Naughty saucy dirty funny

When a federal appeals court judge who is presiding over an obscenity trial is himself revealed to have a "porn stash" on a personal website, as happened a couple of weeks ago, some might get indignant. Others might titter. But what if it turns out that the judge in question, Alex Kozinski of the 9th Circuit court, is a connoisseur not so much of hard-core porn as of raunchy humor? That the stash was more about laughs than about titillation? Well, in that case, it's a completely different story. As Kozinski's wife wrote to a local blogger shortly after the story broke, "Alex is not into porn -- he is into funny -- and sometimes funny has a sexual character."

Sometimes? Nearly always, according to Sigmund Freud. The whole point of humor, Freud thought, is to get around our inhibitions. Most of us in our daily lives expend a certain amount of psychic energy in keeping our sexual impulses at bay. (If we didn't, civilization would be rather a mess.) A naughty joke -- whether verbal or visual -- catches our inner censor off guard and liberates these dangerous impulses, if only for a moment. The result is a discharge of nervous energy through the facial and respiratory muscles: in a word, laughter.

So is there anything untoward about a taste for what Judge Kozinski's wife acknowledged was "raunchy," "crude" and "juvenile" humor? Not if Freud was right. The very ability to enjoy such humor means that you must be investing a good deal of energy in keeping your animal side in check. You are at least trying to be civilized. A dirty joke is an uprising against the bourgeois morality that enslaves most of us most of the time (and a good thing too). We can rejoice in its defeat only because that defeat is brief and inconsequential. In fact, our laughter itself brings the little uprising to an end. As most of us have discovered, laughter's a pretty strong anti-aphrodisiac.

There are, of course, those who are so innocent of improper impulses as to be beyond the reach of lewd humor. A while back, shortly after Bill Clinton went on a successful diet, someone cracked, "Clinton's lost so much weight, now he can see his intern." This struck me as a pretty good joke, so I repeated it to several of my rock-ribbed Republican friends, thinking that they would enjoy a little mockery of the former president. But the joke left them nonplused. "I don't get it," was the universal reaction. To the pure, all things are pure.