Funny Peculiar

Gershon Legman and the Psychopathology of Humor

Mikita Brottman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781138176249
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135890872
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Emotions in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Why are jokes funny? Why do we laugh? In Funny Peculiar, Mikita Brottman demurs from recent scholarship that takes laughter-- and the broader domain of humor and the comical--as a liberating social force and an endearing aspect of self-expression. For Brottman, there is nothing funny about laughter, which is less connected to mirth and feelings of good will than to a nexus of darker emotions: fear, aggression, shame, anxiety.

Brottman rethinks not only the mechanisms of humor but also the relation of humor to the body and the senses. To this end, she provides an engrossing account of the life and work of Gershon Legman, exiled author, publisher, and sexologist, Alfred Kinsey's first bibliographer, and legendary compiler of the dirty joke. Like Freud, Legman was convinced of the impossibility of understanding humor apart from sex, and Brottman shows how his two massive works on the subject, Rationale of the Dirty Joke and No Laughing Matter, provide a framework for understanding the ambivalent and often hostile impulses that underlie the comic impulse in its various guises. In lively and enlivening chapters, she traverses dirty jokes, the figure of the "evil clown" in popular culture, the current popularity of "humor therapy," changing fashions in stand-up comedy, and the connection between humor and horror. Brottman's sparkling prose, laced with wit, does not obscure the seriousness of Funny Peculiar. It is a thoughtful and wide-ranging elaboration of the Freudian claim that joking, in point of fact, is no laughing matter.

CHAPTER 1

Legitimizing Legman

George Alexander Legman was the only son of Emil and Julia Legman, a pair of working-class, Jewish-Hungarian immigrants who arrived in the United States just after the turn of the century and settled in the bleak industrial town of Scranton, Pennsylvania. The extended Legman family remained in Europe; most of them were killed during World War II. George was born on November 2, 1917, and it was his mother, Julia, who started calling him Gershon rather than George—a name he never used, except in the form of an anagram. Gershon was the only boy out of four children, and his parents originally hoped he would train as a rabbi. To their dismay, however, their son proved rather more interested in the flesh than in the spirit.

Legman claimed that one of his earliest childhood memories was making friends with a pair of eight-year-old nonidentical twins, Merry and Sherry, who lived for a while in the house next door. Since their mother went out to work, young Gershon and this precocious little pair had lots of opportunity for sexual experience, and this, claimed Legman in a letter to Christine Hoffmann, the daughter of a colleague, was his introduction to the world of erotic possibilities. “We invented—or thought we invented—both the ‘69’ and the ‘daisy-chain,’” he recalled, “and when, about five years later, I learned that we were not the inventors and that other people had figured it out too, I responded to this shock to my pride by determining to learn as much as I could about sex and sexual science” (Legman to Christine Hoffmann, February 9, 1976, Alfred Kinsey Collection).

Legman’s father, a butcher by trade, was, claimed Legman, a stern and disapproving man, a “terrible prude.” He was also, perhaps not coincidentally, a notable teller of dirty tales, whose lewd stories the young Gershon would often strive to top. To this end, Legman recalled, he began collecting samples of his fellow high school students’ slang for sex acts and sex organs, as well as their jokes, swear words, songs, recitations, Johnny-told-the-teacher stories, and flytings or “dozens” (ritualized mock-insults that Legman—with the arrogance of a colonial explorer—claimed to have been “the first white person to encounter—among young Negro boys in New York early in World War II”). He also started clipping out the jokes from the Literary Digest, pasting them on both sides of pieces of paper, and then arranging them in files according to subject.

