From The New Yorker

The Punch Line, by Jim Holt
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 “zoöphily.” 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. Doucé], 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 Nicolaidès, and published after his sudden and mysterious death as the opening volume of a series imitating Kryptádia: “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 their jokes written down; but the volume, if it ever existed, has been lost. On the Roman side, Plautus refers to jestbooks in a couple of his plays, while Suetonius tells us that Melissus, a favorite professor of the Emperor Augustus, compiled no fewer than a hundred and fifty joke anthologies. Despite this, only a single jokebook survives from ancient times: the Philogelos, or “Laughter-Lover,” a collection in Greek that was probably put together in the fourth or fifth century A.D. It contains two hundred and sixty-four items, several of which appear twice, in slightly different form. This suggests that the volume is not one jokebook but two combined, a hunch borne out by the fact that it is attributed to two authors, Hierocles and Philagrius, although joint authorship was rare at the time. Virtually nothing is known about either man; there is some scholarly speculation that the Hierocles in question was a fifth-century Alexandrian philosopher of that name who was once publicly flogged in Constantinople for paganism, which, as one classicist has observed, “might have given him a taste for mordant wit.”

The jokes in the Philogelos are spare and pointed. (“‘How shall I cut your hair?’ a talkative barber asked a wag. ‘In silence!’”) They take on a gallery of stock characters: the drunk, the miser, the braggart, the sex-starved woman, and the man with bad breath, as well as a classic type known as the scholastikos, variously translated as “pedant,” “absent-minded professor,” or “egghead.” (“An egghead was on a sea voyage when a big storm blew up, causing his slaves to weep in terror. ‘Don’t cry,’ he consoled them, ‘I have freed you all in my will.’”) Some of the jokes are now more cryptic than funny, perhaps because of lost undertones. A couple of jokes about lettuce, for example, might have struck a Roman audience as hilarious, given their belief that lettuce leaves, variously, promoted or impeded sexual function. But others, like No. 263 (lifted from Plutarch), would not be out of place at a Friars Club meeting: “‘I had your wife for nothing,’ someone sneered at a wag. ‘More fool you. I’m her husband, I have to have the ugly bitch. You don’t.’” The most haunting joke in the Philogelos, however, is No. 114, about a resident of Abdera, a Greek town whose citizens were renowned for their foolishness: “Seeing a eunuch, an Abderite asked him how many children he had. The eunuch replied that he had none, since he lacked the means of reproduction. Retorted the Abderite . . .” The rest is missing from the surviving text, which goes to show the strange potency of unheard punch lines.

The Philogelos was misplaced during the Dark Ages, and with it, seemingly, the art of the joke. Sophisticated humor was kept alive in the Arab world, where the more leisurely folktale was cultivated. During the centuries of Arab conquest, folktales from the Levant, many of them satirical or erotic, made their way through Spain and Italy. An Arab tale about a wife who is pleasured by her lover while her duped husband watches uncomprehendingly from a tree, for instance, is one of several that later show up in Boccaccio’s “Decameron.” Once in Europe, the folktale began to cleave in two. On the one hand, with the invention of printing and the rise of literacy, it grew longer, filling out into the chivalric romance and, ultimately, the novel. On the other hand, as the pace of urban life quickened, it got shorter in its oral form, shedding details and growing more formulaic as it condensed into the humorous anecdote. It was in the early Renaissance that the art of the joke was reborn, and the midwife was a man called Poggio.

Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) was one of the most colorful and versatile of the Italian humanists. A secretary to eight Popes over a half century, he fathered fourteen children with a mistress before taking, at the age of fifty-five, a beautiful eighteen-year-old bride, who bore him another six children. His career coincided with a turbulent era in Church history. During the Great Schism, there were two and sometimes three competing Popes, and councils had to be called to restore unity. Poggio was a passionate bibliophile, and he profited from the disorder, travelling throughout Europe in search of lost works of ancient literature. From the dungeons of remote medieval monasteries he rescued precious manuscripts that had been rotting into oblivion, and laboriously deciphered and copied them. It is thanks to him that we have Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, as well as many of the orations of Cicero, the architectural writings of Vitruvius, and Apicius’ works on cooking. Not only was Poggio the greatest book-hunter of his era; he also wielded one of its wickedest pens, satirizing the vices of the clergy and lambasting rival scholars in his Ciceronian Latin. “In his invective he displayed such vehemence that the whole world was afraid of him,” a contemporary observed. A skilled calligrapher, Poggio invented the prototype of the roman font. As chancellor of the Republic of Florence after his retirement from the Curia, he became that city’s biographer. Yet, for all these accomplishments, Poggio ended up being best known for a book of jokes.

The Liber Facetiarum, usually called simply the Facetiae, was the first volume of its kind to be published in Europe. In this collection of two hundred and seventy-three items—jests, bons mots, puns, and humorous anecdotes—the expansive Arab-Italian novella can be seen turning into the swift facezia. Some of the material had been gathered by Poggio during his travels through Europe; several of the jests have been traced to tales told by Provençal bards in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But much of it came out of a sort of joke club in the Vatican called the Bugiale—the “fib factory.” Here, papal scribes would gather at the end of a tedious day spent drafting bulls, dispensations, and encyclicals to shoot the breeze and tell scandalous stories. Poggio published his Facetiae in 1451, when he was seventy years old. Soon it was being read throughout Europe. Although many of the jokes were about sex and poked fun at the morals of churchmen, not a word of condemnation was heard from the Vatican. Presumably, since the Facetiae were written in Latin, they could be savored by the clerical class without corrupting the morals of the masses. Later commentators, however, were not so broad-minded. In 1802, the Reverend William Shepherd, the author of the only biography of Poggio in English, expressed his shock that “an apostolic secretary who enjoyed the friendship and esteem of the pontiff, should have published a number of stories which outrage the laws of decency, and put modesty to the blush.”

Copies of the Facetiae are not easy to come by today. The only thing I could find in the library of New York University was a photocopied facsimile of an 1878 Paris edition that was the first unexpurgated translation of Poggio’s book into French (even then, the really bawdy bits were left in Latin). Reading through it, I was struck by the familiarity of the themes. There are fat jokes, drunk jokes, erection jokes, and fart jokes. There is a joke about a guy tricked into drinking urine which would not have been out of place in “American Pie.” In Facetia XLVII, a husband asks his wife why, if women and men get equal pleasure out of sex, it is the men who pursue the women rather than vice versa. “It’s obvious,” the wife says. “We women are always ready to make love, and you men aren’t. What good would it do us to solicit you when you’re not in the mood?” As jokes go, this is less than sidesplitting, and yet the precise reversal of it appears in the television show “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” when Cheryl, lying in bed with her husband, Larry, asks him why she’s the one who always has to initiate sex. It’s because we men are always ready to go, he replies—just tap me on the shoulder when you want it!

By modern standards, Poggio’s Facetiae are invariably too long, and he has a regrettable tendency to preëmpt the punch line with an explanation, as in Facetia XXVI: “The abbot of Septimo, an extremely corpulent man, was travelling toward Florence one evening. On the road he asked a peasant, ‘Do you think I’ll be able to make it through the city gate?’ He was talking about whether he would be able to make it to the city before the gates were closed. The peasant, jesting on the abbot’s fatness, said, ‘Why, if a cart of hay can make it through, you can, too!’” Nor are the Facetiae often very funny, at least when abstracted from the presumably chucklesome atmosphere of the Bugiale and set down in cold print. Nonetheless, by collecting and publishing them, Poggio set the precedent for a slew of later jestbooks, most of which shamelessly plundered his.

William Caxton, England’s first printer of books, padded his own translation of Aesop, in 1484, with a sampling of Poggio’s jokes, thus creating the earliest jestbook in English. By Shakespeare’s time, jestbooks had become extremely popular. “I had my good wit out of the ‘Hundred Merry Tales,’” Beatrice declares in “Much Ado About Nothing,” referring to a popular collection of the day. Many of the items in these Tudor and Elizabethan jestbooks are artlessly scatological; for example, “What is the most cleanliest leaf among all other leaves? It is holly leaves, for nobody will wipe his arse with them.” Many more are scarcely jokes at all. Instead of racing toward a punch line, they simply describe some prank, typically played by a wife on her husband, or illustrate a moral. (Preachers frequently inserted jests into sermons to keep their congregations from falling asleep.) Another nudge was needed to finish what Poggio had started: the making of the humorous tale into the joke. It came at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when—possibly because of a confusion with another classical writer called Hierocles—twenty-eight of the Philogelos jokes were appended to an edition of his “Commentary on the Golden Words of Pythagoras.” The jokes were soon circulating in print throughout Europe.

