Freud - Complete Works (296 page)
The comparison of reviews to a
childish illness is founded in the first instance on the fact of
being exposed to them shortly after first seeing the light of day.
I cannot venture to decide whether up to this point the comparison
has the character of a joke. But it is then carried further: it
turns out that the subsequent fate of new books can be represented
within the framework of the same analogy or through related
analogies. A prolongation like this of an analogy is undoubtedly in
the nature of a joke, but we already know what technique it has to
thank for this - it is a case of unification, the making of an
unsuspected connection. The character of the unification is not
altered by the fact that here it consists in making an addition to
a previous analogy.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1683
In another group of analogies one
is tempted to shift what is undoubtedly an impression that has the
character of a joke on to another factor, which once again has in
itself nothing to do with the nature of the analogy. These are
analogies which contain a striking juxtaposition, often a
combination that sounds absurd, or which are replaced by something
of the sort as the outcome of the analogy. The majority of the
Lichtenberg examples belong to this group.
‘It is a pity that one
cannot see the learned entrails of authors so as to discover what
they have eaten.’ The ‘learned’ entrails is a
bewildering and indeed absurd epithet, which is only explained by
the analogy. What if the impression of its being a joke were due
entirely to the bewildering character of the juxtaposition? If so,
it would correspond to a method of joking with which we are quite
familiar - ‘representation by absurdity’
Lichtenberg has used the same
analogy between the ingestion of reading and instructive matter and
the ingestion of physical nourishment for another joke:
‘He thought very highly of
learning at home, and was therefore entirely in favour of learned
stall-feeding.’
Other analogies by the same
author exhibit the same absurd, or at least remarkable, assignment
of epithets, which, as we now begin to see, are the true vehicles
of the joke:
‘That is the weather side
of my moral constitution; I can stand things there quite
well.’
‘Everyone has his moral
backside, which he does not show except in case of need and which
he covers as long as possible with the breeches of
respectability.’
‘Moral backside’ -
the assignment of this remarkable epithet is the outcome of an
analogy. But in addition, the analogy is continued further with an
actual play upon words - ‘need’ - and a second even
more unusual juxtaposition (‘the breeches of
respectability’), which is perhaps a joke in itself; for the
breeches, since they are the breeches of respectability,
themselves, as it were, become a joke. We need not be surprised,
then, if the whole gives us the impression of being an analogy that
is a very good joke. We begin to notice that we are inclined, quite
generally, where a characteristic attaches only to a part of a
whole, to extend it in our estimation to the whole itself. The
‘breeches of respectability’, incidentally, recall some
similarly bewildering lines of Heine’s:
. . . Bis mir endlich,
endlich alle Knopfe rissen
an der Hose der Geduld.
¹
There can be no doubt that these
last two analogies have a characteristic that we do not find in
every good (that is to say, in every apt) analogy. They are to a
great degree ‘debasing’, as we might put it. They
juxtapose something of a high category, something abstract (in
these instances, ‘respectability’ and
‘patience’), with something of a very concrete and even
low kind (‘breeches’). We shall have to consider in
another connection whether this peculiarity has anything to do with
the joke. Here we will try to analyse another example in which this
disparaging characteristic is quite specially plain. Weinberl, the
clerk in Nestroy’s farce
Einen Jux will er sich machen
[
He wants to have a spree
], pictures to himself how one day,
when he is a respectable old business man, he will remember the
days of his youth: ‘When the ice in front of the warehouse of
memory has been hacked up like this in a friendly talk’, he
says, ‘when the arched doorway of old times has been unlocked
again and the showcase of the imagination is fully stocked with
goods from the past. . . .’ These are, to be
sure, analogies between abstract and very commonplace concrete
things; but the joke depends - whether entirely or in part - on the
fact that a clerk is making use of analogies taken from the domain
of his everyday activities. But the bringing of these abstractions
into connection with the ordinary things with which his life is
normally filled is an act of
unification
.
¹
[ . . . Till at
last,
at
last every button bursts
on my
breeches of patience.]
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1684
Let us return to the Lichtenberg
analogies:
‘The motives that lead us
to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds [=
points of the compass] and might be given names in a similar way:
for instance, "bread-bread fame" or
"fame-fame-bread". As is so often the case with
Lichtenberg’s jokes, the impression of something apt, witty
and shrewd is so prominent that our judgement upon the nature of
what constitutes the joke is misled by it. If some amount of joke
is admixed with the admirable meaning in a remark of this kind, we
are probably led into declaring that the whole thing is an
excellent joke. I should like, rather, to hazard the statement that
everything in it that is really in the nature of a joke arises from
our surprise at the strange combination ‘bread
bread-fame’. As a joke, therefore, it would be a
‘representation by absurdity’.
