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.
Alan Dundes' subjects included fairy tales and gross-out humor.
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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."