Thanks to the popularity of the rediscovered Philogelos jokes, English humor got shorter and punchier—that is to say, jokier. The change shows up in “Joe Miller’s Jests,” the most enduringly popular of the new generation of jokebooks that began to flourish in the Georgian era. The book was named after a famous London comic actor, although he was not responsible for its publication and had died the year before. First published in 1739, it went through so many editions that a “Joe Miller” came to mean a stale joke.

The original edition contained everything from jokes about the fractured logic of Irishmen and bad breath (“A Lady being asked how she liked a Gentleman’s Singing, who had a very stinking Breath, the Words are good, said she, but the Air is intolerable”) to bawdy plays on the word “cock” and ribaldry at the expense of loose women (“A Gentleman said of a young Wench who constantly ply’d about the Temple, that if she had as much Law in her Head, as she had in her Tail, she would be one of the ablest Counsel in England”). The bluer material, however, did not survive the subsequent wave of prudery in Anglo-Saxon culture. In the early nineteenth century, around the time that Thomas Bowdler removed the indelicate bits from Shakespeare, jokebooks also got cleaned up. Little of Poggio could have made it into the expurgated columns of humor magazines like Punch. But the dirty joke lived on in oral culture until it was restored to print, in all its repulsive splendor, by Gershon Legman, in the nineteen-sixties.

Legman, I noticed in my decrepit copy of “Rationale of the Dirty Joke,” had dedicated the volume “To the Manes”—shade—“of Poggio Bracciolini, Lover of Books, Folk-Humor, and Women.” Did he feel some deep affinity with the mischievous Italian humanist? People who knew of Legman—he seems to have left behind a cult following—tell the most outlandish stories: that he created the sixties slogan “Make Love, Not War”; that he had an affair with Anaïs Nin and enlisted her help to write dollar-a-page pornography to order for a rich Oklahoma “collector”; that he was behind the invention of the vibrating dildo; that he introduced origami to the West; that he left the United States to escape government persecution, taking refuge in a hill town on the French Riviera, where he lived a hand-to-mouth existence in a dilapidated castle that had once belonged to the Knights Templar.

On investigation, most of this turned out to be at least partly true. (We have to take Legman’s own word on the dildo and the slogan.) Legman was born in 1917 into a Jewish family in the coal country of Pennsylvania. He started collecting jokes early, clipping them from magazines and filing them by theme. After high school, he went to New York, where he educated himself in several languages; his university, he said, was the New York Public Library. At the age of twenty-three, he published his first book, “Oragenitalism,” under the pseudonym Roger-Maxe de la Glannège (an anagram of his given name, George Alexander Legman). It bore the subtitle “An Encyclopaedic Outline of Oral Technique in Genital Excitation, Part I, Cunnilinctus.” (Legman later explained that he lacked the courage to do the research for fellatio.) At the time, writing a treatise on oral sex was deemed as dangerous as political sedition. When his publisher’s office was raided, Legman briefly fled the state. On his return to New York, he worked as an erotic-book hunter for the sexologist Alfred Kinsey and inhabited the disreputable fringes of the city’s literary world, where smut-peddlers were sometimes indistinguishable from avant-garde publishers of Joyce, Lawrence, and Henry Miller.

Legman, however, was more of a moralist than a pornographer. In the late nineteen-forties, he wrote “Love and Death,” a fierce polemic, which argued that violence was the true pornography. Why, he asked, should children be exposed to relentless depictions of violence but shielded from those of lovemaking? “At least sex is normal,” he wrote. “Is murder?” Legman published the book himself, shipping copies to customers by post from his three-room cottage in the Bronx. Although “Love and Death” was a tirade against censorship, not a piece of erotica, the United States Postal Service authorities accused its author-publisher of sending “indecent, vulgar and obscene materials” through the mail, and cut off his deliveries. Disgusted, Legman left the country, with his wife, for France. They bought a small piece of land on the Riviera with an olive grove and an old building (which was indeed on the site of a Knights Templar castle) that became a repository for his vast collection of rare volumes and his crates of index cards covered with limericks, jokes, and what he called “pissoir epigraphs.”

