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University of California in 1964-65. His principal subject was folklore, but his favorite activity seems to have been creating the Legend of Gershon Legman. "The kids would space out, disappear," he says. "I used to burn bonfires of pot in a living-room grate. The campus was rotten with drugs. At one stage, I got banned from speaking to the students because I ran two courses called Orgasm I and Orgasm II. They were about literature. If it had been Violence I and II, there would have been no problem."
Pocked Dignity. Legman's revenge was Fake Revolt (1967), an overheated assault on the youth rebellion. "COOL," he concluded, "is the new venereal disease." Despite such desert-prophet eruptions, Legman's scholarship continued. The Limerick is a massive accumulation of the world's most suggestive examples. The Horn Book contains studies in erotic folklore. The Guilt of the Templars is about heresy and sexual perversion in the medieval order of the Knights Templar. Ora genitalism is an elegantly written and anything but smutty study subtitled "Oral Techniques in Genital Excitation." Legman is also an authority on origami, which is not a sexual technique but the gentle Japanese art of paper folding.
It is as the Diderot of the dirty joke that Legman will be best remembered, although Rationale contains enough ravings against the inauthenticities of popular culture to earn him another title —the Carrie Nation of kitsch. He is also the Joe McCarthy of heterosexuality who looks for gays under every bed, a man who professes to love woman but whose opinions reveal a lover of the Vic torian idea of Woman, and a Jeremiah who sees the world ending in nuclear war or a fecal flood of pollution.
Throughout Rationale, Legman is concerned with a transcendent purity every bit as excessive and unattainable as the perfect body cleanliness of the deodorant-happy culture he abhors. His views on the psychological roots of dirty jokes, while delivered with ingenuity, verve and color (Legman will always call a spade a goddam shovel), belong to the Freudian orthodoxy as laid down by the master in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905).
Trying to be more Freudian than Sigmund, Legman plays many varia tions on his single theme: smut springs from unconscious fears and rages and is usually directed by males against females. His illustrations on the war be tween the sexes range from the earliest skirmishes to a cocktail-party confrontation: a beautiful woman propositions a man. "My place or yours?" he asks.
"If it's going to be such a hassle for you," she replies, "forget it."
Rationale of the Dirty Joke is an un deniable presence, a work of majestic ego that was weathered by new attitudes and ideas long before completion. In the future, it will be plundered, measured and thumbed through for titillation. But the book will remain impervious in all its pocked dignity, authenticity and embattled romanticism.