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Alan Dundes, UC Berkeley professor and world expert in folklore studies, dies
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Berkeley -- Alan Dundes, a popular and award-winning University of California, Berkeley, professor of anthropology and folklore who earned an international reputation for his Freudian deconstruction of everything from fairytales to football to the Book of Genesis, died Wednesday (March 30). He was 70.
Dundes collapsed Wednesday afternoon at Giannini Hall on campus while teaching a graduate seminar on folklore theory and techniques. Students called 911, and he was rushed to Alta Bates-Summit Medical Center in Berkeley, where officials said he was pronounced dead upon arrival of an apparent heart attack.
"To call Alan Dundes a giant in his field is a great understatement," said George Breslauer, a professor of political science and dean of the Division of Social Sciences in UC Berkeley's College of Letters & Science. "He virtually constructed the field of modern folklore studies and trained many of its most distinguished scholars. Anyone who has ever taken a class with Alan Dundes knows that it was an unforgettable experience."
Simon Bronner, Distinguished University Professor of American Studies and Folklore at Pennsylvania State University in Harrisburg and editor of the Encyclopedia of American Folklife, said Dundes "will undoubtedly go down in history as one of the most influential folklorists, indeed one of the most influential minds, the world has known. That mind had an incredible range, reaching into cultures around the globe, and all manner of material including literature, narratives, art, customs, speech and games. His specialty was not in a single genre, but in the provocative interpretation."
Delighting in what he called "the wit, humor and amazing creativity" found in folklore, Dundes said most people think folklore is found only in superstition, ritual, myths and fables. But he also studied contemporary cartoons, poems, jokes and other lore passed along from one person to another. In his book, "Never Try to Teach a Pig to Sing," he and co-author Carl Pagter analyzed modern folklore including T-shirt slogans, ethnic and sexual remarks, scatalogical humor, and exchanges distributed via office photocopy machines.
Dundes began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1963. His knowledge about cultural studies -- along with his unmistakable wit and charm -- made him a favorite among students and the media alike. Reporters knew to call him for help explaining the mystique of the vampire, the allure of violent sports, holiday traditions and even why the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1942.
In the classroom, Dundes earned a legion of fans among the thousands of students who took his courses, easily among the most sought after on campus. Dundes made such an impression that, in 2000, one of his undergraduate students from the 1960s sent him a check for $1 million. He used the anonymous gift to establish a UC Berkeley distinguished professorship in folkloristics.
Dan Melia, a UC Berkeley professor of rhetoric, called Dundes a "very meticulous scholar" who was "intellectually and personally generous."
That generosity was remembered by Beverly R. Ortiz, a lecturer in anthropology at California State University, East Bay, and a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at UC Berkeley. She met Dundes in his narrative folklore class during her first semester on campus in 1993.
"Perhaps Professor Dundes' most important academic legacy is the time he took to get to know his students as individuals," she said. "During office hours, students lined up to speak with him, and he always had sound, practical advice and a plethora of citations to share."
Under his guidance, UC Berkeley's anthropology department established a master's degree in folklore program that houses an archive of more than 500,000 items relating to folklore.
Dundes became one of the most cited scholars in the world, and many of the prolific author's writings are required reading for students in a number of fields, Bronner said.
Dundes is the author of more than 250 scholarly articles and a dozen books, including "Parsing Through Customs: Essays by a Freudian Folklorist," "The Vampire: A Casebook," "Cracking Jokes," "Holy Writ as Oral Lit: The Bible as Folklore" and "The Shabbat Elevator and Other Sabbath Subterfuges: An Unorthodox Study of Circumventing Custom and Jewish Character."
He co-authored or edited more than 20 books - tackling subjects including cockfighting, the evil eye, the relationship between anxiety and humor, and Cinderella -- and in 1965 edited "The Study of Folklore" to fill a void of textbooks about folklore. The book has since gone through 26 printings.
In the past year, the London-based Routledge publishing house issued "Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies," a mini-library about folklore that was edited by Dundes. "Anyone who reads these four volumes will know what folklore is," Dundes recently said. "There's nothing like this. This sort of stakes out the field."
