Decomposing Matters

It is so important to be forward thinking that even waste gets positivized.

The classic: Shit happens
Also: fertilizer occurs, feces emerges

"Backlogs, however, do occur" (unpublished thesis for M.A. in Rehabilitation Psychology, Caseload Management: Differentiation of Effectiveness 9).

from: http://www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/374064
reprint at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2098554/posts

David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'

An election-season essay

By David Mamet

published: March 11, 2008

John Maynard Keynes was twitted with changing his mind. He replied, "When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?"

My favorite example of a change of mind was Norman Mailer at The Village Voice.

Norman took on the role of drama critic, weighing in on the New York premiere of Waiting for Godot.

Twentieth century's greatest play. Without bothering to go, Mailer called it a piece of garbage.

When he did get around to seeing it, he realized his mistake. He was no longer a Voice columnist, however, so he bought a page in the paper and wrote a retraction, praising the play as the masterpiece it is.

Every playwright's dream.

I once won one of Mary Ann Madden's "Competitions" in New York magazine. The task was to name or create a "10" of anything, and mine was the World's Perfect Theatrical Review. It went like this: "I never understood the theater until last night. Please forgive everything I've ever written. When you read this I'll be dead." That, of course, is the only review anybody in the theater ever wants to get.

My prize, in a stunning example of irony, was a year's subscription to New York, which rag (apart from Mary Ann's "Competition") I considered an open running sore on the body of world literacy—this due to the presence in its pages of John Simon, whose stunning amalgam of superciliousness and savagery, over the years, was appreciated by that readership searching for an endorsement of proactive mediocrity.

But I digress.

---

I wrote a play about politics (November, Barrymore Theater, Broadway, some seats still available). And as part of the "writing process," as I believe it's called, I started thinking about politics. This comment is not actually as jejune as it might seem. Porgy and Bess is a buncha good songs but has nothing to do with race relations, which is the flag of convenience under which it sailed.

But my play, it turned out, was actually about politics, which is to say, about the polemic between persons of two opposing views. The argument in my play is between a president who is self-interested, corrupt, suborned, and realistic, and his leftish, lesbian, utopian-socialist speechwriter.

The play, while being a laugh a minute, is, when it's at home, a disputation between reason and faith, or perhaps between the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist) view. The conservative president in the piece holds that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention.

I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. "?" she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and to NPR as "National Palestinian Radio."

This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.

But in my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes of which I was at various times a part.

And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.

---

I'd observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.

For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to be their proper interests.

To that end, the Constitution separates the power of the state into those three branches which are for most of us (I include myself) the only thing we remember from 12 years of schooling.

The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long.

Rather brilliant. For, in the abstract, we may envision an Olympian perfection of perfect beings in Washington doing the business of their employers, the people, but any of us who has ever been at a zoning meeting with our property at stake is aware of the urge to cut through all the pernicious bullshit and go straight to firearms.

I found not only that I didn't trust the current government (that, to me, was no surprise), but that an impartial review revealed that the faults of this president—whom I, a good liberal, considered a monster—were little different from those of a president whom I revered.

Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh.

And I began to question my hatred for "the Corporations"—the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live.

And I began to question my distrust of the "Bad, Bad Military" of my youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very hostile world. Is the military always right? No. Neither is government, nor are the corporations—they are just different signposts for the particular amalgamation of our country into separate working groups, if you will. Are these groups infallible, free from the possibility of mismanagement, corruption, or crime? No, and neither are you or I. So, taking the tragic view, the question was not "Is everything perfect?" but "How could it be better, at what cost, and according to whose definition?" Put into which form, things appeared to me to be unfolding pretty well.

---

Do I speak as a member of the "privileged class"? If you will—but classes in the United States are mobile, not static, which is the Marxist view. That is: Immigrants came and continue to come here penniless and can (and do) become rich; the nerd makes a trillion dollars; the single mother, penniless and ignorant of English, sends her two sons to college (my grandmother). On the other hand, the rich and the children of the rich can go belly-up; the hegemony of the railroads is appropriated by the airlines, that of the networks by the Internet; and the individual may and probably will change status more than once within his lifetime.

What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.

But if the government is not to intervene, how will we, mere human beings, work it all out?