An older sister who collected examples in a small way first introduced Gershon to erotica in the form of a volume of Havelock Ellis, which their understanding, unshockable mother allowed to be stored with other forbidden books on the floor of her closet. Whenever he wanted to look at one of these volumes, claimed Legman, he first needed to crawl his way through a scented, ruffled forest of feminine underwear. One day, sitting among his mother’s panties and leafing through his sister’s volumes of Havelock Ellis, he was struck by a number of references to the work of a Dr. Friedrich Krauss. This was a familiar name. In fact, Krauss was the uncle of his mother, Julia Friedman, and had long been known to Gershon as his Great Uncle Fritz, well-established in Legman family lore as another remarkable storyteller, although Gershon and Krauss had never met. A prisoner in Nazi Germany during the 1930s, when Legman first came across his work, Krauss was the editor of two enormous series of erotic folklore published between 1880 and 1910—Anthropophytéia (The Sexual Relations of Mankind), and Kryptádia (Secret Things), a journal later edited by Freud.

At a very young age, Gershon was sent by his father to work as a breaker-boy in a Pennsylvania colliery. Unhappy with this job, and not particularly close to his family, he left home with his mother’s blessing at the age of 16 and set out—as he put it—“on the road” as a “tramp kid” in the “cruel and dangerous world of semi-criminal men and sadistic cops” (Legman to Christine Hoffmann, February 9, 1976). In this dark and noxious underworld, Legman began his lifetime’s work of field collecting, picking up every new or old example of lewd story, dirty joke, or sexual slang term he could find.

Despite a well-circulated anecdote about his being thrown out of the University of Pennsylvania during his first semester for stealing a typewriter, Legman never had the benefit of a college education. He spent a few months at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor but quickly dropped out and made his way to New York, whose public library he often fondly referred to as “my only university.” He recalled that the first books he requested to see upon arriving at 42nd Street were Friedrich Krauss’s 44 volumes of Anthropophytéia and Kryptádia. He remembered being allowed to read those volumes for a brief time until the librarians discovered his age (he was still under 18) and took the offending books away from him. But Legman had already seen enough to confirm his suspicion: Krauss and his contributors had collected examples of erotic humor and folklore from almost every culture and language in the world—except English. As a result, Legman decided that his whole life’s work would be “to collect all the similar material in English, and to publish it, which I have been doing (on and off) from that day” (Legman to Christine Hoffmann, February 9, 1976).

In his early days in New York, Legman made his living from bits and pieces of hack writing: anonymous detective stories with titles like The Poisoned Enema, and The Beaten Bride, comedy scripts for radio, rewrites of theater plays, custom-written pornography, ghost written speeches and “autobiographies.” He spent much of his time cowriting a series of erotic stories commissioned privately by an oil millionaire from Oklahoma, who apparently wanted follow-up sequels to his favorite novel, An Oxford Thesis on Love by Lupton Wilkinson, which was circulated in New York in mimeographed form in 1938. Allegedly, this mysterious gentleman needed a constant supply of sequels as material for masturbation, since each one satisfied him only once, upon first reading. The group of writers and illustrators included, along with Legman, Gene Fowler, Anaïs Nin, Clara Tice, Clement Wood, Jack Hanley, Bernard Wolfe, and Robert Sewall. A number of these sequels, known as the Oxford Professor novels, have since been published (Legman and Sewall, 1971a, b; Sewall, 1981).

Eventually, Legman found more stable work as a medical researcher (“amanuensis,” as he descibed it) for Dr. Robert Latou Dickinson, head of the American College of Gynecology and the National Committee on Maternal Health, which later merged with the better known Planned Parenthood program. Dickinson was a retired gynecologist who had begun a second career as a sex researcher and had become the medical profession’s most influential advocate of birth control. He led the crusade to persuade doctors to make birth control available to their patients and, owing to his medical specialty, had a special interest in women’s issues. He was also a committed Christian who tried to combine the roles of doctor and marriage counselor. Convinced that a healthy sex life was the key to a happy marriage, he went about educating the public about sex and encouraging the attitude that sex was healthy and good for you. According to Legman, Dickinson was not only “cheap as cat meat” (Legman to Paul Gebhard, April 3, 1959, Alfred Kinsey Collection), but also a plagiarist, renowned for passing off other people’s work as his own, including that of the sculptor Abram Belskie, whose birth-of-a-baby models, claimed Legman, Dickinson signed with his own name for many years.¹