A strange juxtaposition or the
attribution of an absurd epithet can stand by itself as the outcome
of an analogy:
‘A
zweischläfrige
woman.’ ‘An
einschläfriger
church-pew.’¹ (Both by
Lichtenberg.) Behind both these there is an analogy with a bed; in
both of them, besides the ‘bewilderment’ the technical
factor of ‘allusion’ is in operation - an allusion in
one case to the sleepy effects of sermons and in the other to the
inexhaustible topic of sexual relations.
So far we have found that
whenever an analogy strikes us as being in the nature of a joke it
owes this impression to the admixture of one of the joke-techniques
that are familiar to us. But a few other examples seem at last to
provide evidence that an analogy can in itself be a joke.
This is how Lichtenberg describes
certain odes:
‘They are in poetry what
Jakob Böhme’s immortal works are in prose - a kind of
picnic, in which the author provides the words and the reader the
sense.’
‘When he philosophizes, he
throws as a rule an agreeable moonlight over things, which pleases
in general but shows no single thing clearly.’
¹
[These two German words - meaning literally
‘that can sleep two’ and ‘that can sleep
one’ - are ordinarily applied to beds, i.e.
‘double’ and ‘single’.
Einschläfrig
, however, can also mean
‘soporific’.]
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1685
Or here is Heine:
‘Her face resembled a
palimpsest, on which, beneath the fresh black monastic manuscript
of the text of a Church Father there lurk the half-obliterated
lines of an ancient Greek love poem.’
Or let us take the lengthy
analogy, with a highly degrading purpose, in the ‘Bäder
von Lucca’
‘A catholic cleric behaves
rather like a clerk with a post in a large business house. The
Church, the big firm, of which the Pope is head, gives him a fixed
job and, in return, a fixed salary. He works lazily, as everyone
does who is not working for his own profit, who has numerous
colleagues and can easily escape notice in the bustle of a large
concern. All he has at heart is the credit of the house and still
more its maintenance, since if it should go bankrupt he would lose
his livelihood. A protestant cleric, on the other hand, is in every
case his own principal and carries on the business of religion for
his own profit. He does not, like his catholic fellow-traders,
carry on a wholesale business but only retail. And since he must
himself manage it alone, he cannot be lazy. He must advertise his
articles of faith, he must depreciate his competitors’
articles, and, genuine retailer that he is, he stands in his retail
shop, full of business envy of all the great houses, and
particularly of the great house in Rome, which pays the wages of so
many thousands of book-keepers and packers and has its factories in
all four quarters of the globe.’
In the face of this and many
other examples, we can no longer dispute the fact that an analogy
can in itself possess the characteristic of being a joke, without
this impression being accounted for by a complication with one of
the familiar joke techniques. But, that being so, we are completely
at a loss to see what it is that determines the joking
characteristic of analogies, since that characteristic certainly
does not reside in analogy as a form of expression of thought or in
the operation of making a comparison. All we can do is to include
analogy among the species of ‘indirect representation’
used by the joke-technique and we must leave unresolved the problem
which we have met with much more clearly in the case of analogies
than in the methods of joking that we came across earlier. No
doubt, moreover, there must be some special reason why the decision
whether something is a joke or not offers greater difficulties in
analogies than in other forms of expression.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1686
This gap in our understanding
gives us no grounds, however, for complaining that this first
investigation has been without results. In view of the intimate
connection which we must be prepared to attribute to the different
characteristics of jokes, it would be imprudent to expect that we
could completely explain one side of the problem before we have so
much as cast a glance at the others. We shall no doubt have now to
attack the problem from another direction.