Legman was a handsome man, with thick dark hair, blue eyes, and a strong nose; because of chronic poverty, he was typically dressed in threadbare clothes with a length of rope for a belt. Friends describe him as tetchy and difficult, but exhilarating to be around. Academics were put off by this autodidact from the murky demimonde, whose rambling prose was full of marginal jeremiads. Legman, in turn, was disdainful of folklorists with Ph.D.s, whom he called “Phudniks” and “cacademics.” Yet, by freely making available to them materials that academic journals were afraid to publish, he helped establish erotic folklore as a respectable subject for scholarly study.

Reading through Legman’s vast compilation of dirty jokes is a punishing experience, like being trapped in the men’s room of a Greyhound bus station of the nineteen-fifties. And the jokes in “Rationale of the Dirty Joke” are what Legman deemed the “clean” dirty jokes, arranged by such relatively innocent themes as “the nervous bride,” “phallic brag,” and “water wit.” In 1975 he published a second fat volume, “No Laughing Matter,” which contained the “dirty” dirty jokes—nearly a thousand pages of jokes about anal sadism, venereal disease, and worse. Legman’s avowed purpose was not to amuse the reader or furnish him with material for the locker room; he saw his work as a serious psychoanalytic study, one that would disclose the “infinite aggressions” behind jokes, mainly of men against women.

Legman spent three and a half decades collecting the jokes in these volumes—transcribing some sixty thousand variants on index cards, arranging them by type and motif, and tracing them from country to country and culture to culture, back to the time of Poggio and beyond. They were culled not only from written sources but also from the field: parlor, beer joint, bedroom, and public lavatory. (Many of the jokes are tagged by year and place of discovery: “Idaho 1932,” “Penna. 1949.”) The result was, by his own account, a vast “decorative showcase” of anxiety, repression, and neurosis, a magnum opus written “almost as often in tears as in laughter.” What drove him to this singular labor? According to one friend, he saw himself “as the keeper of the deepest subcellar in the burning Alexandria Library of the age; the subcellar of our secret desires, which no one else was raising so much as a finger to preserve.”

But Legman must have suspected that he also had a subconscious stake in his massive dirty-joke project. As a lay analyst, he believed that “jokes are essentially an unveiling of the joke-teller’s own neuroses and compulsions, and his guilts about these.” An enthusiasm for a certain species of joke can be revealing in ways the enthusiast might not fully appreciate. Take the dead-baby jokes that were popular in the United States a few decades ago (“What’s red and swings? A baby on a meat hook,” and so on). If you were one of the teen-agers who used to tell such jokes, it might conceivably have had something to do with murderous impulses arising from sibling rivalry. Even parents could see the humor; after all, babies are such a lot of bother. Although “sick jokes” of this sort lay outside Gershon Legman’s purview, he did make slightly puzzled reference to them, mentioning a “Dr. Dundes” as an authority.

Alan Dundes is a folklorist at the University of California at Berkeley, reverentially known there as the “Joke Professor.” Dundes is the academy’s most assiduous collector of jokes, the heir to Poggio and Legman. In the past five decades, he has produced several analytical collections of humor, notably “Cracking Jokes” (1987). He has also written or co-authored many articles in folklore journals on specific joke themes, with titles like “Here I Sit: A Study of American Latrinalia” (toilet jokes); “Arse Longa, Vita Brevis” (aids jokes); “First Prize: Fifteen Years” (dissident jokes from Eastern Europe—the title is the punch line to the setup “Did you hear about the joke contest in Bucharest?”); and even a study of jokes about Gary Hart, “Six Inches from the Presidency”—which, he told me with some amusement when I reached him by phone in Berkeley, has just been translated into Russian.

Dundes was fascinated with jokes as a boy growing up in the suburbs of New York City. His father, an attorney, would return home from the city each evening with a few jokes he had picked up while playing bridge on the commuter train out of Grand Central, and tell them over dinner. As a graduate student at Yale, Dundes took a course in poetry with Cleanth Brooks and became interested in Yeats’s use of Celtic mythology. This led him to the study of folklore, then an academically marginal field. In 1962, he obtained his Ph.D. from Indiana University, where, as a course requirement, candidates had to submit a hundred items of folklore that they had collected and analyzed. Dundes turned in a lot of jokes.

