If a cigar is sometimes just a cigar, does that mean a dick joke is sometimes just a dick joke? Not according to G. Legman. In Rationale of the Dirty Joke, originally published in 1968 and now available in a new paperback edition, Legman (yes, that was his real name) categorizes and contemplates more than 2,000 dirty jokes. His primary conclusion: Man is an angry, anxious animal who needs to get laid more.
Legman, who died in 1999 at the age of 81, started collecting jokes at an early age, and while he dropped out of college after one semester, he eventually decided to make the study of erotic folklore his vocation. "I knew other folklorists had collected everything except the sexual parts," he explained in a 1986 newspaper profile. "I thought that was as funny as spending the wedding night examining every part of the bride's trousseau but nothing of the bride."
But while Legman may have wanted to focus on the juicier aspects of folklore, he didn't exactly operate with a happy-go-lucky touch. Instead, he was relentlessly organized and ruthlessly Freudian, first dividing the jokes he collected in Rationale into nine major subjects—"Marriage," "Adultery," "Premarital Sexual Acts," etc.—and then dividing them further into more specific "motifs" —"Sex Hatred as Rejection," "Incest with the Mother-in-Law." (In a second, even more massive volume, which remains out of print, Legman focused on what he called the "dirty dirty jokes"—those had motifs like "Feces as Gift" and "The Attack of the Testicles.")
In the recent documentary The Aristocrats, which examines a classic dirty joke about a family of debauched vaudevillians—Legman and his book are briefly cited in the film—comedian Bob Saget gets so filthy while improvising his version of the joke, he doesn't seem to know what's driving him to go to such disgusting lengths. Legman, on the other hand, would certainly render an opinion. Dirty jokes, he argues, are "a modified form of rape," forced upon "frankly unwilling audiences." And, he elaborates, jokes about taboo or uncomfortable subjects offer "a petcock of release," a way to mitigate "the great anxiety that both teller and listener feel in connection with certain culturally determined themes." Or to put it another way—never let Bob Saget near your kids, especially if they're coprophiliacs.
As insightful as Legman's analyses in Rationale often are, however, they're also constrictingly myopic. Sure, joke-telling can be an aggressive act, and, sure, jokes (dirty or otherwise) can be a coping mechanism to address difficult situations or problematic desires. But what Legman doesn't really acknowledge is that that's not necessarily a bad thing. Instead, he characterizes joke-telling as a form of neuroses, an intrinsically negative act. If we were all totally sexually at ease with ourselves, he implies, we would have no need for dirty jokes. (In a book he wrote in 1950, Love and Death: A Study in Censorship, he reaches the same conclusion about comic books and other forms of violent media.)
But do we really want a world without dirty jokes (or by extension, jokes of any kind)? Along with being a first-rate provocateur, Legman was also a thorough scholar. One of the things he demonstrates in Rationale is how few new jokes there are; most of the punchlines we laugh at today reach deep into history. And there's something comforting about this lineage. Indeed, we may be, as Legman's analyses imply, messed-up, miserable perverts—but at the same time, so was Voltaire! Upper-class, 18th-century Londoners, too. And while they apparently loved a good venereal-infection joke even more than, say, Howard Stern does, they turned out all right. So maybe there's hope for us, too.