then-standard $2 bill''.

There is, maybe, a reference to {snuff films} on p. 256: ``I can only add that any sick sexual Hollywogs accidentally omitted by either Ray Russell or Al Goldstein are wrapped up (in spades) in Terry Southern's black-humor evisceration of the subject, {\it Blue Movie} (New York, 1970), in which the studio-head has a special affinity for `paying his last respects' to corpses''.

I have already posted, at length, Legman's account of Marcel Proust's alleged kink for killing mice ``with needles on the boys' bodies during homosexual intercourse'' (p. 259) and have wondered if this precurses the {gerbilling} story. Was Proust as famous in his day as Richard Gere is in ours?

DISEASE AND DISGUST

No Lemonjello, but on p. 308 we have ``{\it The Negro woman in the maternity hospital who names her baby `Wasserman Positive Jones} because she has found this written on her hospital card, and `it sounds so fine!'} (N.Y. 1937)''. By now, you know, if there were any such {Unfortunately Named Children of Dumb Clucks}, you'd think some of them could be documented with death certificates -- much easier to find than birth certificates.

On p. 312, something else I've posted about at greater length: the (intermittent) popularity of stories (whether true or false) about notable public figures (President Roosevelt, French President F\'elix Faure, ex-Vice President Rockefeller, {Catherine the Great}) who died while engaged in sexual activities of one sort or another not involving song.

On p. 331: a 1966 citation for the {Overheard Airline Pilot} story (the date has since been pushed further into the past by Ms. Barbara Hamel).

As to {broadcast bloopers} more generally, on p. 360 ``A similar radio `boner' -- probably not authentic -- was reported from England ... {\it `Wilfrid Pickles interviewing a young lady: ``If you weren't yourself, Miss, who or what would you like to be?'' She: ``A Christmas Pudding ... I'd like to be done slowly for six hours''.'}'' (No date. Who is Wilfrid Pickles?)

On p. 364, there's a story I've never heard, but I'd like to spread it. ``No one who has been bouncing around in the literary and cultural hipster activities of the last few decades in American can be ignorant of the fact that the late Ernest Hemingway . . . chose as running gag . . . of . . . {\it For Whom the Bell Tolls}, in 1940, the Spanish food-dirtying oath, {\it `I shit in the milk of your mother!'} This appears, however, as `I {\it obscenity} in the milk of your mother,' the explanation being circulated -- folklore, of course -- that as he as being paid $1 a word, each {\it obscenity} netted him one buck, where he would have been paid nothing for dashes.'' As I myself was once screwed out of a one-dollar word by an editor of the {\it New Yorker}, this has special resonance for me.

{Pissing in coffee}, which has been well-documented in the present day, is addressed in a 1940 joke on p. 374. Likewise, a story about {semen} on restaurant food (in this case, tapioca pudding), showed up in the District of Columbia in 1953--showing (if any proof were needed) that it's not just pizza boys and Paki curry houses that add the spice of life to their food.

CASTRATION.

I think AFU has decided that `everyone knows' that native informants will pull {anthropologists'} legs whenever they get the chance. For what it's worth, Legman seems to agree (p. 421), at least in the case of Malinowski.

{\it Penis captivus} gets a whole subsection to itself, starting on p. 427. One ``form of this . . . tenacious legend suddenly appear[ed] as a wildfire rumor among the students at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, in the Winter of 1935/36, with exact details in the telling as to the very place where the lovers `were found' in the university Arboretum''.

On the next page, Legman quotes at length, from Vance Randolph's {\it Pissing in the Snow} (still only in ms. at the time, but now -- I believe -- in print), an Ozark version of {the girl who gets a bottle stuck `by suction' in her vagina during masturbation} (in his version, it's a beer bottle).

On p. 438, Legman repeats a tale of dental penectomy caused by an auto accident during fellation, adding, ``This story has been consistently collected over the years, and is always told as authentically true.'' Has anyone here ever heard it on the hoof?

{The exploding toilet}, p. 443, is traced back to the era of outhouses (sometime before 1940), as I've reported in more detail in an earlier post. None of Legman's versions is embellished with dropped stretchers or the like.

On p. 453, there's a story that I suspect of being a precursor to the {superhero sex game} UL: ``{\it A girl tells her mother about the marvelous new position for making love that her husband has taught her: she is to lie on the bed with her legs spread, while he charges across the room and swan-dives into her embrace. The next day the girl has a hurry-call from the hospital where her parents have been taken. `How are they?' she asks fearfully. `Your mother is all right,' she is told, `but they're still probing for your father'.}'' He traces this back to 1929 or earlier.

There's loads of stuff on {merkins} starting on p. 459, in the midst of which Legman claims to have been ``the co-inventor in 1938'' of ``the excessively frank vibrating or rotating dildo'', in cooperation with ``the late Dr. Vladimir Fortunato, the world's greatest anatomical model-maker. (It is not patented; our gift to the world. ... )''

On p. 485, Legman quotes Henry Miller ({\it Aller-Retour New York} (Paris, 1938) interviewing an Englishman who has been to Australia and learned to castrate sheep with his teeth.

On p. 491, Legman reports some slightly different words to ``Colonel Bogy'' (about {Hitler's supposed cryptorchidism}) than we are familiar with, and also gives a few lines from the World War I ``Mademoiselle from Armenti\`eres'' about the Kaiser's genitals. Some things never change.

On p. 493, we learn that ``{Santa Claus} ... is also castrated. This is plainly stated in modern Dutch folklore, which also supplies Santa Claus' last name. In Holland he is {\it Sinter Class Kapoentje} (Santa Claus the Little Capon)''.

On p. 511, we learn that the French got there first, coining the verb ``ab\'elardiser'' sometime before 1898, long before Lorena Bobbit gave her husband's name to the English language. I bring this up only because there's another version of the {chloroformed roommate} here, or so it seems to me. Here is Legman's translation of the beginning of Octave Mirbeau's {\it Torture Garden}, followed by some of Legman's debunking. Note as well the {frivolous lawsuit} theme. `` `Several months ago, a young Anglican vicar was {\it abelardised} by the husband of a lady whom this reverend gentleman had crowned with his heavenly favors. The husband, a doctor, made use of the ancient subterfuge of deceived husbands, which never fails to trap both wives and lovers. He feigned going off on a trip, and came back {\it suddenly} at the moment when he was least expected. The guilty couple were quietly sleeping, and the doctor chloroformed them both without making any scene. Then he proceeded to operate on the gentleman, bandaged him properly, and retired. One can imagine the mutual surprise of the lovers, the next morning, at the our of leavetaking. The reverend gentleman had to have himself transported to his lodgings somewhat more crestfallen than he had arrived. But the characteristic [sc. British] trait is that after he was healed, he sued the physician, demanding damages and interest for an injury incapacitating him for work. [See {\it Deuteronomy, xxiii.1}]' ... I cannot of course prove, at this date, that the story ... is untrue, but one observes that ... [t]his is hardly the way two people who have been chloroformed would wake up!''

****to be continued?****

Lee Rudolph