Can we feel sure that none of the
possible techniques of jokes has escaped our investigation? Of
course not. But a continued examination of fresh material can
convince us that we have got to know the commonest and most
important technical methods of the joke-work - at all events as
much as is required for forming a judgement on the nature of that
psychical process. So far we have not arrived at any such
judgement; but on the other hand we are now in possession of an
important indication of the direction from which we may expect to
receive further light upon the problem. The interesting processes
of condensation accompanied by the formation of a substitute, which
we have recognized as the core of the technique of verbal jokes,
point towards the formation of dreams, in the mechanism of which
the same psychical processes have been discovered. This is equally
true, however, of the techniques of conceptual jokes -
displacement, faulty reasoning, absurdity, indirect representation,
representation by the opposite - which re-appear one and all in the
technique of the dream-work. Displacement is responsible for the
puzzling appearance of dreams, which prevents our recognizing that
they are a continuation of our waking life. The use of absurdity
and nonsense in dreams has cost them the dignity of being regarded
as psychical products and has led the authorities to suppose that a
disintegration of the mental activities and a cessation of
criticism, morality and logic are necessary conditions of the
formation of dreams. Representation by the opposite is so common in
dreams that even the popular books of dream-interpretation, which
are on a completely wrong tack, are in the habit of taking it into
account. Indirect representation - the replacement of a
dream-thought by an allusion, by something small, a symbolism akin
to analogy - is precisely what distinguishes the mode of expression
of dreams from that of our waking life.¹ So far-reaching an
agreement between the methods of the joke-work and those of the
dream-work can scarcely be a matter of chance. To demonstrate this
agreement in detail and to examine its basis will be one of our
later tasks.
¹
Cf. Chapter VI (‘The
Dream-Work’) of my
Interpretation of Dreams
.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1687
III
THE
PURPOSES OF JOKES
When at the end of my last chapter I wrote
down Heine’s comparison of a catholic priest to an employee
in a wholesale business and of a protestant one to a retail
merchant, I was aware of an inhibition which was trying to induce
me not to make use of the analogy. I told myself that among my
readers there would probably be a few who felt respect not only for
religion but for its governors and assistants. Such readers would
merely be indignant about the analogy and would get into an
emotional state which would deprive them of all interest in
deciding whether the analogy had the appearance of being a joke on
its own account or as a result of something extra added to it. With
other analogies - for instance, the neighbouring one of the
agreeable moonlight which a particular philosophy throws over
things - there seemed to be no need for worry about the disturbing
effect they might have on a section of my readers. The most pious
man would remain in a state of mind in which he could form a
judgement on our problem.
It is easy to divine the
characteristic of jokes on which the difference in their
hearers’ reaction to them depends. In the one case the joke
is an end in itself and serves no particular aim, in the other case
it does serve such an aim - it becomes
tendentious
. Only
jokes that have a purpose run the risk of meeting with people who
do not want to listen to them.
Non-tendentious jokes were
described by Vischer as ‘abstract’ jokes. I prefer to
call them ‘innocent’ jokes.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1688
Since we have already divided
jokes into ‘verbal’ and ‘conceptual’ jokes
according to the material handled by their technique, it devolves
on us now to examine the relation between that classification and
the new one that we are introducing. The relation between verbal
and conceptual jokes on the one hand and abstract and tendentious
jokes on the other is not one of mutual influence; they are two
wholly independent classifications of joking products. Some people
may perhaps have gained an impression that innocent jokes are
predominantly verbal jokes, but that the more complex technique of
conceptual jokes is mostly employed for definite purposes. But
there are innocent jokes that work with play upon words and
similarity of sound, and equally innocent ones that employ all the
methods of conceptual jokes. And it is just as easy to show that a
tendentious joke need be nothing other than a verbal joke as
regards its technique. For instance, jokes that ‘play
about’ with proper names often have an insulting and wounding
purpose, though, needless to say, they are verbal jokes. But the
most innocent of all jokes are once more verbal jokes; for
instance, the
Schüttelreime
¹, which have recently
become so popular and in which the multiple use of the same
material with a modification entirely peculiar to it constitutes
the technique:
Und weil er Geld in
M
enge
h
atte,
lag stets er in der
H
änge
m
atte.
²
It may be hoped that no one will question that
the enjoyment derived from these otherwise unpretentious rhymes is
the same as that by which we recognize jokes.
¹
[Literally, ‘shaking-up
rhymes’.]
²
[And because he had money in
quantities
He
always lay in a hammock.]
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1689
Good examples of abstract or
innocent conceptual jokes are to be found in plenty among the
Lichtenberg analogies, with some of which we have already become
acquainted. I add a few more:
‘They had sent a small
octavo volume to Göttingen, and had got back something that
was a quarto in body and soul.’
‘In order to erect this
building properly, it is above all necessary that good foundations
shall be laid; and I know of none firmer than if, upon every course
of masonry
pro
, one promptly lays a course
contra
.’
