Back in the day, instructors proctoring final exams whiled away boredom by composing limericks, inspired by Gershon Legman's observation that the “folk expression” of academics could produce examples nastier than those everybody had already heard. Popular and scholarly delight in the off-color ingenuity of the thousands of limericks he gathered as The Limerick (1953) and The New Limerick (1977) was the reason those books were the only ones to make Legman money. If academics were not so fond of his later publications, they are nevertheless indebted to the bibliographic, lexicographic, and etymologic work he did that opened folklore and humor studies to previously unprintable discourse. As he insists in the preface to his magisterial “Erotic Folksongs and Ballads: An International Bibliography” (1990), “Folklore is the voice of those who have no other voice, and would not be listened to if they did. Of no part of folklore is this more true—folksongs and ballads, folklife, language, artifacts, dances and games, superstitions and all the rest—than of the sexual parts.”1 That credo guided a forensic dissection of sexual humor that traces anathematized jokes to their preindustrialized DNA. Despite the generosity with which he shared findings, however, his is a cautionary tale of research sidelined by academic condescension and the treacherous currents of theory.An overdue assessment by Susan G. Davis, an emerita professor of communication and library and information science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, carefully details a career of extraordinary eccentricity, showing why his status is still fraught. He was born in 1917 to Jewish immigrants in Scranton, Pennsylvania; here Davis uncovers the unpleasant family dynamics—reticent mother and dominant, probably unbalanced father—that are clichés in biographies of rebellious high achievers. Davis connects Legman's discovery that his adolescence could be understood in psychoanalytic tropes to the near-evangelical Freudianism that drove his study of dirty jokes and bawdy songs. Nor does she discount the impetus of sheer horniness; Legman vowed early to treat sex itself as an art form, which he ended up practicing occasionally with men, although more often with women like the erotic illustrator Susan Aguerra and the diarist Anaïs Nin.When poverty ended study at the University of Michigan after a single semester, Legman educated himself at the New York Public Library before and after odd jobs, an enduring approach to research supported by low-paying gigs. During the 1930s he collaborated with Nin, Henry Miller, Clement Wood, Caresse Crosby, and Robert DeNiro Sr. to write pornographic stories commissioned by a rich collector. More to his liking were freelance editing and writing assignments from marginal publishers and booksellers such as Jake Brussel, Samuel Roth, and Frances Steloff and from the National Committee on Maternal Health, at the time the center of American sex research. These included “The Language of Homosexuality” (1941), a manual on cunnilingus published as part 1 of An Encyclopaedic Outline of Oral Technique in Genital Excitation (1940), and his own printing of the first American edition of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1939). In the 1940s his reputation as a scout of forbidden texts attracted Alfred Kinsey, who hired him to help build the library of what became the Kinsey Institute for Research on Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University, Bloomington. Irascible as he was, he soon broke with Kinsey, disputed the methodology behind his 1948 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, and ran afoul of Indiana University folklorist Richard Dorson, who disparaged Legman and the Ozark folklorist Vance Randolph, calling them “scholar tramps.”As editor from 1947 to 1951 of Neurotica, a privately financed journal, Legman published essays by Marshall McLuhan, Allen Ginsberg, Larry Rivers, and Lawrence Durrell. When post office censors targeted him for distributing his own Love and Death: A Study in Censorship (1949), whose thesis was that a degenerate American culture preferred images of violence and sadism to representations of natural sexual desire, he decamped in 1953 to Europe. Save for occasional visits to the US in fruitless search of grants or academic appointments, he would remain abroad, eventually settling his wife and children in a house without running water in Opio, near Valbonne on the Riviera. From Europe he published “The Horn Book” and Other Bibliographic Problems (1953, expanded in 1964 to The Horn Book: Studies in Erotic Folklore and Bibliography). The well-received if cranky text drew on his prowls through archives of suppressed books and manuscripts, global sleuthing of erotic texts, collectors, and bibliographers, and fascination with the pedigrees of folk elements. He despised bowdlerization; to gild a text was to geld it. His focus was now precise: “Sexual folklore is, with the lore of children, the only form of folklore still in uncontaminated and authentic folk transmission in the Western world. It has thumbed its nose for centuries at both censorship and print.”2 He called for a new motif index for sexual humor to fill out the well-known Aarne-Thompson Index.Though applauded, The Horn Book did not produce much income, nor did diverse projects ranging from essays, editions, translations, and introductions to an attack on the sexual revolution of the 1960s called The Fake Revolt (1967). Undeterred, he combed the world for items of coarse humor, a task metaphorically more like drinking from a fire hose. For decades, he daily recorded, catalogued, and stored. Along with his amazing archive grew the legend of an uncredentialed, impoverished authority obsessed with the prehistory of sexual stories, quips, gibes, anecdotes, jests, and jokes. Voluminous correspondence answered questions and asked others. Those academics who did visit to pick his brains, however, rarely lingered, repulsed by his personal rudeness and by the Opio house's lack of toilets.Media pundits found amusing the title of The Rationale of the Dirty Joke: An Analysis of Sexual Humor (1968), a dense explication of comic vulgarity intended to establish Legman's primacy as a humor scholar. But Grove Press stiffed Legman on royalties from robust sales to audiences titillated by scholarship on the down low. Worse, the book received little serious comment from an intellectual community of ethnographers, anthropologists, sociologists, linguists, and