His last book was "Recollecting Freud: Isidor Sadger." Dundes edited and introduced what he called a personal and insightful account by Sadger, one of Freud's earliest students, about the controversial psychoanalyst.
While Sadger was a devoted follower of Freud, he was considered more of a participant observer than a member of his inner circle. Freud and others were critical of Sadger's work, and after Sadger published his memoir about Freud in 1930, it essentially became lost.
Dundes learned of the book and searched around the world for one of the few remaining copies, which he located in a Japanese research library.
Bronner said Dundes' ideas, "captured in lively publications, will certainly live on for many generations to come because they are so incisively far-reaching, but we will miss his sharp wit and ready humor, the gleam in his eye after hearing a good 'text,' his distinctive quick-paced vocal delivery and most of all, his passion for knowledge exuberantly evident wherever he made an appearance," said Bronner.
In 2002, Dundes delivered a Commencement Convocation speech to UC Berkeley graduates at the Greek Theatre that exemplified his gift for rapid delivery as well as for imparting sage advice and non-stop laughs. At the end of his address, he fired off a long list of folk wisdom one-liners and a few other tips including: "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."
With characteristic caring, he told students to "take time to enjoy the present, savor the moment, take pleasure in 'now,' not worrying yourself to death about tomorrow ... American culture seems to denigrate and demean the present in a never-ending push towards a future which may or may not ever materialize."
Dundes was the first folklorist to be elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and won the Pitré Prize, an international lifetime achievement award in folklore, in 1993. He said he was very proud to have won UC Berkeley's Distinguished Teaching Award in 1994. Dundes was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966 and named a senior fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1972.
His wife of 48 years, Carolyn, said his hobbies included "work and more work." He also liked to watch baseball and football and wanted to live long enough to see the Cal Bears make it back to the Rose Bowl, she said. Dundes also loved books, she said, and every nook and cranny in their Berkeley home is filled with them.
Years ago, he wrote a centennial song for UC Berkeley that was played at one of the Bears' football games, his wife said. He wrote pieces for the San Francisco Opera for programs with folklore themes, such as "Little Red Riding Hood," she added.
A native of New York City and the son of a lawyer and a musician, Dundes was born in 1934.
Dundes studied music at Yale College but switched to English after two years. He earned his B.A. in English in 1955, was in the U.S. Navy for two years and returned to Yale to earn his M.A. in the teaching of English there in 1958. Carolyn Dundes said he was drawn to the material in literature and opted instead to pursue folklore studies. He earned a Ph.D. in folklore at Indiana University in 1962. He taught English at the University of Kansas for one year before coming to UC Berkeley's anthropology department.
His wife said he was teaching just one course this spring semester and planned to teach two classes for the first time during Summer Sessions. Although he sometimes talked about retiring, she said, he planned to continue teaching as long as he could.
The Dundes family suggests that memorial contributions be made to any UC Berkeley library.
Details of a campus memorial event will be announced later.
Survivors include his wife, Carolyn of Berkeley; son, David of Walnut Creek; daughters, Lauren Dundes Streiff of Owings Mills, Md., and Alison Dundes Renteln of Altadena, Calif.; and six grandchildren. Dundes' son is an information technology manager. Dundes Streiff is a professor of sociology, and Dundes Renteln is a professor of political science and anthropology.
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.
Page B - 5
BERKELEY
UC folklorist Dundes dies while teaching: His scholarship helped to create an academic discipline
- Charles Burress, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, April 1, 2005
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Friday, April 1, 2005
Renowned UC Berkeley folklorist Alan Dundes died Wednesday from an apparent heart attack suffered while teaching a graduate seminar on campus.
Dundes, 70, an internationally known figure whose enthusiasm and rigorous scholarship established folklore as a full-fledged academic discipline, died on the way to the Alta Bates-Summit Medical Center in Berkeley, campus officials said.
"Everybody's in shock," said the head archivist at Cal's Folklore Archive, Kelly Revak, her voice breaking as she passed the phone to a colleague.
He collapsed shortly before 4:30 p.m. while conducting a graduate seminar on folklore theory and techniques in Giannini Hall, campus officials said. Ten students are enrolled in the class.
His students found significance in the way he died, said Ryan Sayre, a master's candidate in folklore who was studying with Dundes.