“Before then, it had never occurred to me to analyze the jokes I collected,” he told me. “But Vladimir Propp’s ‘Morphology of the Folktale’ had just come out in English”—he was referring to the 1928 work that identified thirty-one narrative elements which constitute the underlying structure of Russian fairy tales—“and I thought, Hey, this is a great methodology for jokes. So I was early to hop on the structuralist bandwagon.” But Dundes was also a Freudian, and remains one, “even in these days of Freud-bashing.” Freud himself was an industrious collector of Jewish jokes and considered them deeply significant. Although his collection was most likely destroyed in one of his periodic manuscript-burning sessions, some two hundred jokes, tales, puns, and riddles appear in his 1905 book “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.” Dundes was greatly influenced by this seminal work, which likens jokes to dreams. (Both involve the condensation and displacement of meanings, the representation of things by their opposites, the triumph of fallacy over logic—all to outwit the inner censor.) “Some people believe jokes and nursery rhymes and fairy tales are just harmless little stories that don’t mean anything,” Dundes told me. “But they’re not meaningless. And they’re not necessarily harmless, either.”

I could not resist posing the tiresome but still mysterious question: Where do jokes come from? “There are two classic theories about the origin of jokes,” Dundes said. “One is that they come from stockbrokers, who have time on their hands between sales and a communications network to send jokes around. The other theory is that they are made up by prisoners, who have a lot of spare time and a captive audience.” He added, “Lately, these two theories have merged.”

But the romantic ideal of individual creation seems inadequate when it comes to jokes. “The classic ones get told over and over again in updated dress,” Dundes noted. “A good example is one that I first heard about Richard Nixon. So Nixon’s taking a walk around the White House grounds one winter day when he comes across the words ‘I hate Tricky Dick’ written in urine in the snow. He tells the Secret Service to investigate. A week later, they come back to him and say, ‘Well, Mr. President, we’ve analyzed the urine, and it turns out to be Secretary Kissinger’s. But we’ve also analyzed the handwriting, and it’s the First Lady’s.’” Dundes heard the same joke during the Clinton years, with Kissinger and Pat Nixon replaced by Al Gore and Hillary, or even Chelsea. Indeed, versions of it go back to the Ozark mountain culture of the eighteen-nineties. “People on the Internet today have no idea that the jokes they’re trading are hundreds of years old,” he said.

Folklorists are fond of the idea that jokes don’t get invented; they evolve. As Legman put it, “Nobody ever tells jokes for the first time.” Consider the following joke, current in mid-twentieth-century America, about an impecunious couple who marry for love. Since there is nothing for breakfast in the morning, the husband instead has sex with his wife on the kitchen table before going off to work and also when he returns home for lunch. Coming back famished in the evening, the husband finds his wife sitting in the kitchen with her panties down and her feet up on the oven door. “Just warming up your supper, darling,” she says. This jest can be traced back to a late-eighteenth-century Scottish rhyme titled “The Supper Is Na Ready,” and from there almost two centuries earlier to a 1618 French collection of libertine poetry (“Mais le souper n’est pas encore cuit”), and ultimately to the Philogelos: “Said a young man to his randy wife, ‘Wife, what shall we do, eat or make love?’‘Whichever you like; there’s no bread.’” This may be the longest joke lineage ever established, reaching back some fifteen centuries. It is the labor of the great joke collectors—a few brilliant, polymathic, and sometimes eccentric men—that has made us aware of such continuities in the nether regions of civilization. Some have piggybacked on the work of earlier collectors; others have added analyses or rhetorical flourishes. But Poggio remains the most important of them, the man who reintroduced the lost classical art of the joke to Western culture.

After Poggio’s death, the people of Florence entombed him with much pomp in the Church of Santa Croce. Donatello was commissioned to make a statue of him, which was installed in the façade of the Duomo. A century later, in 1569, some alterations were undertaken in the cathedral, and Poggio’s statue was removed from its original position and placed in a grouping of the Twelve Apostles. There the first modern joke collector can be found, timelessly keeping company with martyrs and evangelists.