communication, cultural, pop cultural, and performance theorists who had by then appropriated the study of humor, nearly all of them taken aback by the book's painful thematic organization and the thesis that dirty jokes articulated Freudian neurosis.Legman's failure to acknowledge new directions in humor studies gave his detractors ammunition when No Laughing Matter: The Rationale of the Dirty Joke appeared in 1975. The far more scurrilous and fetishistic jokes he dealt with this time struck many readers as “nauseating.” His purpose, says Davis, was to assert that “jokes ‘rationalize’ real existing perversions such as coprophilia or necrophilia, and laughter shrives our awareness of a ‘perverted reality’ that we all would prefer to ignore. Jokes, seen in this way, are a disguised record of a very dark world, a sort of dirty basement of disavowed desires and acts. This world eroticizes feces, farts, all kinds of excreta and pollution, infections, infestations, accidents, as well as maimed and distorted bodies. No Laughing Matter is at times hilarious, at times bitter. Most often it is disturbing, as it was intended to be. Legman wrote that he felt a responsibility to present his evidence” (214).Davis continues: “There is more emphasis here on the wretched and despised: women, of course, but also the familiar ethnic and racial minorities and male homosexuals. It is not pressing a point to say that No Laughing Matter is a detailed register of the hatreds and fears of Legman's American joke tellers, at a particular point in time” (214).Critics fearful of being thought slumming shied from reviewing No Laughing Matter, even though it did receive a minor folklore award for its boldness. The few who did took issue with the book from the perspective of their respective disciplines. Davis's survey of objections, carefully set against period and personalities, is excellent. Most attacked Legman's Freudian interpretations, tools already fading in popularity and utility. Legman believed that dirty jokes masked aggressiveness and that their hostility, while revealing the character of the teller, made the listener the butt of the joke. Worse, Legman relied on theme to determine the meaning of a dirty joke, not its social context or its performative aspects. For critics, the fleeting nature of sexual jokes, their diverse functions, the spaces where they were told, and differing social circumstances were everything, says Davis: “Telling a dirty joke could be a hostile act, or a critique of prevailing sexual arrangements, or a political provocation, or a way of ganging up on someone, or a bid for affection and solidarity. The claim Legman made for the dirty joke, that it was always an expression of sexual anxiety and hostility, was difficult to prove, if it could be proven at all” (219). Outnumbered defenders were mostly silent.Neither Davis nor those critics address two paradoxes in Legman's approach to folkloristic humor. The first, a Heisenbergian problem, and one shared by ethnographers who study ephemeral speech, was made acute by Legman's insistence that only oral expression is authentic. Once printed, oral expression enters the commercial mainstream, so—logically but ironically—committing even oral recordings to print destroys their original meaning. Legman wrestled with this contradiction by summarizing jokes rather than reporting them verbatim, just as integrity led him to withhold examples of which he had the only copy because other scholars could not see them. A second paradox arises from Legman's faith that folklore wells up from democratic impulses as a challenge to a censorious culture that privileges violent tropes over more natural expression of sexuality. If that is so, one must ask, then why is it that so many of his specimen jokes are themselves violent and hostile?Legman spent the years that followed publishing Mark Twain's The Mammoth Cod and Address to the Stomach Club (1976), editing Vance Randolph's collection of Ozark ballads and tales into Roll Me in Your Arms: “Unprintable” Ozark Folksongs and Folklore and Blow the Candle Out: “Unprintable” Ozark Folklore, (1992), for which he at last found a scholarly venue, the University of Arkansas Press, and never quite finishing Peregrine Penis: An Autobiography of Innocence (a play on Smollett's The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle). Davis benefited from this memoir, edited and published on demand by Legman's widow Judith in six volumes (2016-18); it contains information on underground publishers, erotic artists, censors, and collectors of contraband to be found nowhere else. Davis's interviews with family members, friends, and scholars supplement this self-portrait of a scholar who went his own way. When he died in 1999, few agreed with folklorist Alan Dundes that “one of the giants of the twentieth century is gone!” (235). Obituaries were sparse.Because Legman did as much as stand-up comedians like Lenny Bruce to widen the boundaries of comic taste, those who chart the growing tolerance of edgy (not to say harsh) off-color jokes will find Davis's book spot on. Historians and theorists of humor will also find her research well worth consulting, although a comprehensive bibliography of Legman's work would have made it even more useful. Davis balances her subject's achievements and prejudices, arguing that isolation, overwrought iconoclasm, and cantankerousness should not result in his genuine legacies being dismissed. In her estimation, his overall impact remains somewhat antiquated, partly because he ignored Foucault, among other contemporaries who were overtaking him. He contributed enormously nonetheless to our understanding of the history of sexuality, especially its manifestations in pornography, which in its narrative forms is often parodic and thus constitutes a comic genre in its own right. Capitalism, not Legman, has made pornography ubiquitous, unfortunately without diminishing the cultural appetite for the mediated violence he thought so awful. Even so, his pioneering approach helped make respectable academic examination of explicitness; after all, like it or not, sexual expression in language, coarse or not, is nothing if not human. Despite personal sexism, Davis says, he championed women, convinced not only that their sense of humor was often superior to men's but also that they could write better erotica, predictions that are coming to pass. Finally, of course, there is the peerless archive he assembled; one can only hope that others will build on it.