Funny Peculiar: Gershon Legman and the Psychopathology of Humor , and: The Mirth of Nations (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Funny Peculiar: Gershon Legman and the Psychopathology of Humor, and: The Mirth of Nations Gary Alan Fine Funny Peculiar: Gershon Legman and the Psychopathology of Humor. By Mikita Brottman. (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 2004. Pp. xxiii + 174, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, illustrations, bibliography, index.) The Mirth of Nations. By Christie Davies. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002. Pp. xi + 252, acknowledgments, introduction, bibliography, index.) During the period that Richard Nixon was under threat of impeachment, the Chicago Tribune suggested that one justification for removing him from office was his sour humorlessness. A sense of humor generally stands high among the cardinal virtues of selfhood. A scholar who questions the fundamental beneficent merits [End Page 497] of wit stands outside the boundaries of conventional wisdom. While humor in general is embraced, ethnic and racial jokes are generally smeared. Here the dark side of humor becomes visible as it casts a shadow over enlightened tolerance. A scholar who questions the destructiveness of ethnic humor has a tough case to push. The authors Mikita Brottman and Christie Davies are prepared for their respective challenges as they confront orthodoxy. Even if neither author fully makes the case, both shave away some of our moral certainty. Humor is a complex domain, not properly encapsulated into banal verities. Mikita Brottman's volume, Funny Peculiar, is subtitled Gershon Legman and the Psychopathology of Humor. Brottman, a candidate in psychiatry and an expert on the horror film, presents us with an interconnected set of six essays questioning the benefits of humor in its various forms. The first and longest of these essays (nearly a third of the book) is the one chapter that presents us Legman in the raw, whereas the other chapters rely on Legman's writings to illuminate the claimed dangers of humor as a form of aggression. Gershon Legman is an icon for folklorists, and we should be grateful to receive any treatment of his life, however incomplete. These forty pages do not constitute anything close to the full biography that this idiosyncratic and problematic scholar deserves. With Alfred Kinsey currently the subject of multiple biographies, films, documentaries, and novels, Legman deserves his moment of fame. Legman's relationship with academic folklore was troubled, a fate that he shared with many outsider scholars, from Vance Randolph to Ben Botkin to Zora Neale Hurston. Folklore is a discipline whose academic practitioners are enriched by the prodding of outsider scholars, even if they do not always recognize the gift. With his attraction/repulsion for the academic life, Gershon Legman served as an agent provocateur. Legman is known as a collector of erotica, but that label does not fully do him justice. He borrowed from Freudian theory while making it both coarse and true. Legman lacked the analytic nuance and complexity of such scholars as Alan Dundes, but he made up for this lacuna with a wider range of life experiences and greater recognition of the politics of sexuality. Central to Legman's sexual politics is the realization that joking involves subversion, anxiety, and aggression in a culture in which discourse about intimacy is discouraged and often punished. Legman sees jokes as a release for neurosis, or as Brottman puts it, "The Rationale makes the very notion of joke telling seem like a miserable and pathetic exercise, especially if we accept the premise that our taste in humor is the key to the depth of our anxieties, particularly regarding sex" (p. 46). The joke is father to the man. Humor and laughter expose deep secrets and are dangerous for that reason. What Brottman does not sufficiently recognize is the existence of a tacit agreement that the parties to humor should avert their ears from the deep subtexts. We act as if humor is all in fun, and it is this that makes it not only possible but also desirable. It is precisely the dual messaging, coupled with a means of social and psychological distance, that makes humor work. In subsequent chapters Brottman dissects laughter, clowns, stand-up comedy, and even humor therapy. While relying on a body of academic literature for each chapter, she underlines the aggressive and competitive features of humor without recognizing that aggression (or...