Volume 12, Number 7 · April 10, 1969
What's So Funny?
By Charles Rycroft
Rationale of the Dirty Joke: An Analysis of Sexual Humor. First Series
by G. Legman
Grove, 811 pp., $15.00
Some years ago the present reviewer acted as an experimental subject in a research project on the physiological effects of alcohol. He was put into a room alone and made to drink the equivalent of ten sherries in as many minutes and then spend the hours in which he returned to sobriety performing a number of totally uninteresting mechanical tasks. He now feels much as he did then, after having read studiously and seriously more than 2,000 dirty jokes at the rate of some 150 an hour under conditions totally unlike those in which they are ever spontaneously told.
Review, 1768 words
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