I wondered and read, and it occurred to me that I knew the answer, and here it is: We just seem to. How do I know? From experience. I referred to my own—take away the director from the staged play and what do you get? Usually a diminution of strife, a shorter rehearsal period, and a better production.

The director, generally, does not cause strife, but his or her presence impels the actors to direct (and manufacture) claims designed to appeal to Authority—that is, to set aside the original goal (staging a play for the audience) and indulge in politics, the purpose of which may be to gain status and influence outside the ostensible goal of the endeavor.

Strand unacquainted bus travelers in the middle of the night, and what do you get? A lot of bad drama, and a shake-and-bake Mayflower Compact. Each, instantly, adds what he or she can to the solution. Why? Each wants, and in fact needs, to contribute—to throw into the pot what gifts each has in order to achieve the overall goal, as well as status in the new-formed community. And so they work it out.

See also that most magnificent of schools, the jury system, where, again, each brings nothing into the room save his or her own prejudices, and, through the course of deliberation, comes not to a perfect solution, but a solution acceptable to the community—a solution the community can live with.

Prior to the midterm elections, my rabbi was taking a lot of flack. The congregation is exclusively liberal, he is a self-described independent (read "conservative"), and he was driving the flock wild. Why? Because a) he never discussed politics; and b) he taught that the quality of political discourse must be addressed first—that Jewish law teaches that it is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow out.

And so I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to attempt to do so. And in doing so, I recognized that I held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).

And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.

---

"Aha," you will say, and you are right. I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

At the same time, I was writing my play about a president, corrupt, venal, cunning, and vengeful (as I assume all of them are), and two turkeys. And I gave this fictional president a speechwriter who, in his view, is a "brain-dead liberal," much like my earlier self; and in the course of the play, they have to work it out. And they eventually do come to a human understanding of the political process. As I believe I am trying to do, and in which I believe I may be succeeding, and I will try to summarize it in the words of William Allen White.

White was for 40 years the editor of the Emporia Gazette in rural Kansas, and a prominent and powerful political commentator. He was a great friend of Theodore Roosevelt and wrote the best book I've ever read about the presidency. It's called Masks in a Pageant, and it profiles presidents from McKinley to Wilson, and I recommend it unreservedly.

White was a pretty clear-headed man, and he'd seen human nature as few can. (As Twain wrote, you want to understand men, run a country paper.) White knew that people need both to get ahead and to get along, and that they're always working at one or the other, and that government should most probably stay out of the way and let them get on with it. But, he added, there is such a thing as liberalism, and it may be reduced to these saddest of words: " . . . and yet . . . "

The right is mooing about faith, the left is mooing about change, and many are incensed about the fools on the other side—but, at the end of the day, they are the same folks we meet at the water cooler. Happy election season.

=====================================

See also:

http://books.google.com/books?id=Ydr9vp-M8WkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Wicked+Son&lr=&as_brr=3&ei=NphSSv27A47ilASI97jTAg

http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=3917

Maybe when I hang out my shingle it will say.

Skulduggery

Fascinated by Scottish adultery (sculdudrie) and sculduddery (bawdry and obscenity), and other euphemisms of uncertain origin since 1856!

Proctologisms

It is important to note that, should existing language distinguishing assholes from buttheads prove insufficient, you might want to consider creating a proctologism.

Rectal Advertising

"They" know it matters. Do you?

Neil Postman – Bullshit and the Art of Crap-Detection

reproduced from from Tim van Gelder's http://criticalsnips.wordpress.com/2007/07/22/neil-postman-bullshit-and-the-art-of-crap-detection/

Neil Postman’s classic essay Bullshit and the Art of Crap-Detection. Contains a handy taxonomy of forms of bullshit, and some useful “laws” such as: Almost nothing is about what you think it is about–including you.”

I’ve copied it here in this post just to help ensure it remains easily available on the web.

“Bullshit and the Art of Crap-Detection”

by Neil Postman

(Delivered at the National Convention for the Teachers of English [NCTE], November 28, 1969, Washington, D.C.)

With a title like this, I think I ought to dispense with the rhetorical amenities and come straight to the point. For those of you who do not know, it may be worth saying that the phrase, “crap-detecting,” originated with Ernest Hemingway who when asked if there were one quality needed, above all others, to be a good writer, replied, “Yes, a built-in, shock-proof, crap detector.”

