He spent much of his career as a professional academic at the University of California, Berkeley and published his ideas in a wide range of books and articles.
His presidential speech at the American Folklore Society conference in 1980 argued that there was an anal-erotic fixation in the German national character; this generated significant controversy.
Known unofficially as the "Jokes Professor"[6] at University of California, Berkeley, his classes were very popular, combining learning with "an irresistible wit and style".
[1] In this introductory course, students were introduced to the many various forms of folklore, from myth, legend, and folktale to proverbs and riddles to jokes, games, and folkspeech (slang), to folk belief and foodways.
He dealt frequently with folklore as an expression of unconscious desires and anxieties and was of the opinion that if people reacted strongly to what he had to say, he had probably hit a nerve and was probably on to something.
[9] However, of all his articles, the one that earned him death threats was "Into the Endzone for a Touchdown", an exploration via psychoanalysis of what he contended was the homoerotic subtext inherent in the terminology and rituals surrounding American football.
[10] His presentation, later published as a monograph titled Life is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder, uses folkspeech, customs, material culture, and so forth seeking to demonstrate an anal-erotic fixation in German national character.
[11] When he finally participated again, in 2004, he again gave a plenary address, this time taking his fellow folklorists to task for being weak on theory.
[12] In 2012, linguist Anatol Stefanowitsch credited Dundes with having given rise to a still prevalent "stereotype about Germany as a culture enamored with excretion", but called Life is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder, "unstructured, poorly argued and flimsily sourced" and "methodologically flawed because he only looked for evidence supporting his theory, and not – as even a folklorist should – for evidence against his theory".
This money allowed Dundes to endow the university with a Distinguished Professorship in Folkloristics, thereby ensuring that upon his retirement folklore would not be abandoned in the department.
He prominently recounted Lord Raglan's 22-point scale from his 1936 book The Hero, in which he ranks figures possessing similar divine attributions.
Dundes is often credited with the promotion of folkloristics as a term denoting a specific field of academic study and applies instead what he calls a "modern" flexible social definition for folk: two or more persons who have any trait in common and express their shared identity through traditions.
Another implication of this broader defining of the term folk, according to Dundes, is that folkloristic work is interpretative and scientific rather than descriptive or devoted solely to folklore preservation.
As long as humans interact and in the course of so doing employ traditional forms of communication, folklorists will continue to have golden opportunities to study folklore" (Devolutionary Premise, 19).
"[1] On March 30, 2005, Dundes collapsed from an apparent heart attack while giving a graduate seminar at University of California, Berkeley, and died on the way to the hospital.