This new biography is a worthwhile addition to the would-be discipline of folkloristics as it continues to come to terms with its own problematic past and the casual disrespect it too often receives from academics in other fields. Using a trove of unpublished or difficult-to-access resources, Susan G. Davis constructs a detailed account of the career of Gershon Legman (“G. Legman” to most of his audience) from his youthful years in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to his most productive years living in an isolated farmhouse in the vicinity of Valbonne in the south of France.

The book’s subject is memorable both for his work and for his controversial lifestyle. During his life, Legman gained both notoriety and acclaim for his encyclopedic work on the “underground” social world of pornography and obscene folklore, and he at different times collaborated with the Indiana sex-researcher Alfred Kinsey, the cultural studies icon Marshall McLuhen, the Ozarks fieldworker Vance Randolph, the Beat poet Allen Ginzberg, and pioneering folklorists such as Roger Abrahams. He was a key participant in the 1960 American Folklore Society “Symposium on Obscenity in Folklore” (by proxy, alas), and his challenging essay (Legman 1962) was a centerpiece of the ensuing special issue of the Journal of American Folklore. The 1975 Chicago Folklore Prize, a major international distinction, was given to him for his two-volume Rationale of the Dirty Joke. By all normal criteria, Legman should be remembered as a central influence on the discipline’s free-ranging emphases.

Yet, Davis concedes in her preface and introduction, Legman’s reputation has proved ephemeral: his contribution to the field is, she says, now is “ill-remembered” (xi) and “little acknowledged” (3). Some of this results from the difficulty of accessing his major works. While the two volumes of Rationale were widely distributed during the 1970s, when young scholars like me were exploring new and previously transgressive topics, many of his other works are far more difficult to locate. The precautions used by Legman and his collaborators to prevent their writings’ seizure and destruction by authorities continue to make physical copies of certain essays nearly impossible to locate, even in days of freer expression. None of his book-length publications appear to be currently in print. Davis’s introductory “Acknowledgments” documents the difficulties faced when she set out to locate and read his entire scholarly output.

In addition, as Davis shows, Legman had the misfortune to live through an era during which the identity of “folklore” changed from being an area of personal interest to the focus of an academic discipline. When he self-identified as a “folklorist” during the 1940s, Legman was one of many energetic private enthusiasts who occupied themselves in preserving folk traditions, including Harry M. Hyatt (folk beliefs and rituals), the Lomaxes (folksongs and blues), and Richard Chase (folktales). As his career developed, he came into contact with the leaders in the emerging new academic discipline of folkloristics, notably Richard Dorson, Alan Dundes, and Roger Abrahams, whose groundbreaking monograph on African American improvised verse, Deep Down in the Jungle (1964), Legman annotated. Davis does a new generation a great service by providing clear summaries of Legman’s central arguments about the need to view and discuss bawdy folklore of all kinds, and by putting them into the perspective of folklore research, both during Legman’s period and afterwards.

The author makes a bold defense of Legman’s legitimate status as a folklorist. He deserves credit for his encyclopedic knowledge of erotica and for making much of it available to scholarly attention. Davis highlights his perceptive mind honed on extensive reading and on imitation of other scholars’ indexing and bibliographic strategies. His profound knowledge of the fields that attracted his attention (including origami as well as erotica) and his innate ability to compile the traditions he documented into databases made him potentially useful to academics who recognized the importance of the traditions he preserved. He deserves credit particularly for providing access to previously inaccessible resources in obscene folk speech, in folksong, and in the huge range of dirty jokes and poems in British and American tradition.

However, Legman’s brash and often difficult style of writing, combined with his unpredictable social behavior, made him unwelcome in many academic circles. (This combination of precociousness, obsessive collecting and organizing, and social dysfunctionality strongly suggests autism spectrum disorder, a condition not recognized during his lifetime.) Some of this was inevitable: though Legman had a brilliant high school career, he was expelled from college in his first semester and so lacked even undergraduate credentials. Many academics thus felt the outsider’s demands for attention and help were importunate, and by the same token Legman had little patience with the theoretical house of cards built by scholars, which he believed gave a false and dishonest account of traditions dealing with sexual matters. And so invitations to academic settings often led to unproductive mêlées. A potentially valuable invitation for Legman to serve as “Writer in Residence” at the University of California’s San Diego campus led nowhere: the courses he proposed were not approved, faculty shunned him, and his sole work consisted of informal meetings with students under the disapproving eyes of their advisors.