"The fact that he died while he was teaching, while he was in mid- sentence, was very meaningful for us students in that he was doing something that he loves to do, and that's to share folklore with people," Sayre said.
Paramedics summoned to the scene were not able to revive him. He was pronounced dead at 5:41 p.m. at Alta Bates, said hospital spokeswoman Carolyn Kemp.
Hardly any subject was off-limits for Dundes, whose infectious enthusiasm tackled topics ranging from fairy tales to ethnic jokes, from football to Freud.
His expansive knowledge, expressive language and creative interpretations made him an often-sought source by other scholars and the mass media.
Maureen Dowd quoted him in her March 13 New York Times column about gender roles. In February, a Washington Post writer reprised his controversial thesis about the homosexual symbolism of football.
A list of his scholarly work fills several pages, with more than 250 articles, 12 books that he wrote alone and more than 20 other books that he co- wrote or edited, including a new four-volume set of folklore readings.
"He was certainly the most famous academic folklorist in the world," said one of his faculty colleagues, Daniel Melia, who teaches rhetoric and Celtic studies.
He was such a giant in the field that he became the subject of folklore himself. A memorable article in the Journal of American Folklore was titled, " 'That Can't Be Alan Dundes! Alan Dundes Is Taller than That!': The Folklore of Folklorists." He also inspired the 1995 book, "Folklore Interpreted: Essays in Honor of Alan Dundes."
"He was really a pleasure to be with," Melia said. "When he got into his subject, he was always brimming with his ideas, eager to discuss it and argue and so on."
The regard for him has been so great that one of his former students sent him a check for $1 million in 2000. Dundes used the anonymous gift to set up a professorship in folkloristics.
Dundes is survived by his wife of 48 years, Carolyn, of Berkeley; a son, David, of Walnut Creek, two daughters, Lauren Dundes Streiff of Owings Mills, Md., and Alison Dundes Renteln of Altadena (Los Angeles County); and six grandchildren.
The family requests that any memorial contributions be made to UC Berkeley libraries. A memorial service is being planned.
Joke and Folklore Scholar Alan Dundes Dies
By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 1, 2005; Page B06
Alan Dundes, 70, a folklorist whose lively explorations of everything from the office memo to the Koran made him one of the most celebrated figures in his field, died March 30 at a hospital in Berkeley, Calif.
Dr. Dundes had a heart attack while teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, where he was a professor of anthropology and folklore.
He also was called, with equal measures of reverence and frivolity, the Joke Professor because of his scholarly studies with eye-catching titles. Among them: "Here I Sit: A Study of American Latrinalia" -- toilets; "Into the End Zone: A Psychoanalytic Consideration of American Football"; and "Six Inches From the Presidency," a review of jokes about former senator Gary Hart (D-Colo.), whose bid for the White House folded with a sex scandal.
Perhaps not unexpectedly, his Introduction to Folklore class was one of the most popular on campus, with huge waiting lists despite the auditorium-size classroom in which it was held. His enormous reading list and other requirements, which he used to emphasize the rigor he expected from his students, did not deter many.
He held, in the face of frequent skepticism, that the study of folklore was valuable for studying the values and beliefs of a society.
"The idea is commonly held that folklore is a positive force," he told the Los Angeles Times in 1995. "It must answer some kind of need. Today in Russia, for example, the Jews are being blamed for Communism. Or women as a group have been blamed for the Garden of Eden, Pandora's box and the cause of death and disease. Besides women as a group, gay groups and African Americans know all about bad folklore."
Dr. Dundes had an ample scholarly range, from Grimm Brothers fairy tales to the Ten Commandments, from bloodsucking vampires to Cinderella. He also made a vibrant study of everyday gross-out humor.
In "Cracking Jokes: Studies of Sick Humor Cycles and Stereotypes" (1987), he made the point that jokes with a sexual or racial edge are "effective as socially sanctioned outlets for expressing taboo ideas and subjects." He once said that jokes about quadriplegics stem from a public backlash to the disabled rights movement.
On occasion, he aroused controversy. American Jews protested and asked for his dismissal when a 1988 work of his, about German anti-Semitic jokes set in Auschwitz, was excerpted by Harper's magazine.
