PUNCH LINE.(history of the obscene joke)

A few years ago, browsing in a dusty used-book store in Maine, I came across a curious volume. It was a fat, tattered paperback bearing the title "Rationale of the Dirty Joke." Its author, I saw from the sixties-style futuristic cover, was G. Legman. Taking it off the shelf and riffling though its badly oxidized pages, I found that it contained what looked like thousands of erotic and scatological jokes, arranged under such themes as "coital postures," "the big inch," and "zoophily." These jokes were accompanied by Freudian-style commentary, along with random animadversions on aspects of sixties life, like Zip Codes, hippies, women who swear, and Marshall McLuhan. The most striking aspect of the volume was the author's esoteric scholarship, exemplified by this sentence from the introduction:

Particular attention should be drawn to three rare works presenting Modern Greek, Arabic, and other Levantine erotic tales and foolstories: La Fleur Lascive Orientale ('Oxford' [Bruxelles: Gay & Mlle. Douce], 1882), anonymously translated from the originals by J.-A. Decourdemanche, an even rarer English retranslation also existing ('Athens' [Sheffield: Leonard Smithers], 1893); Contes Licencieux de Constantinople et de l'Asie Mineure, collected before 1893 by Prof. Jean Nicolaides, and published after his sudden and mysterious death as the opening volume of a series imitating Kryptadia: "Contributions au Folklore Erotique" (Kleinbronn & Paris: G. Ficker [!], 1906-09, 4 vols.); and especially two modern French chapbooks, one entitled Histoires Arabes (Paris: A. Quignon, 1927), ascribed to an admittedly pseudonymous 'Khati Cheghlou,' and its sequel or supplement, Les Meilleures Histoires Coloniales (about 1935).

Noting the fanciful names (G. Ficker, Khati Cheghlou) and the cranky, erudite tone, I began to wonder whether this wasn't a wild Nabokovian put-on. No doubt "G. Legman" itself was a pseudonym; both the initial (G-spot?) and the surname (as opposed to tit-man?) were suspicious. But a few months later, in the late winter of 1999, I saw on the obituary page of the Times that Gershon Legman, a "self-taught scholar of dirty jokes," had died, at the age of eighty-one, in the South of France, where he lived in voluntary exile from his native United States.

A certain facetiousness might seem to attach to the phrase "scholar of dirty jokes." Is this really an area in which scholarship is appropriate or profitable? Well, jokes do fall into the category of folklore, along with myths, proverbs, legends, nursery rhymes, riddles, and superstitions. And a good proportion of the jokes in oral circulation involve sex or scatology. If the history of folklore aspires to be a history of the human mind, as some of its practitioners insist, somebody has to do the irksome job of collecting and recording obscene, disgusting, and blasphemous jokes, and ushering them into print.

Although we think of the joke as a cultural constant, it is a form of humor that comes and goes with the rise and fall of civilizations. What distinguishes the joke from the mere humorous tale is that it climaxes in a punch line--a little verbal explosion set off by a sudden switch in meaning. A joke, unlike a tale, wants to be brief. As Freud observed, it says what it has to say not just in few words but in too few words. The classic joke proceeds with arrowlike swiftness, resolving its matter in the form of a two-liner ("Hear about the bulimic stag party? The cake came out of the girl") or even a one-liner ("I was so ugly when I was born, the doctor slapped my mother"). Often, it is signalled by a formulaic setup, which might itself, in turn, become the subject of a meta-joke ("A priest, a rabbi, and a minister walk into a bar. Bartender says, 'What is this, a joke?' ").

Joking is sometimes said to have been invented by Palamedes, the hero of Greek legend who outwitted Odysseus on the eve of the Trojan War. But since this proverbially ingenious fellow is also credited with inventing numbers, the alphabet, lighthouses, dice, and the practice of eating meals at regular intervals, the claim should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt. In the Athens of Demosthenes, there was a comedians' club called the Group of Sixty, which met in the temple of Heracles to trade wisecracks, and it is said that Philip of Macedon paid handsomely to have ...