LECTURE : Exploring Folklore, Stereotypes : Professor whose studies include sick jokes and bathroom humor focuses on serious subject of racial and ethnic slurs.
The funniest joke is the one that’s so funny, you die laughing. That one won’t be on the program, but there will be plenty to giggle at and to ponder at a noon lecture at UCSB Friday. That’s when wisecracking wise guy Alan Dundes sends one-liners flying all over the Hatlen Theatre.
Dundes, an anthropology professor with a specialty in folklore at UC Berkeley, where he has been teaching since 1963, will discuss folklore in general and in particular, the more serious topic of racial and ethnic slurs. Dundes has written more than 150 articles and scores of books, among them “Cracking Jokes: Studies of Sick Humor Cycles and Stereotypes” and “When You’re Up to Your Ass In Alligators.”
His scholarship is considered as influential as it is controversial, and Dundes will stoop to any depth or go the extra yard to find his material, as evidenced in his paper on bathroom graffiti, “Here I Sit: A Study in American Latrinalia,” or his paper on football, entitled “Into the End Zone: A Psychoanalytic Consideration of American Football.”
At Berkeley, Dundes’ classes are a hit, and his Introduction to Folklore packs a 400-seat room, plus there’s a waiting list. Apparently his office hours are a take-a-number-and-wait thing. The guy is nearly impossible to reach except on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, when, on a rare day off, he spoke from his home.
What is the fascination of folklore?
Folklore is interesting because you come to class with a lifetime of folklore--from family folklore to playground folklore to workplace folklore. Unlike specialized courses like algebra or physics where you come in pretty cold, everyone has heard a dirty joke, used a proverb or told a story. It’s a field that appeals to a fairly large audience, and once your eyes have been opened to folklore, it’s something you’ll use the rest of your life.
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Discuss good and bad folklore.
The idea is commonly held that folklore is a positive force. It must answer some kind of need. Today in Russia for example, the Jews are being blamed for Communism. Or women as a group have been blamed for the Garden of Eden, Pandora’s Box and the cause of death and disease. Besides women as a group, gay groups and African Americans know all about bad folklore.
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What makes folklore believable?
It’s the authority of the parent, the family and the person that’s telling you. People tend to accept their own culture, so they’re under a lot of pressure, and basically have no choice. I do believe in the unconscious, in that people don’t understand why they say or do what they do, and that folklore is an unconscious reflection of people’s anxieties. But the challenge is to figure it out, not just repeat it.
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Since it’s Super Bowl week, discuss the folklore of football.
I’ve done some work on that, and you probably don’t want to know about it. But since you asked, football has to do with one team trying to get into another team’s end zone. One team tries to feminize the other in a ritual homoerotic manner. When spiking the ball, for example, you don’t get extra points for it--it just prolongs the moment. Basketball is the same. You don’t get extra points for a slam dunk--it just humiliates the opponent.
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Your talk is going to be on ethnic and racial slurs. How old are they? Were Cro-Magnons putting down Neanderthals for having bad posture?
Usually ethnic slurs come from neighboring peoples who have some sort of need to feel superior. I discuss this stuff in my classes, but not right away. The school asked me to speak on this subject--it’s not at all politically correct.
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What is a sick humor cycle?
They are usually about tragedies, illnesses or murders. There’s always a victim to a joke, but some of them are sicker than others. There were a lot of jokes about Waco and now the O. J. Simpson case. There’s nothing funny about a brutal double murder, but the jokes are funny. “They finally found twelve jurors who had never heard of O. J. Simpson--twelve of his professors at USC.”
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To anyone but lawyers, are lawyer jokes sick humor?
Lawyer jokes are not sick humor because lawyers are doing just fine, thank you. They tried to censor those jokes recently, you’ll remember, but you can’t censor folklore. There are four-letter words that you and I can’t use, but folklore is much freer than mass culture because folklore is anonymous. There are no authors, no names.
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Does folklore get bad press in academia?
It’s not so much that we get bad press, but no press. A lot of people just don’t know what folklore is, and have no idea of its importance, no idea at all.
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How did you become interested in folklore?
Luck. I was working on an English degree at Yale, and we were reading Yeats and Blake, which contained all this symbolism. I asked one of my professors who told me about “some place in the Midwest,” which turned out to be the University of Indiana. When I looked at the catalogue, I saw they had 10, 15, 20 courses on folklore. When I went to Indiana, there were only 10 students in my class. Folklore is a worldwide field with an international community of scholars. There are four major schools that offer degrees in folklore in the United States--UCLA, Indiana, Texas at Austin, and Penn, which is probably the best right now. If I had stayed in English, I’d probably be teaching freshman composition and would have no meaningful career.
Details
* WHAT: Alan Dundes, professor of anthropology, UC Berkeley.
* WHAT: “Folklore in the Modern World.”
* WHERE: Hatlen Theatre, UCSB.
* WHEN: Friday, noon.
* COST: Free.
* CALL: 893-8411.