"As long as such jokes are told, the evil of Auschwitz will remain in the consciousness of Germans," Dr. Dundes said in the article, co-written with a German ethnologist. "They may seem a sorry and inadequate memorial for all the poor wretched souls who perished at Auschwitz, but when one realizes that comedy and tragedy are two sides of the same coin, we can perhaps understand why some contemporary Germans might need to resort to the mechanism of humor, albeit sick humor, to try to come to terms with the unimaginable and unthinkable horrors that did occur at Auschwitz."
Publishing his works was not always easy. He said it took a decade to find someone to print "Urban Folklore From the Paperwork Empire" (1975), a collection of photocopied jokes, cartoons, fake memos and letters from corporate and government bureaucracies.
The University of Texas Press printed the book but, he once said, "they were so embarrassed that they took their name off after the first edition."
Another volume, "When You're Up to Your Ass in Alligators: More Urban Folklore" (1987), explored blue jokes and sophomoric gags. He included the example of one taxpaying wag whose idea of a "simplified 1040 form" featured just two lines: "1. How much money did you make last year? 2. Send it in."
The book also celebrated office pranks. They were so prolific, he once said, because "not everyone can tell a joke. But anyone can operate a Xerox machine."
Dr. Dundes was born Sept. 8, 1934, in New York, where his father, a lawyer, brought home great jokes from his bridge buddies on the commuter train.
At Yale University, he received bachelor's and master's degrees in English. He found himself entranced by mythical and symbolic aspects of literature. In short, folklore. It was far from a respected or major field in academia. One of his advisers thought that there was one school "someplace in the Midwest" -- by which he meant Indiana University -- that offered folklore studies.
While working on his doctorate, he once turned in a series of jokes for a required course.
"Before then, it had never occurred to me to analyze the jokes I collected," he told the New Yorker. "But Vladimir Propp's 'Morphology of the Folktale' had just come out in English" -- the book was a scholarly study of Russian fairy tales -- "and I thought, 'Hey, this is a great methodology for jokes.' So I was early to hop on the structuralist bandwagon."
He joined the Berkeley faculty soon after graduating from Indiana University in 1962.
He published more than 250 pieces in scholarly journals, traveled to conferences worldwide and was quoted extensively in the media. He spoke about bears (great on Wall Street, mean in some fairy tales), the importance of table manners, the significance of jokes about blondes, the survivalist movement and the need for father figures in politics.
"The underlying psychology of elections is about sports and war, where women were not welcome," he once said.
At Berkeley, he amassed a trove of world folklorica: jokes, riddles, proverbs and games whose origins and symbolism he had his students examine. He was beloved among students, and one from the 1960s anonymously sent a $1 million check to the university to establish a folklore professorship in his name. He received the school's Distinguished Teaching Award in 1994.
Survivors include his wife of 48 years, Carolyn Browne Dundes of Berkeley; three children, Alison Dundes Renteln of Altadena, Calif., Lauren Dundes Streiff of Owings Mills, Md., and David Dundes of Walnut Creek, Calif.; a sister; and six grandchildren.
http://www.slumdance.com/blogs/brian_flemming/archives/001538.html
April 02, 2005
Alan Dundes, 1934-2005
So just now I was reviewing the interview footage I shot for The God Who Wasn't There, selecting some highlights for the special features part of the DVD. One of my favorite interviews was one I did about six weeks ago with Alan Dundes, professor of folklore at UC Berkeley. In the interview, Prof. Dundes is fascinating and funny--exactly what you'd expect from a giant in his field as well as one of the UC Berkeley students' favorite professors. He told jokes while simultaneously analyzing them--and somehow not ruining them in the process. He also opened up about his own life, talking about the heat he received for writing a book about the Qur'an as folklore--even from his own wife.
Googling him to make sure I got the title of one of his books right, I just found out he died four days ago. It's a bizarre contrast. On one screen on my desk, Alan Dundes is talking about how happy he is with his choices in life. On the other screen is his obituary. You know how when someone dies, people say, Hey, don't be sad, he lived a good life? Well, I practically have Alan Dundes himself right here saying, Hey, don't be sad, I lived a good life.
I'm still sad. Here's a clip of the great Alan Dundes.
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