The New Yorker recently ran a wonderful piece about joke collectors (printable version), going back to the Greeks.
But more fascinating to me than Palamedes and Philogelos was Garamond Legman–whose first published work was about–er, well, he claimed to
have invented the–er, well, among other things, he claimed to have invented the phrase “Make Love not War.”
Legman left the US for a life of poverty a French castle, where he
collected crates full of index cards covered with extremely dirty
jokes. (“Zut alors, this joke should be filed under ‘offspring from sex with sheep’–what is it doing here in ‘outrageous farting’?”)
Legman’s story spooked me a little bit–maybe because I too have spent years collecting old jokes, though my specialty is nerd and scientific humor. Maybe because his real life in poverty sounds much uglier than the glamorous life of writerly French poverty I once dreamed of.
A physicist, a mathematician, and an engineer walk into a bar.
The bartender says, “Hey! Is this some kind of joke?”
Interesting to think what kind of joke Legman would have made of it….