Gershon Legman
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Gershon Legman (November 2, 1917 – February 23, 1999), American social critic and folklorist was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania to parents of Eastern or Central European Jewish descent. According to George Chauncey's book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (1994), Legman was a homosexual.
As a young man he acquired a number of interests including sexuality, erotic folklore, and origami. For a period of time he was a bibliographic researcher with the Kinsey Institute; and, in 1949, he published Love and Death, an attack on sexual censorship. During this period he also published a little magazine (actually so informally it was rather like a fanzine), Neurotica, which featured notable contributions and had some influence disproportionate to its circulation. Neurotica was published as a collection in a book and had some influence on Marshall McLuhan. The Horn Book : studies in erotic folklore and bibliography was a collection of assorted writings from the 1950s and 1960s.
In 1953 Legman left his native United States for a farm Le Clé des Champs in the village of Valbonne in the South of France, where he was able to pursue his intellectual interests with greater freedom.
Legman spent several decades compiling specimens of bawdy humor including limericks. In 1970 his first volume of over 1700 limericks (published in France in the 1950s) was released in the United States as The Limerick. He followed this with a second volume, The New Limerick in 1977, which was reprinted as More Limericks in 1980. His magnum opus was Rationale of the Dirty Joke: (An Analysis of Sexual Humor), a tour de force of erotic folklore, succeeded by No Laughing Matter : Rationale of the Dirty Joke: An Analysis of Sexual Humor, 2nd Series for which a subscription had to be paid to support publishing as no publisher would touch it after Grove did volume one in 1968.
Gershon Legman died in early 1999 in his adopted home country, France, after several years of debility.
[edit] External links
[edit] Books
By Gershon Legman
- The Language of Homosexuality: An American Glossary,in George W. Henry, Sex Variants (New York: Paul B. Hoeber, 1941)
- Bibliography of paper-folding (1952)
- Neurotica: No. 9 The Castration Complex (ed., with Alvin Lustig) (1952)
- The Compleat Neurotica: St. Louis - New York 1948 - 51 (ed., with Jay Irving) Landesman (1963)
- Guilt of the Templars (1966)
- The Intimate Kiss (Paperback Library, 1971)
- Rationale of the Dirty Joke: An Analysis of Sexual Humor (New York: Grove Press, 1968); reprinted in hardcover by Indiana University Press (December 1982) ISBN 0253347777; ISBN 978-0253347770
- No Laughing Matter: An Analysis of Sexual Humor (1982)
- Love and Death: A Study in Censorship, (1985)
- Limerick (Hardcover - Sep 11, 1991)
About Gershon Legman
- Funny Peculiar: Gershon Legman and the Psychopathology of Humor, by Mikita Brottman (2004)
In which Gerson Legman is Cited
- Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, by George Chauncey (1994)
