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 passed away in 2005.

He appreciatively blamed England for introducing "sick humour" to the US, arguing that probably the American variety "was inspired by a minor English poet, Harry Graham, who specialised in light verse and amusing doggerel. In 1899, he published Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes and one rhyme in this volume ran as follows:



Billy, in one of his nice new sashes,

Fell in the fire and was burnt to ashes;

Now, although the room grows chilly,

I haven't the heart to poke poor Billy.

In another study, called Polish Pope Jokes, Dundes presents samples representative of many different varieties of Polish pope jokes, and remarks: "It was probably inevitable that the Polish-Americans' hope that the election of a Polish pope would curtail or contain the Polish joke cycle would be in vain. Quite the opposite occurred. The election provided a fresh impetus for a new burst of creativity in the cycle."

A Dundes monograph called Six Inches from the Presidency: The Gary Hart Jokes as Public Opinion examines the joke cycle touched off by the withered candidacy of Gary Hart, the front-running Democratic party candidate for the 1988 presidential election.

The joke frenzy began when newspapers published photographs of Hart, in the absence of Mrs Hart, installing a young actress on his lap during an overnight trip "from Miami to Bimini on a boat with the unlikely but apt name of Monkey Business".

Dundes's best-known book is called Life Is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder: A Portrait of German Culture Through Folklore. It explores the many variants of the German proverb "life is like a chicken coop ladder - shitty from top to bottom". In 174 pages, Dundes plumbed the anal/erotic aspects of German culture, and presented evidence for his thesis that Teutonic parents' overemphasis on cleanliness gives their children a lifelong love of scatological humour and imagery.

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize