Rodney Dale

First published in 1984 by

Gerlad Duckworth & Co Ltd

The Old Piano Factory

43 Gloucester Crescent, London NW1

© 1984 by Rodney Dale

All rights reserved

ISBN 0 7156 1759 1

My colleague on the platform was one of America's leading folklorists, Professor Jan (pronounced, appropriately enough, Yarn) Harold Brunvand, who had recently published The Vanishing Hitchhiker, a collection of American 'urban legends'. I commend this book to you and thank Jan for allowing me to use some of the stories from his collection.

The Tumour in the Whale gave rise to a remarkable display of mass apathy, though some people - including the publisher - thought that it was the title which put people off. However, it would appear to have become essential reading for the professional collector of 'urban legends', and that is why I am pushing on the work by revising some of the old stories and adding much new material which has come my way since.

Ever since the dawn of time, before the days of television, man has felt the need to exercise God's glorious gift of speech by talking to his fellows. Story telling obviously meets several needs: it fills silences on long winter evenings, it preserves knowledge and traditions, and - by no means least - it confers a special aura upon the teller: the camp-fire personality.

Some of the stories told are obviously funny (or supposedly funny) – the joke and the shaggy dog story for example. Some are not meant to be funny – folk tales and ghost stories, for example - whose reception will vary according to the guise in which they are served. If we are warned that we are about to hear a ghost story, our minds may put themselves into that mode which suspends disbelief and makes the heart pump faster.

In some ways, the urban legend is the folk tale of the present, but it differs from the folk tale in that it is of paramount importance that the hearer should believe that it is true. This is why 'it is common practice for the artless teller to seek to impart that belief [in its truth] to his listeners by affecting kinship, or at least a lifelong intimacy, with the protagonist of the adventure related' (Alexander Woollcott).

Aficionados of the urban legend will immediately see that by its opening will ye know it: 'A strange thing happened to a friend of mine ...' These opening words, necessary to establish the truth of the story, in themselves mark it as untrue.

Another characteristic which ensures that the urban legend is not seen as a joke is its generally unpleasant or ghastly character, as witnessed by many examples in this book. This also gives those who seek such pleasures an almost legitimate means of referring to unpleasant or taboo subjects in otherwise polite company. Apparent seriousness of purpose is here essential to avoid ostracism.

To make sure that it is taken seriously, the urban legend must be credible, even if it is somewhat far-fetched; the manner of telling is such that probing the story is discouraged. When challenged, most amateur (by which I mean those who do not collect and write about them) tellers of urban legends seek strenuously to adduce further instant evidence that what they have said is true. This demonstrates what one might call the Pelion-Ossa syndrome - the more a person's tale is questioned, the more is he likely to wind himself deeper and deeper into the mud of unjustified and unjustifiable defence.

A story has just come to hand which illustrates this perfectly.

A friend (not in the urban legend sense) of mine attended a public relations gathering to mark the opening of a production line. There, she met someone who told her of an occasion where a man had been pushed by a robot into a press which produced the bonnet of a certain model of motor car. Well, it was too late to save him, so they decided to wait until the end of the shift, rather than disrupt the line. And every car built that shift bears the shape of the man impressed into its bonnet.

When my friend heard this she immediately exclaimed: 'I don't believe you!' 'What do you mean?' replied the teller, much offended, 'Of course it's true, it really happened to a friend of mine. He told me about it and there's this really funny dent in his car bonnet ...'

The conventions of politeness therefore help the urban legend to survive. If we were brutally honest (and perhaps if we know the teller well enough, we are) we would say: 'Come off it, I heard that last week/years ago, and it didn't happen in Troon/Llanwit Major, it happened in Market Harborough/Bootle to a friend of mine.' On the other hand, the anaesthetic of the teller's claiming the story to be true sometimes robs us of all memory of having heard it before. I have certainly noticed myself taking a different attitude to anecdotal conversation since I started collecting urban legends, and others have remarked the same thing.

There is often a certain topicality in the urban legend: another of its hallmarks. When sharks were 'in', for example, there was the surfer accosted by a shark, which took a bite out of his 'solid fibreglass surf-board'. Then we started to hear of incidents in which the shark sliced the surf-board in half – 'Suddenly it went under and surfaced behind me. The next thing I knew it had bitten my bottom.' Later topicalities include microwave ovens and – latest of all at the time of going to press – the Falklands Adventure.

There is, of course, another explanation for some urban legends. They can serve as awful warnings – don't put your poodle in the microwave oven, don't give lifts to little old ladies (they might have meat cleavers concealed in their handbags) and so on. To suggest to a child that it should not accept sweets from strange men merely gives rise to the question: 'Why?' To tell a story about someone who accepted sweets from strange men with some gruesome consequence, may seem somewhat macabre – and possibly contrary to this month's notions of child rearing – but it will certainly answer any questions before they are asked.

The etymology of this word has a great deal to answer for, as it no doubt keeps the popular idea alive. Certain animals, to wit the lobster and the crayfish, have teeth in their stomachs; but, as far as we know, they do not possess the power of producing audible sound by means of those organs.

On this subject, Prof. Huxley, FRS, says: 'What is called ventriloquism (speaking from the belly), and is not uncommonly ascribed to a mysterious power of producing voice somewhere else than in the larynx, depends entirely upon the accuracy with which the performer can simulate sounds of a particular character, and upon the skill with which he can suggest a belief in the existence of the causes of these sounds ...

Clearly, the urban legends of yesterday may become the jokes of today, as understanding of the underlying principles spreads. My old Granny used to tell a story:

Since I was very young at the time and needed to know more about this, Granny explained that it was an old tramp (presumably equipped with a ladder?) who had taken the boots and left the note. I felt very glad for that old tramp.

As I have said, the urban legend has to be distinguished from a joke, whose purpose is to amuse the listener. For this reason, its core has to be anything but funny, and is often downright unpleasant. I say 'its core' because there are certainly many which do raise some sort of laugh, but when they do, they do so without its detracting from the apparent truth of the story.

Often, the humour of the urban legend is the humour of relief. My Grandfather told of an incident (incident – there's a word for you) in the trenches in the First World War when a brother officer clambered up in the wrong place and 'was cut in half with a burst of machine-gun fire. His top half fell down, and the legs remained standing for a time before they, too, toppled over.'

My Grandfather's reaction was to laugh. This is nothing like the laughter of humour, however. It is compounded of ... Horror? Relief that it didn't happen to you? And if you didn't laugh, what would you do?

So does Bottom say (MND Ill. l): 'I will walk up and down here, and I will sing, that they shall hear that I am not afraid'; it is whistling in the dark.

We can share our tears as we can share our laughter. When someone dies we can reduce our grief by sharing it – there is an indescribably pleasurable pain in breaking the news to others. Is it that we are gaining attention for ourselves by being the bearers of sad tidings? Certainly there is some element of reflected glory in telling some anecdote of the deceased – de mortuis nil nisi bonum – the banal and the trivial assume an inflated importance until our memory of the departed comes into perspective, and the anecdotes sink back into their triviality. There is no doubt that people closely connected with bad news tend to share it with anyone at hand, including those who have little interest (a 'head-dropper', for that is their reaction), and that equally those less closely connected with it may tighten their assumed connections.

While on the subject of sharing grief, it is worth pointing out that in the world of film, the weepie (not to mention the horror movie) has as strong a place as the comic.

If you care to think on, you might wonder why, if the X-film is denounced as likely to incite people to violence and depravity, the comic film is not denounced as likely to incite people to hilarity and levity, and to bring into question the gravity of the church, the law, the civil service, parliament and so on. If anyone thinks that the vulgar literature, sports and pastimes of today are likely to deprave, corrupt and incite violence, he had better take a look at those of yesteryear.

In a short story, Isaac Asimov suggests that sense of humour was a gift bestowed on the race by extraterrestrial watchers. This gift, Asimov wrote, was a control in a giant experiment – jokes were introduced by the experimenters, and as long as the subjects kept laughing, it was known that they hadn't rumbled that they were being observed. One day, it was realised that jokes were never seen being created, the laughter stopped, and so did the experiment. Convoluted.

The late Dudley Clews (mathematician and cornettist) decided to invent a joke, tell it to someone at Land's End, and catch it when it arrived at John O'Groats. But inventing a new joke, with the uniqueness necessary for this experiment, is far from easy. It came to him very early in the morning, and with that adrenal excitement which accompanies such invention, he had to rush out and tell someone. He banged on a neighbour's door, and the victim, unaware of the privilege which was being bestowed upon him, listened blearily and unwillingly to Dudley's joke. At the end, Dudley waited expectantly for the deserved acclaim. All he got was: 'Piss off, you daft bugger, you made it up!' (Slam.)

The really interesting thing would be to know what the joke was, but to my lasting regret, I never found out.

One of the features of stories told and retold is that they become embroidered and intermingled. Alice Heim's first-ever paper was 'An Experiment in Humour'. She told 32 stories – some of which were funny – to 50 subjects, and recorded their reaction to the humour. (1 asked her if she could remember any of the jokes, but unfortunately not.) However, the really interesting thing about the experiment was that, when she interviewed the subjects again after six months, and asked them if they could remember any of the jokes, she found, inter alia, that she got some new – and sometimes even better – jokes compounded of parts of old jokes, which had not always been in the original list. This is one of the strange tricks that the human mind plays, and one of the ways in which the urban legend develops.

Enough of this. Why read menus and cookery books when you can eat the food? Read on and bon appetit.

A Note on the Foaf

One of the first questions I was asked when I arrived at the Sheffield conference was: 'Do you pronounce it foaf (to rhyme with loaf) or fo-af (to rhyme with so affable)?' Foaf is a word I invented to stand for'friend of a friend', the person to whom so many of these dreadful things I am about to recount happens. I have omitted the word from this book as a gesture to neologophobes, but I recommend it – especially for its secondarily clodhopping connotations – to the cognoscenti.

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