As I see it, the best things schools can do for kids is to help them learn how to distinguish useful talk from bullshit. I will ask only that you agree that every day in almost every way people are exposed to more bullshit than it is healthy for them to endure, and that if we can help them to recognize this fact, they might turn away from it and toward language that might do them some earthly good.

There are so many varieties of bullshit I couldn’t hope to mention but a few, and elaborate on even fewer. I will, therefore, select those varieties that have some transcendent significance.

Now, that last sentence is a perfectly good example of bullshit, since I have no idea what the words “transcendent significance” might mean and neither do you. I needed something to end that sentence with and since I did not have any clear criteria by which to select my examples, I figured this was the place for some big-time words.

Pomposity:
Pomposity is not an especially venal form of bullshit, although it is by no means harmless. There are plenty of people who are daily victimized by pomposity in that they are made to feel less worthy than they have a right to feel by people who use fancy titles, words, phrases, and sentences to obscure their own insufficiencies.

Fanaticism:
A much more malignant form of bullshit than pomposity is what some people call fanaticism. Now, there is one type of fanaticism of which I will say very little, because it is so vulgar and obvious — bigotry. But there are other forms of fanaticism that are not so obvious, and therefore perhaps more dangerous than bigotry

Eichmannism is a relatively new form of fanaticism, and perhaps it should be given its own special place among the great and near-great varieties of bullshit. The essence of fanaticism is that it has almost no tolerance for any data that do not confirm its own point of view.

Eichmannism is especially dangerous because it is so utterly banal. Some of the nicest people turn out to be mini-Eichmanns. When Eichmann was in the dock in Jerusalem, he actually said that some of his best friends were Jews. And the horror of it is that he was probably telling the truth, for there is nothing personal about Eichmannism. It is the language of regulations, and includes such logical sentences as, “If we do it for one, we have to do it for all.” Can you imagine some wretched Jew pleading to have his children spared from the gas chamber? What could be more fair, more neutral, than for some administrator to reply, “If we do it for one, we have to do it for all.”

Inanity:
This is a form of talk which pays a large but, I would think, relatively harmless role in our personal lives. But with the development of the mass media, inanity has suddenly emerged as a major form of language in public matters. The invention of new and various kinds of communication has given a voice and an audience to many people whose opinions would otherwise not be solicited, and who, in fact, have little else but verbal excrement to contribute to public issues. Many of these people are entertainers. The press and air waves are filled with the featured and prime-time statements from people who are in no position to render informed judgments on what they are talking about and yet render them with elan and, above all, sincerity. Inanity, then, is ignorance presented in the cloak of sincerity.

Superstition:
Superstition is ignorance presented in the cloak of authority. A superstition is a belief, usually expressed in authoritative terms for which there is no factual or scientific basis. Like, for instance, that the country in which you live is a finer place, all things considered, than other countries. Or that the religion into which you were born confers upon you some special standing with the cosmos that is denied other people. I will refrain from commenting further on that, except to say that when I hear such talk by own crap-detector achieves unparalleled spasms of activity.

If teachers were to take an enthusiastic interest in what language is about, each teacher would have fairly serious problems to resolve. For instance, you can’t identify bullshit the way you identify phonemes. That is why I have called crap-detecting an art. Although subjects like semantics, rhetoric, or logic seem to provide techniques for crap-detecting, we are not dealing here, for the most part, with a technical problem.

Each person’s crap-detector is embedded in their value system; if you want to teach the art of crap-detecting, you must help students become aware of their values. After all, Vice President, Spiro Agnew, or his writers, know as much about semantics as anyone in this room. What he is lacking has very little to do with technique, and almost everything to do with values.

Now, I realize that what I just said sounds fairly pompous in itself, if not arrogant, but there is no escaping from saying what attitudes you value if you want to talk about crap-detecting.

In other words, bullshit is what you call language that treats people in ways you do not approve of.

So any teacher who is interested in crap-detecting must acknowledge that one man’s bullshit is another man’s catechism. Students should be taught to learn how to recognize bullshit, including their own.

It seems to me one needs, first and foremost, to have a keen sense of the ridiculous. Maybe I mean to say, a sense of our impending death. About the only advantage that comes from our knowledge of the inevitability of death is that we know that whatever is happening is going to go away. Most of us try to put this thought out of our minds, but I am saying that it ought to be kept firmly there, so that we can fully appreciate how ridiculous most of our enthusiasms and even depressions are.

