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Occasional examples unpredictably presented. November 2002 |
Anecdotal Matters
The Joke as a Platform to a Rant
The Joke as a Platform to a Rant
The book that caught my fancy isn't much to look at. With its bland, dark covers, yellowed interior pages, and bent spine, it would never make the grade among condition hounds. Neither did I care that it has some semi-celebrated place in historical erotica or that it can command the low end of eyebrow-raising prices. I will admit to caving to its bargain price, but that wasn't really why I bought it.
The book became mine because, in the high times of early 20th-century suppression, it dared to sneer at its cultural detractors.
Honestly, I simply couldn't ignore that fact that the 1927 Humphrey Adams edition of Anecdota Americana claimed it was published for The Associations for the Asphyxiation of Hypocrites. Like that forbidden desert sitting in the refrigerator, its blatant transgressive charm called me by name.
Fully entitled, Anecdota Americana: Being, Explicitly, An Anthology of TALES IN THE VERNACULAR is a collection of dirty jokes, riddles, limericks, and tales. Some read like something out of a perverted Poor Richard's Almanac (and remind us of life before antibiotics, replete with poisonous treatments):
"Life's irony: One night with Venus. Six months with Mercury."
Others read like Red Foxx material, decades before his blue material made the Vegas stage:
"A man dashed into the doctor's office in a great funk. "Look doctor," he screamed, taking out his pecker, "look how red it is, all splotched up. What shall I do for it?" The physician took the tool in his hand a moment, then said, "Get a wet rage and rub it off. Then tell your girl not to use so much lip rouge."Still others remind us that everything old becomes new again:
"A new word was coined for a certain actor whose inclinations were equally amorous for men as for woman. [sic] One of his critics called him "ambisextrous."If its detractors didn't get the joke the first time out, they got the point hammered home just before the jokes started running:
Really, what's not to love with this book?
Actually, there are a few things that haven't stood the test of time. Many jokes are race or ethnically based and some do cross today's line of bias. Others are sexist. And the book is specifically heterosexual. If you want to find a fag-friendly joke, you'll either have to read between the lines or look elsewhere.
The book opened, however, with a serious rant -- excuse me, make that an "elucidatory preface." Composed by J. Mortimer Hall, it castigated the modern state of prudery over the course of eighteen pages, but only insofar as suppression has held man back from developing beyond his own stupidity. Here, arrested development walked hand-in-hand with fear-based morality while attainment and higher realization strolled with elitism:
"We thus realize it is not unreasonable to expect much may be learned in this book of the temper, the culture, the character of the race from which it springs. Here is placed plainly in view the backfire of suppression which is call smut by those burdened by disgust because they lack sufficient vitality to accept the facts of life. But in America it could not possibly be called pornography! For in this land they pride themselves there are no whores to write about. Well, they may have driven her to cover. But consider the number of brothel stories in the following text and judge if they have driven her out of mind. It is merely another example of man's stupidity in attacking his own ills at the wrong end."The jokes, the essayist claimed, "are, then, obscene in the same sense that current newspapers, jazz, and picture-shows are
obscene." Granted, it's date-stamped Jazz Age, but Hall sounded remarkably similar to any current, pop-culture detracting American politician as he placed the act of reading this book on the same level as visiting Coney Island. Of course, back then it wasn't a matter of a parental advisory, but complete suppression, yet it surprised to see that rather than invoke the hell-in-handbasket, fall-of-mankind diatribe we so commonly hear these days, he placed the burden on man's stupidity and failure to progress.
"...the present stories take their rise out of an obsessional pre-occupation with the images of sex; and that they continue their course because they offer man escape from imposed restrictions, possibilities of vicarious satisfaction of denied desires, and one more field in which to exercise his restless imagination... These tales may, then, be regarded as loopholes of escape for a civilization-ridden man."In the end, it's hardly sex-positive thinking. And, if not for the nearly 200 pages of humor that followed, its bold irreverence would have been completely compromised.
Of course, it's possible that by couching this book as an examination of man's ills and posing that the end of suppression might lead to social enlightenment, the publisher aimed to escape the censors. Perhaps he brought the equivalent of literary merit to the work decades of ahead of the court challenge that would establish literary merit as grounds for constitutional protection.
Or maybe not. Who knows. Besides, like a crow who's found a shiny trinket, I've spied another bargain in today's mail. It's the Panurge Press edition of Frank Harris's Pantopia. And lookie here: Stuck between the frontispieces is a Literary Digest article from 1931 about the author entitled The Brilliant "Ruffian".
How curious...