Moreover, as Davis aptly notes, many of his ideas have not worn well. His thesis that comic books contributed to violence and crime among young people, while it was common among intellectuals in the post-World-War-II era, no longer seems as obviously valid as it did then. While he was justified in considering erotic songs as worthy of study as the violence-rife Child ballads, like many folksong scholars of the early twentieth century, he felt that the latter reflected a romantic golden age. So he tended to consider contemporary bawdy songs, such as those sung by college students, shocking and pedestrian, much as earlier folksong scholars saw “hillbilly music” as a travesty of an older, purer tradition.

And his interpretations of obscene humor, while his most celebrated work, have not proved a model for subsequent research. His self-learned understanding of Freudian psychoanalysis was, ultimately, a deeply-felt subjective reaction to humor as, necessarily, a cry of repressed pain. And so his readings of certain types of vulgar jokes as revealing underlying mental problems are by nature unverifiable (much like some academics’ interpretations of contemporary legends as expressing “fears”). By contrast, more successful approaches, such as those by Elliott Oring (2016; his critiques of Legman are lucidly summarized in this book) and by Christie Davies (2011) stress falsifiable conclusions whose validity can be assessed by objective research and observation. Finally, Legman’s reactions against homosexuality as a deviant and socially dangerous option do not wear well in a century when the LGBTQ communities are increasingly recognized as natural options to “straight” gendering.

The book thus is valuable in honoring the substantial contribution of a researcher who was central to the change of directions taken by folkloristics in the mid-1900s. Davis is amply fair to Legman’s passionate point of view about the traditions he documented and at times celebrated. While she honestly identifies his stylistic and theoretical shortcomings as a scholar, she is also soberingly frank about the social penalties he endured as a result. The author and his associates repeatedly risked arrest and jail for collecting and distributing material dealing with obscene folklore. Additionally, the unorthodox ways in which his works were published meant that Legman rarely could claim royalties, even when they were republished in a franker era. In the end Legman endured decades of exile in an isolated farmhouse in the French countryside without electricity or plumbing. Davis vividly details the reactions of academic “pilgrims” to his “uninspiringly ugly” homestead.

The biography is thus important in giving welcome attention to an important influence on the discipline of folklore and also in identifying factors that continue to trouble the field’s legitimacy. The issue of what accords a researcher academic credentials as a “folklorist” was still unsettled in my generation. I myself was called out as a “self-declared” folklorist since my university did not then offer a graduate program in the discipline. And so, even as such programs grew fewer in the later parts of the twentieth century, the lack of proper credentials sharply limited my access to grants or to sabbatical positions. At the same time, any effort to include sex-related materials in publications or in courses left me open to professional reprisals. The use of a peer-reviewed folklore article on “first dirty jokes” of 12-year-old boys led to a confrontation with my campus’s sexual harassment officer, during which I was told that such material could only be assigned by a female instructor to a course made up exclusively of females, and only in an “affirming” atmosphere. While Legman was often seen as unbalanced or obnoxious by his peers, there is little doubt that his passion pointed to irrational ideas and practices in academics, in his day and in ours.

So many younger folklorists, even now, find themselves exploring transgressive traditions in ways that their field still does not credential as academically sound. Such work is necessary to understand the social world as a totality, Legman successfully argued (though we may disagree with the reasons he gave). And yet in many educational environments, as I recently commented, “folklore research [is] done almost as an outlaw proposition, in the shadows, under risk of official displeasure, even forbidden in many places” (Section Leadership Series).

Legman’s battle, it seems, is still being fought, perhaps with more scholarly rigor, but in the same way and with similar results.

Works Cited

Abrahams, Roger D. Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia. Hatboro, PA: Folklore Associates, 1964.

Davies, Christie. Jokes and Targets. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.

Legman, G. “Toward a Motif-Index of Erotic Humor.” The Journal of American Folklore 75 (1962): 227-48.

Oring, Elliott. Joking Asides: The Theory, Analysis, and Aesthetics of Humor. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2016.

“Section Leadership Series: Bill Ellis, PhD (Full interview).” New Directions in Folklore (21 May 2018).

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[Review length: 1653 words • Review posted on September 10, 2020]