Reflections on one’s mortality curiously makes one come alive to the incredible amounts of inanity and fanaticism that surround us, much of which is inflicted on us by ourselves. Which brings me to the next point, best stated as Postman’s Third Law:

“At any given time, the chief source of bullshit with which you have to contend is yourself.”

The reason for this is explained in Postman’s Fourth Law, which is;

“Almost nothing is about what you think it is about–including you.”

With the possible exception of those human encounters that Fritz Peris calls “intimacy,” all human communications have deeply embedded and profound hidden agendas. Most of the conversation at the top can be assumed to be bullshit of one variety or another.

An idealist usually cannot acknowledge his own bullshit, because it is in the nature of his “ism” that he must pretend it does not exist. In fact, I should say that anyone who is devoted to an “ism”–Fascism, Communism, Capital-ism–probably has a seriously defective crap-detector. This is especially true of those devoted to “patriotism.” Santha Rama Rau has called patriotism a squalid emotion. I agree. Mainly because I find it hard to escape the conclusion that those most enmeshed in it hear no bullshit whatever in its rhetoric, and as a consequence are extremely dangerous to other people. If you doubt this, I want to remind you that murder for murder, General Westmoreland makes Vito Genovese look like a Flower Child.

Another way of saying this is that all ideologies are saturated with bullshit, and a wise man will observe Herbert Read’s advice: “Never trust any group larger than a squad.”

So you see, when it comes right down to it, crap-detection is something one does when he starts to become a certain type of person. Sensitivity to the phony uses of language requires, to some extent, knowledge of how to ask questions, how to validate answers, and certainly, how to assess meanings.

I said at the beginning that I thought there is nothing more important than for kids to learn how to identify fake communication. You, therefore, probably assume that I know something about now to achieve this. Well, I don’t. At least not very much. I know that our present curricula do not even touch on the matter. Neither do our present methods of training teachers. I am not even sure that classrooms and schools can be reformed enough so that critical and lively people can be nurtured there.

Nonetheless, I persist in believing that it is not beyond your profession to invent ways to educate youth along these lines. (Because) there is no more precious environment than our language environment. And even if you know you will be dead soon, that’s worth protecting.

Just Parsing Through

Alan Dundes
King of pissing people off in a necessary way,
Plenipotentiary carrier forward of the psychoanalytic cynical tradition,
Most fabulous oppositional upholder of psychological scientism neologized as Folkloristics,
Excellent, generous, and widely loved human being,
Shit, I'm gonna miss'im.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

APRIL 2, 2005

Alan Dundes, 70, Folklorist Who Studied Human Custom, Dies

By MARGALIT FOX

Alan Dundes, an internationally renowned folklorist who explored - rigorously, engagingly and often provocatively - a vast spectrum of human custom and belief, died on Wednesday after collapsing while teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. He was 70 and lived in Berkeley.

The apparent cause was a heart attack, according to the university, where he had been a member of the anthropology department for more than four decades.

Widely credited with helping to shape modern folklore scholarship, Dr. Dundes was best known for his Freudian interpretations of everything from jokes and folktales to cockfighting and contact sports.

"As a psychoanalytic folklorist," he once wrote, "my professional goals are to make sense of nonsense, find a rationale for the irrational and seek to make the unconscious conscious."

Among his many books are "The Shabbat Elevator and Other Sabbath Subterfuges" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); "Why Don't Sheep Shrink When It Rains? A Further Collection of Photocopier Folklore" (Syracuse University, 2000, with Carl R. Pagter); and "Cracking Jokes: Studies of Sick Humor Cycles & Stereotypes" (Ten Speed Press, 1987).

Naturally, Dr. Dundes studied traditional folklore genres like superstitions, fairy tales, riddles and proverbs. But he also turned his scholarly attention to flourishing strains of popular culture, including chain letters, light-bulb jokes and bathroom graffiti.

Customs like these, Dr. Dundes observed, were windows on the social and psychological landscape. "Folklore furnishes a socially sanctioned outlet for cultural pressure points and individual anxieties," he wrote in "Interpreting Folklore" (Indiana University, 1980).

