The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #167099   Message #4048810
Posted By: Jim Carroll
27-Apr-20 - 03:12 AM
Thread Name: BS: Only Joke Thread You'll Need for 2020
Subject: RE: BS: Only Joke Thread You'll Need for 2020
"nun"
I've been a fan of joke-telling most of my life; it was reading Gershon Legman's two large analytical works under the title 'The Rationale of The Dirty Joke' (particularly volume two, 'No Laughing Matter' (The 'Dirty' Dirty Joke) which woke me up to the serious side of it
Legman was a strag=nge feller - his views of homosexuality as a 'hate-causing sickness' are downright offensive, mut a great deal of what he had to say is still well worth reading
It takes the subject far above the 'misogyny' stage to a much more complicated level

I come from an ex-Catholic, Irish background - my father was excommunicated for 'fighting on the losing side in the wrong war' in 1936'
He left Liverpool Collegiate having been an altar boy and returned from eing a prisone in Spain after having undergone irregular 'mock executions' which were officiated over by a priest who gave him the last rites before he was placed before a firing squad who went through the motions of execution before collapsing with laughter, joined by the priest, and left on the exercise yard soaked in his own piss
The fact that these were irregular make them worse in their unexpected nature

Woks like 'Ballad of a Raggy Boy' and the Magdalene Sisters show that behavior such as this didn't just happen 'out foreign' or in wartime; comparatively recent revelations that has damaged religion so much, probably irreparably, has shown how deep such behaviour went and for how long

My dad was a joke and humourous story teller (in the case of his very personal 'navvy stories' to 'masterpiece level) but he never mantioned priests and nuns - he always invited the visitor donation-collecting priest in to argue with him, but that was it
I think Legman's point that these jokes went far beyond the 'misogyny' stage and in many, fulfilled a deep, psychological need in some people

God - I hate being serious before breakfast
Jim
Jim