Children’s Folklore Recent Titles in Greenwood Folklore Handbooks Myth: a handbook

PSYCHOANALYTIC APPROACHES
Scholars who have applied Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory to chil-
dren’s folklore have focused primarily on jokes, rituals, and legends. Martha 
Wolfenstein’s study 
Children’s Humor
(1954) explains that children use jokes to 
transform painful situations into laughter. A sequence of dirty jokes shows how 
children of different ages handle sexual and scatological humor: A four-year-old 
likes to shout “Hello, Mr. Doody!”; children between the ages of 7 and 11 enjoy 
jokes that involve simple wordplay; and children 11 or older have the ability to 
use language in more sophisticated ways (161–65). Wolfenstein explains that the 
joke façade, which masks sexual and hostile content, works better as children 
get older. Mastery of the joke façade brings “not only pleasure in virtuosity, but 
momentary triumph over inhibition, and the response of others” (191).
Another study of humor related to children is Gershon Legman’s remarkably 
thorough 
Rationale of the Dirty Joke
(1968), the first chapter of which is devoted 
to children. Scrutinizing hostile impulses reflected in jokes, Legman suggests that 
“Under the mask of humor, our society allows infinite aggressions, by everyone 
and against everyone” (1). He finds that jokes about children reflect penis envy, 
ridicule, sexual starvation, and a desire to put others on the spot, as well as ea-
gerness to learn about sexual matters. Unfortunately, Legman does not specify 
the age of his informants; it appears that most of the jokes in his chapter about 
children come from adults. A better source of information about children’s dirty 
joke patterns is Rosemary Zumwalt’s essay “Plain and Fancy: A Content Analysis 
of Children’s Jokes Dealing with Adult Sexuality.”
The leader of American psychoanalytic studies of children’s folklore was Alan 
Dundes, whose publications extend from the 1960s to the early twenty-first cen-
tury. In his essay “On the Psychology of Legend” (1971), Dundes analyzes teen-
age girls’ renditions of the popular legend “The Hook.” The crux of this legend 
is a teenage couple hearing, while parked in Lovers’ Lane, a radio announcement 
that a sex maniac with a hook in the place of a hand has escaped from an insane 
asylum. Teenage boys, Dundes suggests, may be “all hands” while parking with 
girlfriends. The hook, a phallic symbol, represents girls’ fears of losing control. 
After the girl begs to go home, the boy “pulls out” and drives her home. Reaching 
out to open the door on her side of the car, he finds a hook hanging from the 

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108 Children’s 
Folklore
door’s handle. The hook’s removal from the sex maniac’s body symbolizes castra-
tion of the boy, who has lost his chance for sexual experimentation (30–31).
One of Dundes’s most interesting studies of children’s lore is “The Dead Baby 
Joke Cycle,” published in 1979. Examining a sample of teenagers’ jokes from the 
1960s and 1970s, Dundes asserts that “there is a sick streak—and a longstanding 
one at that—in American humor” (145). He notes that “Little Willie” rhymes from 
1899 to the 1930s and subsequent “Little Audrey” jokes humorously describe 
children’s deaths. Most dead-baby jokes take the form of questions with answers. 
Dundes identifies the most common dead-baby joke as “What’s red and sits in 
a corner? A baby chewing (teething on, eating, sucking on) razor blades” (151). 
Among the reasons for these jokes’ popularity, Dundes cites teenagers’ tension about 
sexual activity and concern about unwanted pregnancies. It is possible, he suggests, 
that gross dead-baby jokes give teenagers “one way of fighting the fear and gilding 
the guilt” (154). Addressing some adults’ distaste for these jokes, Dundes wisely 
states, “If anything is sick, it is the society which produces sick humor. Elimi-
nating the humor—even if such censorship were possible, which it definitely is 
not—would not solve the problems which led to the generation of the folklore in 
the first place” (155). Another psychoanalytic essay by Dundes, “Bloody Mary in 
the Mirror,” is discussed in the “Supernatural” section of this chapter.
In “The Magic of the Boy Scout Campfire” (1980), Jay Mechling applies psy-
choanalytic theory to campfire rituals of Boy Scouts in California. Mechling 
identifies six elements of the campfire event: its opening (marked by the lighting 
of the fire), songs, skits, yells, tales, and closing. Defining the campfire site as “al-
most sacred space,” he finds that the fire has sexual significance (50). Freud’s 1932 
essay “The Acquisition and Control of Fire” suggests that to gain control over 
fire, men had to stop themselves from urinating on it. Mechling finds that Boy 
Scouts’ “fire fun,” including building, lighting, and urinating on a fire, supports a 
psychoanalytic interpretation of campfire rituals’ significance. He concludes that 
the Boy Scout campfire event is “a ritual dramatization of male solidarity and 
male world view” (56). The fact that Girl Scouts also enjoy campfires does not 
undermine this interpretation, since “fire is a multivocal symbol that functions 
differently in the two contexts, male and female” (55).
GENDER
Scholarship on gender issues in children’s folklore has grown significantly since 
the 1970s. In his article “The Play of Girls” (1979), Brian Sutton-Smith notes 
that boys and girls tend to play different kinds of games within different kinds 
of play groups, but that there are “many more forms of play that the sexes share 
than used to be the case” (250). Anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists, 

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Scholarship and Approaches 109
as well as folklorists, have analyzed how boys and girls learn about gender through 
play, sometimes discovering sharp contrasts between boys and girls. In some stud-
ies, researchers have found relatively few differences. Rivka Eifermann’s study of 
thousands of children in Israel in 1971, for example, notes that most games of 
that time and place cannot be called “boys’ games” or “girls’ games.”
Studies comparing groups of boys with groups of girls have given us insight 
into gender-related play, games, and rituals. Linda Riley’s “Extremes: How Girls 
Play Slaughter, How Boys Play Slaughter at Valley Oak Elementary” (1990), for 
example, examines differences between boys’ and girls’ versions of a ball game simi-
lar to Dodge Ball. In the game of Slaughter, two teams line up facing each other; 
the goalie of one team throws a lightweight ball at members of the opposing team. 
If any member of that team fails to dodge the ball or to throw it back, he or she 
is “slaughtered” and changes places with the goalie. Riley finds that all-girl teams 
playing Slaughter in Davis, California, “stress order, egalitarian relationships, and 
female behavior,” while all-boy teams “stress disorder, hierarchical relationships, 
and male behavior” (16). Both of these gender- related forms of the game reflect 
social roles and attitudes. Riley suggests that children’s game playing has its own 
momentum, regardless of adult intervention: “The children at Valley Oak Elemen-
tary will continue to play Slaughter in their own way because children’s games 
belong to children” (16).
Marjorie Harness Goodwin’s study “The Serious Side of Jump Rope” (1985) 
argues that girls’ interaction while jumping rope has continuity with their inter-
actions outside the frame of play. Girls’ patterning of conflict shows “specifically 
female rather than male ways of speaking,” with brief arguments about rules 
(316). Girls argue about who will turn the jump rope, what rhymes will be re-
cited, and what moves should go with each rhyme, balancing criticism of each 
other with positive remarks. Goodwin concludes that although people have ques-
tioned girls’ ability to argue without stopping their play, “girls are quite able to 
handle conflict without disruption of the ongoing interaction” (326).
In another detailed study of girls’ game playing, “ ‘You Have to Do It with 
Style’: Girls’ Games and Girls’ Gaming” (1993), Linda Hughes suggests that