Why Don't Sheep Shrink When it Rains: A Further Collection of Photocopier Folklore

One of the great advantages of folklore and of these photocopier materials is that, as Dundes and Pagter point out, it cannot be censored by those in authority, even though it may not make the office bulletin board. Much of the material collected here will be justly celebrated because it is offensive, tasteless and demeaning to a variety of groups: in particular, the items dealing with sheep or with bestiality will cause dismay and revulsion among immigrants from Wales.

Predictably, Dundes and Pagter tend to bring a Freudian interpretation to this kind of material. Likewise, Oedipal themes are identified in the farmer's daughter jokes, breast envy emerges as a correlate of penis envy, and the equivalence of milk and semen makes a guest appearance, though it has to be said that Dundes and Pagter missed a good opportunity to comment on the full ambiguities of the cartoon about deer hunting and killing human beings entitled "This one's barely legal." The book, though, is not crammed with psychoanalytic jargon. It is readable, amusing, insightful and very varied in the nature of the materials cited, the cross-referencing to other examples and sources, and in the way it builds on earlier empirical work and theoretical perspectives.

This is a book for the broad-church folklorist. It is an excellent successor to Dundes and Pagter's four earlier anthologies of photocopier folklore. I would, however, have liked a longer analysis of the way in which e-mail and the Internet may have shaped and changed the nature of "photocopier" folklore since the authors produced the first of their annotated collections.

Christie Davies, Faculty of Letters, University of Reading, UK

COPYRIGHT 2002 Folklore Society
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning