The Hell Drawer

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Legman completed and published two volumes of his studies of sexual humor, The Rationale of the Dirty Joke and No Laughing Matter. In these books he presented thousands of jokes on sexual and bodily topics, framed by his own version of a Freudian approach to humor. This chapter lays out Legman’s organization of the materials dredged up in his decades of joke collecting, outlines his theories of humor, and places his books in the expansion of scholarly interest in humor in the 1960s and 1970s. Legman was almost alone in emphasizing aggression as a largely unconscious motive in joke telling and in emphasizing that jokes expressed unresolved psychic conflicts. The Rationale of the Dirty Joke was more warmly received than Legman’s second volume of jokes, in large part because No Laughing Matter dealt with the nastiest jokes in Legman’s collection. The chapter also examines the academic and popular reactions to both books and details Legman’s difficulties with publishers, especially around the issue of royalties for his work.