NO LAUGHING MATTER: RATIONALE OF THE DIRTY JOKE, 2ND SERIES by G. LEGMAN 992 pages. Breaking Point. $18.
Have you heard the one about the dog with a bucket of hot water who chased two people riding on a tandem bicycle? Do you know why Lucky Pierre is a sui generis joke in English-language humor, or why the gag whose punchline is "Don't make any waves" is one of America's favorites?
These jokes, plus 2,000 others, plus answers to questions most readers have never dared to consider, can be found in Gershon Legman's obsessive—and useful—collection of sexual and scatological humor. The first 811-page volume by the world's leading scholar on the subject was published in 1968 (Grove Press). Bound in nursery-blue covers, the book is suitable for mixed company. Volume II is clad in outhouse brown and concentrates on what Legman calls the "nasty nasties," divided under the headings Homosexuality, Prostitution, Sex and Money, Disease and Disgust, Castration, Dysphemism and Insults.
Libidinous Filth. Out of their locker-room context, where hidden anxieties and hostilities trip the giggle reflex, the jokes are not at all funny. Even to Legman they are shocking. "The book is full of material so disgusting that it will make any decent, clean, healthy person want to throw up," he declares. Why then did he spend 41 years collecting and writing the text that accompanies these Augean sweepings of the human psyche? Legman tells us that he began his harvest as a teen-ager in Scranton, Pa., where he was born in 1918. "I got myself in the habit," he recalls, "to top my own father, a notable teller of tales." The psychoanalytically inclined may draw their own conclusions. But it is fairly clear that Legman enjoys a magnificent case of outraged moralism and is trying to housebreak his readers by rubbing their noses in libidinous filth.
As editor of Neurotica, a daring little Freudian quarterly of the late '40s. Legman published his polemical essays attacking violence in comic books. He was an early critic of censorship that allows children to watch dramatizations of murder and mayhem but prevents them from seeing people making love. Lenny Bruce frequently goaded his nightclub audiences with the same point. Legman, never one to be upstaged by a comic, now claims authorship of the slogan "Make Love Not War."
The Neurotica essays were later published together as Love and Death, which has had considerable influence on many social and literary critics, most notably Leslie Fiedler (Love and Death in the American Novel). But Legman is no advocate of the so-called new freedom. The sex practiced in Last Tango in Paris revolted him no less than the plastic horrors of Jaws.
Back in the early '50s, the U.S. Post Office found Love and Death obscene and refused to deliver mail to Legman's Bronx home—a small, rundown cottage furnished ceiling to floor with books and cats. Shortly thereafter, he and his wife packed their belongings, including one of the world's largest private collections of erotic and scatological literature, and moved to France. Since the death of his wife in 1966, he has remarried and fathered three children. The Legman home is on fifteen acres in Valbonne.
Legman has remained in Europe, with the exception of a misspent year teaching at the San Diego campus of the