Clintons: AP Photo/Jimmy May, Norris: Orion Pictures Corporation/Photofest, Bush: AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

Alan Dundes died with a joke on his lips. At least, that's one version of the story. This much is certain: The beloved Cal professor died unexpectedly in 2005, while lecturing. Dundes was a giant in the field of folklore scholarship, an inveterate collector of, and prolific publisher on, unrecorded tales, songs, and traditions. But the man who was sometimes called the Joke Professor had a particular affinity for humor.

Growing up in the suburbs of New York City, Dundes fell in love with the quips his father picked up on the commuter train and heard hundreds more during two years in the Navy. As a grad student, inspired in part by Freud's collection of Jewish jokes, Dundes began gathering them for his doctoral dissertation. Once ensconced at Berkeley, he launched the Folklore Archive, which now holds over 500,000 items—including thousands of bits of humor collected by students enrolled in Dundes's famous course, The Forms of Folklore.

A large man, known for his rapid speech and an endless rotation of baggy suits, white shirts, and dark ties, Dundes held court in office hours that were both intimidating and exhilarating. He brimmed with advice and insight but countenanced no sloppy scholarship. So singular a presence was he for students—some of whom called him "the Master" or simply "Himself"—that they collected their own Dundes folklore, known as Dundesiana. The Berkeley Folklore Archive even has a folder devoted to Dundes-inspired "latrinalia," the bathroom wall scribblings he established as a legitimate object of study. One entry reads "Keep Alan Dundes working! Write graffiti!"

Dundes's revolutionary contribution to the field, however, was not in gathering folklore but in analyzing it. "For him, being a folklorist was like being a scientist," says Maria Teresa Agozzino, a folklore professor at Ohio State University who worked as Dundes's assistant for eight years. To Dundes, collected scraps of folklore "were the hard data" of social mores and cultural trends, and jokes could be particularly illuminating.

Dundes turned a gimlet eye—often with a Freudian lens—to every brand of humor ranging from math jokes to light-bulb jokes, Gary Hart jokes to AIDS jokes, Muslim jokes to elephant jokes. The latter, for instance, he interpreted as veiled references to African Americans, a kind of humor code spawned by white anxiety over civil rights. He also saw a direct line running from what he believed was a German cultural obsession with scatological jokes, to the rise of Nazi fascism.

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