Dirty Jokes and Bawdy Songs

The Uncensored Life of Gershon Legman

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Pub Date Oct 09 2019 | Archive Date Jul 25 2019

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Description

Collector of sexual folklore. Cataloger of erotica. Tireless social critic. Gershon Legman's singular, disreputable resume made him a counter-cultural touchstone during his forty-year exile in France. Despite his obscurity today, Legman’s prescient work and passion for the prurient laid the groundwork for our contemporary study of the forbidden.Susan G. Davis follows the life and times of the figure driven to share what he found in civilization's secret libraries. Self-taught and fiercely unaffiliated, Legman collected the risqué on street corners and in theaters and dug it out of little-known archives. If the sexual humor he uncovered often used laughter to disguise hostility and fear, he still believed it indispensable to the human experience. Davis reveals Legman in all his prickly, provocative complexity as an outrageous nonconformist thundering at a wrong-headed world while reveling in conflict, violating laws and boundaries with equal abandon, and pursuing love and improbable adventures. Through it all, he maintained a kaleidoscopic network of friends, fellow intellectuals, celebrity admirers, and like-minded obsessives.

Collector of sexual folklore. Cataloger of erotica. Tireless social critic. Gershon Legman's singular, disreputable resume made him a counter-cultural touchstone during his forty-year exile in...


Advance Praise

"A more difficult subject is hard to imagine—a self-taught, little-known, irascible scholar who with little support and great opposition delved into some of the darkest corners of culture. Yet this remarkable and utterly engaging biography is the epic story of an unlikely hero as well as a lesson in just how much one person can accomplish in one lifetime. It also evokes an era, one uncomfortably like our own, in which scholars, theologians, politicians, and police wrestle with the unresolved issues of love and death."--John Szwed, author of Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth

"A more difficult subject is hard to imagine—a self-taught, little-known, irascible scholar who with little support and great opposition delved into some of the darkest corners of culture. Yet this...


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9780252084447
PRICE $27.95 (USD)
PAGES 328

Average rating from 3 members


Featured Reviews

This is a fantastic work of biography, history, and historiography about a little known figure in the American history of sex - Gershon Legman. Legman is a peculiar character - a son of Polish orthodox Jewish immigrants who was raised in strict academic and religious tradition to be a rabbi, but abandoned that life at an early age to be a researcher of sex and erotica. Legman’s background in textual study, research, and Jewish oral history made him an excellent scholar; his passion project was compiling a bibliography of all of the folklore, slang, and cultural traditions around sex, both heterosexual and homosexual. He was not a traditional academic, in that he had no formal college education and spent most of his scholarly career as an unaffiliated, unpaid researcher, scrounging up sponsorships and partnerships with publishers as often as he could. His magnum opus, The Rationale of the Dirty Joke, was the product of decades of compilation and research analyzing over 2000 dirty jokes from deep within “low culture” folklore. Legman was most well known as one of the first academics to treat sex and erotica as a legitimate scholarly discipline and primary text worthy of analysis.

Not only was Legman working in a subject considered somewhat taboo even today, he was doing so at the beginning of the 20th century, when sexual censorship and repression was at (what I would consider) a peak. Publishers working with or distributing sexually explicit content were constantly at odds with the postal service and the police, and raids on publishing houses or back rooms were common. Legman fought against this censorship, calling it a symptom of America’s own sexual repression under the guise of morality; he wrote a book on American sexual censorship called Love and Death. He eventually became an expat after finally being put on trial for distributing this very book via the postal service.

As a student of history myself, I am thoroughly impressed with how Davis uses a wide variety of primary and secondary sources as evidence in her biography, from census data to private letters to Legman’s own autobiography. Thank you to NetGalley and Folklore Studies in a Multicultural World for providing me with a copy of this book.

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Dirty Jokes and Bawdy Songs is a interesting and informative book. Susan Davis has done her research and has written a interesting book.

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