Too good to be true
Sir: When I read Jeffrey Bernard's two embarrassing anecdotes (Low life, 4 July), they smelled to me like 'urban legends'— mythical stories that sound plausible but on closer inspection turn out always to have happened to 'a friend of a friend of a friend'. Jan Harold Brunvand, a folklorist at the University of Utah, has devoted his career to studying them.
I showed Professor Brunvand Mr Bernard's column, and he told me that 'The Ski Accident,' as he's called it, was dis- cussed in 1986 in his book The Mexican Pet, and its veracity is in serious doubt. He has found versions in Utah as far back as 1979 and seemed unsurprised to hear a British version.
The 'wrong package' theme of Mr Bernard's other story, about the too hastily discarded trousers, has been dubbed in this case 'Caught Short'. It was published in the British folklorist Paul Smith's book, The Book of Nasty Legends, in 1983. This does not prove Mr Bernard to be hopelessly credulous. For years I believed a story told to me by 'a friend of a friend of a friend' about the two old ladies on holiday who sat on the floor of a hotel elevator out of terror after a large black man got on and shouted 'Sit!' to his two dobermanns. The next day they found that their entire hotel bill had been paid by one Muhammad Al', whom they had given, according to the note he left, 'the biggest laugh of my life'. I didn't question it until I heard identical sto- ries about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Reg- gie Jackson.
The lesson is that if you hear an embar- rassing story that sounds simply too good to be true, it probably is.
Christopher F. Roth
5207 South Greenwood Avenue, No 3 Chicago, Illinois 60615-4315, USA
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