No Laughing Matter: An Anaylsis of Sexual Humor (review)

reviews 133 and reliable vademecum, one with enough passion and defiance to match its subject. JOAN ESPOSITO No Laughing Matter: An Anaylsis ofSexual Humor by G. Legman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. 2 vols., 992 pp. $37.50 per volume. G. Legman has been collecting for half a century and claims to have reintroduced to popular culture the famous slogan from Greek antiquity, "Make Love Not War." He argues that the dirty joke succeeds the ritual telling of bawdy stories in the pre-modern days of Maypoles and Fertility Festivals. The memory is old, and strong. On a hillside in Cerne Abbe, England, can be found scratched the outline of a giant with a large, erect penis. The provincial natives, Christians for at least a millenium, have nevertheless trimmed trie brush to keep the giant visible all this time, and until a couple generations ago infertile women went up to sleep (or make love) on a crucial spot. Hundreds of other such figures, gods and goddesses once considered Roman but likely much older, may be hidden in the surrounding countryside. The remnant that we have" of the Old Ways, adds Legman, "is strange and misshapen, more often monstrously repellent." No raconteur will ever out-collect Legman, at least in the English language. A mere selection , he assures us, these nearly thousand pages contain four or five times that many gags. When Grove Press first published the volumes as The Rationale ofthe Dirty Joke in 1967 and 1975, they must have seemed like a dignified presentation of The Forbidden. Now in the university press format, Legman's pleas to understanding ("the book has been written almost as often in tears as in laughter") become nearly a martyr's lament, documents appended . Legman has carried his mental notebook through endless bars, bedrooms and beer joints, and what credit has he ever received? A slot as bibliographer for the Kinsey Institute , editorship of journals with names like Neurotica and Kryptadia, and a lot of mixed reviews by the prestige press. Legman sees most humor as a form of domination. The sadistic origins of modern pornography are crystal clear in those sailor's jokes which end with the wife being told, "Better sweep around the house when I'm gone because when I'm on leave you'll spend all your time staring at the ceiling." Where's the joke? Laughs, love and anything resembling even recognizable male eros have been banished as if by design. The woman as flesh-lined knothole looks to Legman like the witch facing the old dunking torture—if they drown (inanimate victims) they are innocent, if they swim (respond aggressively, as in vagina dentata), they demonstrate their evil nature. "Will the ladies present please cross their legs?" asks the country preacher, "and now that the gates of hell have been closed, I can proceed with my sermon." Legman rightly interprets the contemporary van sticker's message to prospective female hitchhikers—"Grass, Gas or Ass, Nobody Rides Free"—as another in the variations on the same old theme. Some humor. Legman takes great pains to elucidate the details. No Laughing Matter documents, for instance, the remarkable fear and consequent loathing of female genitals ("how can something which feels so good look so lousy?" from a favorite tag-line). Are the initials "V.D." any more of a coincidence than the christening of Sudden Death Syndrome initially as "SDS"? And there's the castration fear of deflowering a virgin, among still other forms of male hysteria. How deeply these impulses have shaped our ostensibly unerotic, average work- and play-time, we can scarcely imagine. Legman dredges up some fascinating hints from popular culture. In the classic 40s Western Annie Get Your Gun, a sharpshooting cowgirl can win her man only by having the end of her rifle clipped so that she will misfire 134 the minnesota review at the common target. Safe penetration presumably assured, she can ride off into the sunset of vaginal orgasm. Needless to say, non-whites and ethnics generally suffer also, if in a distinctively different symbolic manner. When the husband tries out techniques his black friend has suggested, and his wife responds with surprise, "Where...