No index

Report obscene mail to your postmaster[1].

To Gershon Legman, what would his blog have been like?

Rationale of the dirty joke: An analysis of sexual humor (1968) – G Legman
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

My copy of Gershon Legman’s Rationale of the Dirty Joke arrived in the mail today, I had ordered it somewhat “by accident” after finding out about Neurotica magazine (a magazine Legman was involved with in the 1950s) via Scott McLemee’s new blog Quick Study. My first impressions are: no index (I have a British edition of 1969, but I do not believe it is present in the American edition either) but also no bibliography, of which my version says it is available in the American edition.

One of the first things I check in a non-fiction book is the TOC — I’m always interested in a good ontology — Legman in this case confirms that he essentially relied on the ontological model Freud first set forth in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious(1905).

I read about 13 pages in this 700+ page book and found it clear and amusing. There were favorable references to Games People Play , Children’s Humor : a Psychological Analysis (1954) by Martha Wolfenstein (who was analyzed by the art historian and lay analyst Ernst Kris) and The Mask of Sanity (1941) by Hervey Cleckley.

Only now do I find out that Taschen and Simon & Schuster have reprinted Rationale. Maybe they have an index?