The Truth Never Stands in the Way of a Good Story!

Folklore, Oct, 2001 by Veronique Campion-Vincent

The Truth Never Stands in the Way of a Good Story! By Jan Harold Brunvand. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000. 217 pp. $22.95. ISBN 0-252-02424-9

This collection of thirteen papers is the latest publication of Jan Harold Brunvand, author of six collections of urban legends since 1981's seminal The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and their Meanings. The author has also published two American folklore textbooks, edited American Folklore: An Encyclopedia (Garland, 1996) and has announced the publication of an Encyclopedia of Urban Legends. Most of the papers in this volume have been presented at folklore conferences between 1987 and 1997, and seven of them have been previously published.

After an introduction mostly outlining the author's discovery of the field of urban legends, the book opens with a historical chapter entitled "Richard M. Dorson and the Urban Legend." The longest and most in-depth study the book contains is "`The Baby Roast' as a `New American Urban Legend'," which was a chapter in the author's textbook, The Study of American Folklore (1986). It discusses several closely related stories which consistently include "parental neglect, treating the child as food, drug-induced behavior" (p. 47). He puts forward the psychoanalytical interpretation of the story as an example of "the evil mother," but with scepticism, and also discusses South Pacific tales in which the mishap is the result of the stupidity and literal obedience of the childminders (Motif J2460).

"The Brain Drain" reveals the folkloric background to this tale of a woman who, sitting in her car in an open air department store car park during very hot weather, thinks she has been shot when a dough-can explodes and soils her head. The author's analysis does not address, however, the question that is obvious for Europeans, coming from countries where the personal gun is not so ubiquitous: why would a loud noise make you jump to the conclusion that you have been shot in the head and that your brains are pouring out?

"What's Red and White and Baked All Over?" presents the Red Velvet Cake story that was discussed by the author in the 1963 mimeographed newsletter, Oregon Folklore Bulletin.

Other legends appear as examples in a cluster. For instance, "Was It a Stunned Deer?" depicts a classic animal revenge story "in which stunned animals revive and mistreated animals gain revenge" (p. 77); "Bedtime for Bozo" discusses alleged incidents of insults exchanged between clowns and children and accidentally heard on the radio or during a show; "A Blast Heard around the World" analyses the circulation of exploding toilet tales, themselves a subset of the cluster of hilarious accident stories. "Some News from the Miscellaneous Legend Files" presents a range of news items that are nearly urban legends, including "such things as human interest, oddness, coincidence and pathos, applied to such subject matters as animals, children, accidents, scandal and crime" (p. 167).

Sometimes Brunvand gives as much importance to a legend's diffusion pattern as to its content. "Deer" locates the story's origin in a true incident magnified by "communal re-creation" (p. 83) in a professional milieu (in this case the police). "Lights Out!: A Faxlore Phenomenon" centres on the media's reactions to a faxed warning denouncing "gang initiations" that were said to involve driving at night with the lights off, then chasing and murdering the good Samaritans who had warned them by blinking their own lights. This racist rumour (sociologist Gary Fine "voiced the opinion that `gang in this particular rumor is a code word for young, black men'" [p. 102]) circulated from August to December 1993, with a brief revival in November 1998. The author's lengthy delineation of the story's progress concludes with an endorsement of the academics' commentaries, which Brunvand says were right in identifying "themes like teenage and gang crimes, racism, urban problems and attacks on foreign motorists as topics underlying the `Lights Out!' hysteria" (p. 104), and an analysis of the contradictory media attitudes exemplified in the numerous debunking stories. The articles generally mentioned the possibility of copycat crimes and suggested that "the originator of the story should be found and prosecuted," but also "punned shamelessly" about the story (p. 104), while "no investigative reporter seems to have bothered to have contacted any local gang members to ask about initiation rituals" (p. 105). "Blast" centres on the circulation of exploding toilet stories, from the world media to specialised social circles, such as bikers. "Miscellaneous" is basically a reflection upon the links of "human interest news and modern folk narrative" (p. 167).

Four papers describe the circulation of legends in specialised milieus: the religious in "The Ghost in Search of Help for a Dying Person" and "The Missing Day in Time"; the military in "Some Oddities of Military Legendry"; computer people in "The Heroic Hacker" (written by Erik Brunvand, the author's son). This last contrasts the positive image of the computer hacker amongst computer programmers with his negative presentation by the media.