Alan Dundes liked to study uncomfortable jokes and the people who tell them. His 1979 study called The Dead Baby Joke Cycle, published in the journal Western Folklore, explains:
“Dead baby jokes are not for the squeamish or the faint of heart. They are told mostly by American adolescents of both sexes in joke-telling sessions with the intent to shock or disgust listeners. ‘Oh how gross!’ is a common (and evidently desired) response to a dead baby joke. Teenage informants of the 1960s and 1970s indicate that dead baby jokes were often used in a ‘gross out’ in which each participant tries to outdo previous joke-tellers in recounting unsavoury or crude folkloristic items.”
To Dundes, when a large group of people persistently make uncomfortable jokes about something, it’s something they are uncomfortable about. Thus, he writes, dead baby jokes are popular in the US because of “the traditional failure of Americans to discuss disease and death openly … many Americans prefer not to say that an individual is dead or has died.”
Dundes, a longtime professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, is himself dead, having died in 2005.
He appreciatively blamed England for introducing “sick humour” to the US, arguing that…
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.