Each day, after finishing work with Dickinson, Legman spent his evenings in the New York Public Library, and left when the library closed at 10:00 P.M. He grabbed a sandwich and a piece of pie in one of the lunchrooms under the elevated train tracks on Sixth Avenue behind the library. In his second volume on dirty jokes, No Laughing Matter, Legman (1975) reveals that on one such evening he was accosted by a stranger “with a Germanic British accent” who approached him in the middle of Bryant Park and offered him $5.00—quickly upped to $7.50 (“rather high for a prostitute of either sex, in the worst years of the Depression”)—if Legman would go home with him for a night of “flatophilia” (fartsmelling). Legman declined the offer, but it was all grist for the sexologist’s mill. Legman (1975) describes this incident when discussing the jokes people tell about such activities, which are, as he explains, “rationalizations, under the mask of humor, of a perverted reality that people who accidentally come in contact with would prefer to laugh about than have to take in all its ugly seriousness” (p. 885).

From 1935 until 1937, Legman lived in a small cellar in Brooklyn, in the home of bookseller Rubin Bresler, for whom he worked cataloguing books in exchange for rent; in 1937 he moved to more stable premises, at 50 West 76th Street in Manhattan. Legman’s main personal interest at this time, and his first publication was Oragenitalism, a small volume of “Oral Techniques in Genital Excitation for Gentlemen” (Legman, 1940). His days of daisy-chains with Merry and Sherry were put to good use in this guide for men to performing oral sex on women, including advice about edible lubricants, stimulation techniques, the placement of pillows, and appropriate styles in masculine facial hair. “The beard and the mustache have in common a tendency to sop up the vaginal secretions and, if gray or white, be stained by them,” claims Legman, advising that “the stain will not show in dark, nor—being amber in color—in blond hair” (p. 26).² He also claims that, after use of his manual, “the tongue in particular will have undergone training in rapid vibration … similar to the double-stops used in playing the flute” (p. 26).

The book’s explicit depiction of oral-genital contact and its frank approach to the importance of clitoral stimulation made it difficult for Legman to find a publisher; in 1940, cunnilingus was still considered abnormal and obscene, and this kind of discussion of sexual techniques would have been considered completely taboo, except perhaps in certain medical circles. Potential publishers who looked at the manuscript might also have been disturbed by the book’s tone and style. Quite apart from the author’s tendency to stray from his theme into minor bouts of polemic, Oragenitalism is unique in actually managing to talk elegantly about sex without being clinical, achieving the rare feat—rare in Western culture, anyway—of separating sex talk from medicine.

By 1939, Legman had managed to persuade the publishing firm of J. R. Brussel in New York to take on Oragenitalism, and the book came out in 1940. Jacob Brussel was a smart and energetic antiquarian book dealer well-known for publishing and selling erotica, including legally banned works, from his Ortelius Book Shop and other Fourth Avenue locations in New York City, as well as by mail order. Owing to the controversial nature of the book, Brussel encouraged Legman to use a pseudonym. Indeed, as Legman was soon to discover, in the world of erotica, no one was exactly who he seemed; authors seldom published from a traceable place, and the names and dates of presses and dates of publication were notoriously unreliable. In the end, Oragenitalism was finally published under the authorship of “Roger-Maxe de la Glannège,” an anagram of “George Alexander Legman.” Brussel and Legman put together a mail-order package offered for sale to doctors only; for $25, the discerning physician could purchase Oragenitalism plus a collection of unprintable Norman Douglas limericks and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, which had been published in France but was still banned in the United States. It was quite a deal.

