Interesting. Here I sit on a rainy spring day, listening to Ashcroft’s 9/11 testimony when this appreciation of the dirty joke crosses my radar. While the essay covers the gamut of dirty joke history, it leads in and out of that history by focusing on Gershon Legman, a lay scholar whose exceptional bibliographic knowledge of the dirty joke has yet to be exceeded by anyone. Many of Legman’s books saw print only after the US Supreme Court knocked down the various Comstock laws, but two — the exceedingly uncommon original edition of Oragenitalism* and his more common Love and Death essay — were seized by Vice authorities.

To read of Legman’s legacy while listening to the very man who has renewed a government assault on pornography is, if not ironic, certainly a strange synchronicity.

When I was a young teenager, I had a couple of horses, and my friends and I would spent long summer afternoons riding through the meadows along the Connecticut River. One of our favorite forbidden stops was at a certain outhouse. It was an old, decrepit thing that tilted to the right, but it still did the trick of providing the necessity respite to the farmers and their field hands. Early in the summer, we’d stop by and peer into this decrepit building to establish our baseline awareness of what dirty jokes and poems it held so that late in the summer, before the potato harvest commenced, we would know what new little dirties had accumulated on its walls during the labor-intensive tobacco harvest. Rarely were we disappointed.

Oh, for such simple summer traditions!

I’m not at all sure where or when I first learned about latrine scrawls, but I remember it was as much as hobby for my girlfriends as it was for me. I remember them telling me about sneaking into men’s rooms or overhearing their older brothers or simply remembering those rare gems they’d find in a women’s room, but what I keenly remember was their subversive glee and, me being younger than them, their willingness to clue me on this esoteric knowledge. Later, as we grew a touch older, we’d occasionally find ourselves in separate stalls in a working class restroom rife with scrawlings. We’d shout out the dirtiest of them to each other while peeing in an subtle competition to see who had lucked out in getting the best stall. Back then, “best” had nothing to do with cleanliness or whether the toilet flushed.

Today, my kids would be absolutely embarrassed to find such clandestine goodies, what with so many of today’s public loos scrubbed to a pristine gleam.

Now I’m not going to suggest that everything I learned about sex, I learned from dirty jokes. But they did satisfy my curiosity about sex as they became part of a larger repertoire and awareness. And, of course, fond memories of giggling with my girlfriends can’t be discounted.

Mine was a curiosity that endured. In later teen years, I’d routinely ask a boyfriend, upon his return from a restroom, if he saw anything clever in the stalls that he could share with me. The most enduring and endearing of boyfriends, knowing my tastes and appetites, would indulge me, but more conventional boys would likely dump me after the next date. (Begging off, no less, with the “price of gas” excuse. How little things have changed.)

My teen years brought me another discovery: that of what my father’s family did after the little kids went off to bed at family gatherings. To my surprise, they sat around and told dirty Polish jokes. If, as this article claims, dirty jokes can be ascribed to our neuroses and compulsions, then my father’s siblings may have found a healthy way to excise the pain of being outsiders, the result of their father’s radical decision to marry outside of the Catholic faith. It got him excommunicated and consequently made him dead to his family and my father and his siblings never knew their paternal relatives. The jokes gave shape (however twisted it might’ve been) to the ethnic identity they’d been robbed of and at the same time allowed them to mock their fate while also validating their ability to survive the pain of exclusion. Group therapy of the best kind, if you ask me. Today, though their ranks have greatly diminished, they remain the most jovial of folk.

But for me, the kid who grew up with only sporadic contact with these long-distant jokesters, the dirty joke gave me avenue into their circle of adulthood. The punchline became the icebreaker and knew no generational boundaries. When I greeted them at my wedding reception some twenty years ago, it went along the line of, “What’s long and hard on a Pollack?” “Third grade.” Later, other more reserved attendees commented to us about “that rowdy table that laughed a lot,” only to blush to they learned it was the bride’s family.

Far more recently, I’ve had the odd fortune to run across Legman-like devotees of the dirty joke collecting via ebay. Bid on the manuscript collection that pops up on rare occasion and they’ll email you, whether you win or lose the bid. Why? To see what jokes you might have in your possession that you might care to trade for like items. Invariably, I don’t have anything for them, what with my fleeting interest in the topic, and I’m certain I’ve come across like a newbie when I typify my response with a mention of the 1927 Humphrey Adams edition of Anecdota Americana. Invariably, they come back with how common that book is, which editions they already own, etcetera, etcetera.

At first, I thought these devotees were a tad creepy, sort of like those socially-deficited fetishists I occasionally run across, and maybe they are. But after reading this appreciation and better understanding the bibliographic nature of this collecting, next time I’ll be a kinder, gentler newbie.

Because, who knows, maybe these are the kind of guys who wouldn’t have freaked when I asked them about the bathroom walls on a first date.**

* See also Michael R. Goss’s treasure trove of a website.

**And they would know, unlike the author of this article, about the circa-1928 George Routledge edition of Poggio Bracciolini’s Facetiae and the 1968 Awards Books mass market paperback edition and the 1879 Isidore Liseux edition. But hey, libraries are cheaper than antiquarian booksellers.