Kennedy Assassination Jokes: Thor's Great Anus

Last April I made a post here called Kennedy Assassination Jokes, a whimsical item recounting the lighter side of assassination criticism.

It has since occurred to me that I left out one of my favorite examples.

Renatus Hartogs was a New York shrink who examined Lee Harvey Oswald in the early 1950s, when Oswald was a truant teenager. Though a decade had elapsed, this was good enough for the Warren Commission to call Hartogs as an expert witness. Hartogs dutifully told the Commission that the teenage Oswald was "dangerous," even though his contemporaneous report did not say that.

Cashing in on his Commission appearance, Hartogs co-authored a book about Oswald called The Two Assassins. With great psychological insight, Hartogs said that the letters in Oswald's pseudonym, Alek J. Hidell, could almost be re-arranged to form "Jekyll-Hyde." (The pseudonym lacked two instances of the letter y.)

In a published review of The Two Assassins, Sylvia Meagher noted that the letters in the name "Renatus Hartogs" could themselves be re-arranged to these phrases: "Trash outrages," and "Strange Authors."

Meagher dreamed up a third anagram, "Thor's Great Anus." Her editor deleted it.