But it was a deal that never took off, since later in the same year, 1940, Jacob Brussel’s bookshop was raided by the police; Brussel’s printer’s plates, stocks of books, pamphlets, and mailing lists were seized and destroyed, and Brussel himself was thrown in jail for the publication of various pieces of contraband erotica, including the underground “Medusa” edition of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Charged under the obscenity laws, he was convicted and sent to prison for three years, and nearly all the remaining unsold copies of the first edition of Oragenitalism were destroyed.³ In such a moral climate, it was hardly surprising that Legman did not have the courage to undertake all the research needed for his second proposed volume on fellatio. Plus, as a heterosexual male, he lacked the detailed knowledge of various techniques in oral stimulation that made the first volume such a special book. But, with outside help from female and homosexual friends, a second, elegantly enlarged and revised edition was published in 1969 (when else?) and “is agreed to be the best book on orasexual techniques of all kinds” (Legman to Christine Hoffmann, February 9, 1976, Alfred Kinsey Collection)—at least, according to its author.

In 1942, Legman and his first wife, Beverley Keith, moved to 858 Hornaday Place, a tiny three-room cottage in the Bronx, a house that allegedly once belonged to the maverick philosopher Charles Fort. In the same year, to Legman’s enormous excitement, he was contacted by Alfred Kinsey, then a Professor of Zoology at Indiana University in Bloomington. Kinsey, who had been writing to Robert Latou Dickinson for some time, had heard about Legman through Dickinson and thought Legman might be able to help out with Kinsey’s book buying and general bibliographic research.

Alfred Kinsey had received sponsorship to do his groundbreaking midcentury sex study partly because he was a taxonomer of gall-wasps who was considered pretty much beyond moral reproach—a married man and former Eagle Scout. When he began teaching sex education at Indiana University, the position led him to be invited to undertake the largest sex research project ever—and he got the job because it was assumed, ironically, as it turned out, that he could not possibly be too controversial.

When he originally got in touch with Legman, Kinsey (1948) was working on the first volume of what was to become known, infamously, as the “Kinsey Report.” In connection with this project, Kinsey was looking for someone to take on the job of ploughing through dusty annals of erotica in the homes of booksellers and private collectors in New York. He needed somebody who really knew his dirty books, who could help locate such obscure rarities as the 12-volume Machen translation of the memoirs of Casanova, the English translation of Bloch’s Beiträge zur Aetiologie der Psychopathia Sexualis, and the 16 original volumes of Richard Burton’s Arabian Nights with their complex and lengthy footnotes on Levantine sexuality.

It seemed to be a match made in heaven. Legman was thrilled by this wonderful opportunity actually to make money from locating and buying dirty books; it was the perfect job for a person with Legman’s eclectic interests in erotic anatomy and literary curiosities. And he also had the kind of access Kinsey was looking for—he was already well known among New York booksellers and publishers. Mainstays like Samuel Roth, Jacob Brussel, Benjamin Rebhuhn, and Esar Levine all helped provide him with rare volumes of “gallantiana” (also known as “curiosa” or “facetiae”): novels and literary classics with erotic themes, as well as more marginal elements of uncensored material dealing with sex and humor, like ballads, joke books, and the eight-page erotic comic strips better known as “Tijuana Bibles,” many of which are currently archived in the Kinsey Institute for Sexual Research in Bloomington, Indiana.

Legman, however, was never an easy man to get along with, and by 1943 he had already managed seriously to exasperate his new employer. Kinsey first began to express annoyance with Legman over what comes to be referred to in the correspondence as the “penis article.” Legman had apparently helped Kinsey to work out a statistical calculation for measuring the average length of the erect human penis. But Kinsey—a professional scientist—didn’t agree with what he saw as Legman’s amateurish calculations. To his credit, Legman seems to have been aware of the possible statistical errors in this study, since on August 7, 1943, he wrote to Kinsey: “Not having received any word from you about the penis article, I presume you don’t like it. That’s alright, as I don’t like it a hell of a lot myself. Too sweeping a classification to make on a lousy 456 rounded-off measurements …” (Alfred Kinsey Collection).

Kinsey certainly didn’t like it, and finally informed Legman that he was “no statistician.” Legman admitted to having no scientific training, but tried to back up his side ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Legitimizing Legman
• 2 Against Jokes
• 3 Against Laughter
• 4 Against Clowns
• 5 Against Stand-Up
• 6 Against Humor Therapy
• Afterword: Risus Sardonicus
• References
• Index