Few aspects of culture escaped his scrutiny. If people did it, said it, made it, wrote it, or believed in it, Dr. Dundes wanted to know why. He examined the folklore of wishing wells; the theme of the walled-up wife (think "Jane Eyre"); the psychological underpinnings of sick jokes (think Helen Keller); Choctaw tongue-twisters; the pervasiveness in American culture of the number three (think bears, little pigs, little kittens); Turkish verbal dueling rhymes; the psychoanalytic implications of the bullroarer; ethnic stereotyping; and the humorous folklore-on-paper born of the office copy machine.

"Folklore is not a matter of running down little wart cures," Dr. Dundes told The New York Times in 1985. "It is a serious subject that deals with the essence of life."

Alan Dundes was born in New York City on Sept. 8, 1934. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in English from Yale and, in 1962, a Ph.D. in folklore from Indiana University. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1963.

Dr. Dundes was so highly regarded as a teacher that in 2000, a former student sent him a check for $1 million; he used it to endow a distinguished professorship in folklore at Berkeley. In 2001, he became the first folklorist elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Dundes is survived by his wife, Carolyn; a son, David, of Walnut Creek, Calif.; two daughters: Lauren Dundes Streiff of Owings Mills, Md., and Alison Dundes Renteln of Altadena, Calif.; and six grandchildren.

Where folklorists of the past had concentrated on amassing data, taking to the hills to collect stories and ballads, Dr. Dundes stressed the need for interpretation and analysis. "The problem is that the fundamental question of meaning is never raised or discussed at all," he wrote in "Interpreting Folklore." "Why should a particular custom or belief like the evil eye exist in the first place?"

Dr. Dundes was sometimes criticized for taking the psychoanalytic approach to unverifiable extremes. In one article, for example, he offered a psychosexual reading of the Apollo moon landing. ("Apollo the sun is the brother of Diana the moon. Thus mythologically speaking we have a brother trying to reach or land on his sister.")

But he maintained that such an approach could reveal the hidden layers of meaning beneath popular practices. Take ethnic stereotyping. In many jokes told by Americans, the English are portrayed as stuffy, blundering and humorless. These jokes, Dr. Dundes argued, reflect Americans' residual feelings of inferiority as former British colonials. Consider the following:

"A man named Strange dies. According to his wishes, he is buried under a blank tombstone. People walk by, see the blank tombstone and say, 'That's strange.' Each visitor to the town would be shown the stone and told the story. An Englishman saw it, heard the story and recounts the incident to friends upon his return to England: A man named Strange dies. According to his wishes, he is buried under a blank tombstone. People would walk by, see the blank tombstone and say, 'How very peculiar!' "

---

OBITUARIES

Alan Dundes, 70; Folklorist Drew Laughs and Hostility

By Myrna Oliver
Times Staff Writer

LOS ANGELES TIMES
April 3, 2005

Alan Dundes, the UC Berkeley anthropology professor who gleefully applied Freudian analysis to his version of folklore — which included fairy tales, football, the Bible and photocopier jokes — and amused and angered readers as he went, has died. He was 70.

Dundes died of an apparent heart attack Wednesday after collapsing in Berkeley's Giannini Hall while teaching a graduate seminar. He was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.

"As a psychoanalytic folklorist," Dundes once said, "my professional goals are to make sense of nonsense, find a rationale for the irrational, and seek to make the unconscious conscious."

Spewing out publications almost as fast as he could rattle off ethnic and knock-knock jokes in the classroom, Dundes wrote some 250 scholarly papers and a dozen books and co-wrote or edited 20 more. They covered such topics as the evil eye, Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood, cockfights, vampires, castes and sick jokes. All of them found readers, and hardly any were without controversy.

Half a dozen of the books, written with Carl R. Pagter from 1975 through 2000, dealt with, as their subtitles described, "Urban Folklore From the Paperwork Empire." Among the titles were "When You're Up to Your Ass in Alligators," "Never Try to Teach a Pig to Sing," "Sometimes the Dragon Wins" and "Why Don't Sheep Shrink When It Rains?"

Dundes described "paperwork empire folklore" for The Times in 1975 as the proliferating contemporary jokes, cartoons and fake office memos about racism, politics, women's liberation, automation, alienation, student riots, welfare excesses, bureaucracy, sex and other subjects. Because the items were politically incorrect and usually in bad taste, it took him 10 years to get his first book published.

"It's the autobiography of a people," he said. "Through humor, the most serious issues of the day are being aired."

Dundes irked theologians with his 1980 paper describing the life of Jesus as "a very special version of the standard Indo-European hero pattern" found in folk tales for thousands of years. He miffed a few more when he edited "Holy Writ as Oral Lit: The Bible as Folklore" in 1999, claiming the variations on scriptural stories demonstrated that the Old Testament began as oral tales told around campfires.

He angered Germans with his 1984 book "Life is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder: A Portrait of German Culture through Folklore," in which he described the German predilection for scatology and related it to the slaughters of millions of Jews in the Holocaust.

When he presented a summary of the book to the American Folklore Society as its president in 1980, some colleagues walked out, others threw things at him, and still others marched to the podium and draped him in toilet paper. Columbia University Press tried to get out of publishing the book, and when it finally published it, printed fewer than 1,000 copies.

His response was, in 1989, to have Wayne State University Press publish his updated "Life is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder: A Study of the German National Character through Folklore."

Although Dundes was Jewish, he offended Jews when he published a 1983 paper about Auschwitz jokes, which prompted demands that he be fired. He angered Jews further with papers on Jewish mother jokes and Jewish American princess jokes.

Another of his papers that raised eyebrows examined bathroom graffiti: "Here I Sit: A Study in American Latrinalia."

But Dundes may have sparked the greatest mainstream outrage with his 1978 paper in the Western Folklore academic journal titled "Into the Endzone for a Touchdown: A Psychoanalytic Consideration of American Football."

When Time magazine ran a story on his paper, noting that Dundes considered football "a ritualized form of homosexual rape," enraged football fans sent the professor death threats.

In its essence, Dundes, an avid fan of the UC Berkeley football team, concluded in his study, "American football is an adolescent masculinity initiation ritual in which the winner gets into the loser's end zone more times than the loser gets into his."

Dundes presumably could have avoided controversy if he had stuck to collecting, classifying and describing jokes, folk tales and superstitions. It was the analysis that always got him into hot water.

"Folklorists are not without dullness," he told The Times in 1986. "Some of them have huge card files, with great masses of data, but they make no judgments. I want to get beyond description…. I want to figure out what this stuff means."

Dundes conceded that he loved the controversy that lifted him out of the obscurity of academe.

"The beauty of folklore is that it isn't typical academic work," he told The Times. "You aren't chronicling the life and times of some obscure fish in the waters off Baja California. You're dealing with real people in everyday life."

Dundes' Introduction to Folklore class packed a 400-seat classroom and had a waiting list. He could have students rolling in the aisles with rapid-fire dead baby or yo' mama jokes, and then hold their attention as he explained why they were laughing.

He won the campus' Distinguished Teaching Award in 1994 and was asked to address a Commencement Convocation in 2002, imparting such advice to the graduates as: "For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism"; "If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried"; and "It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others."

By requiring each of his students to submit 50 bits of folklore — jokes, proverbs, myths, riddles, games, customs, pranks, limericks, parodies, puns, yells, dances, gestures, graffiti — Dundes supplemented his own research to provide the Berkeley anthropology department an archive of more than 500,000 items of folklore.

He was instrumental in creating the school's master's program in folklore.

"To call Alan Dundes a giant in his field is a great understatement," George Breslauer, dean of the UC Berkeley division of social sciences, said in a written statement after Dundes' death. "He virtually constructed the field of modern folklore studies…. "

In 2000, one of Dundes' grateful students from the 1960s sent a check for $1 million to endow an anthropology professorship in his name.

"His reaction was incredulity," Dundes' wife, Carolyn, told the Contra Costa Times at the time. "He ran around the house, squawking like a chicken and barking like a dog."

Born Sept. 8, 1934, in New York City to a lawyer father and musician mother, Dundes earned bachelor's and master's degrees in English. But he found himself more intrigued by the folk stories lurking behind the writing of James Joyce and William Butler Yeats than by their finished literature. So he switched to folklore, earning a doctorate from Indiana University, the only school in the country providing the degree at that time.

He taught English for a year at the University of Kansas before joining the UC Berkeley faculty.

Dundes is survived by his wife of 47 years; a son, David, of Walnut Creek; two daughters, Lauren Dundes Streiff of Owings Mills, Md., and Alison Dundes Renteln of Altadena; and six grandchildren.

The family has asked that memorial contributions be sent to any UC Berkeley library.