‘One person procreates a
thought, a second carries it to be baptized, a third begets
children by it, a fourth visits it on its deathbed and a fifth
buries it.’ (Analogy with unification.)
‘Not only did he disbelieve
in ghosts; he was not even frightened of them.’ Here the joke
lies entirely in the nonsensical form of representation, which puts
what is commonly thought less of into the comparative and uses the
positive for what is regarded as more important. If this joking
envelope is removed, we have: ‘it is much easier to get rid
of a fear of ghosts intellectually than to escape it when the
occasion arises.’ This is no longer in the least a joke,
though it is a correct and still too little appreciated
psychological discovery - the same one which Lessing expressed in a
well-known sentence:
‘Not all are free who mock their chains.’
I may take the opportunity that
this affords of getting rid of what is nevertheless a possible
misunderstanding. For ‘innocent’ or
‘abstract’ jokes are far from having the same meaning
as jokes that are ‘trivial’ or ‘lacking in
substance’; they merely connote the opposite of the
‘tendentious’ jokes that will be discussed presently.
As our last example shows, an innocent - that is, a non-tendentious
- joke may also be of great substance it may assert something of
value. But the substance of a joke is independent of the joke and
is the substance of the thought which is here, by means of a
special arrangement, expressed as a joke. No doubt, just as
watch-makers usually provide a particularly good movement with a
similarly valuable case, so it may happen with jokes that the best
achievements in the way of jokes are used as an envelope for
thoughts of the greatest substance.
If now we draw a sharp
distinction in the case of conceptual jokes between the substance
of the thought and the joking envelope, we shall reach a discovery
which may throw light of much of our uncertainty in judging jokes.
For it turns out - and this is a surprising thing - that our
enjoyment of a joke is based on a combined impression of its
substance and of its effectiveness as a joke and that we let
ourselves be deceived by the one factor over the amount of the
other. Only after the joke has been reduced do we become aware of
this false judgement.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1690
Moreover, the same thing is true
of verbal jokes. When we are told that ‘experience consists
in experiencing what one does not wish to experience’, we are
bewildered and think we have learnt a new truth. It is a little
time before we recognize under this disguise the platitude of
‘Injury makes one wise’. (Fischer.) The apt way in
which the joke succeeds in defining ‘experience’ almost
purely by the use of the word ‘to experience’ deceives
us into overvaluing the substance of the sentence. Just the same
thing is true of Lichtenberg’s ‘January’ joke of
unification (
p. 1667
), which has
nothing more to tell us than something we have already long known -
that New Year’s wishes come true as seldom as other wishes.
So too in many similar cases.
And we find just the contrary
with other jokes, in which the aptness and truth of the thought
tricks us into calling the whole sentence a brilliant joke -
whereas only the thought is brilliant and the joke’s
achievement is often feeble. Precisely in Lichtenberg’s jokes
the kernel of thought is frequently far more valuable than the
joking envelope to which we unjustifiably extend our appreciation.
Thus, for instance, the remark about the ‘ torch of
truth’ (
p. 1682
) is an analogy
that scarcely amounts to a joke, but it is so apt that we are
inclined to insist that the sentence is a particularly good
joke.
Lichtenberg’s jokes are
outstanding above all on account of their intellectual content and
the certainty with which they hit their mark. Goethe was quite
right in saying of that author that in fact his joking and jesting
ideas concealed problems; it would have been even more correct to
say that they touch on the solution of problems. When, for
instance, he remarked as a joke: ‘He had read Homer so much
that he always read "
Agamemnon
" instead of
"
angenommen
"‘ - the technique used is
‘stupidity’ plus ‘similarity of sound’ -
Lichtenberg had discovered nothing less than the secret of
misreading.¹
Similarly with a joke the
technique of which struck us as most unsatisfactory (
p. 1661
): ‘He wondered how it is
that cats have two holes cut in their skin precisely at the place
where their eyes are’. The stupidity that is paraded here is
only apparent. In fact, behind this simple remark lies the great
problem of teleology in the structure of animals. It was by no
means so completely a matter of course that the palpebral fissure
should open at the point at which the cornea is exposed, until the
theory of evolution had thrown light on the coincidence.
We shall bear in mind the fact
that we receive from joking remarks a total impression in which we
are unable to separate the share taken by the thought content from
the share taken by the joke-work. It may be that later on we shall
find a still more significant parallel to this.
¹
See my
Psychopathology of Everyday
Life
(1901
b
)
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1691
From the point of view of
throwing theoretical light on the nature of jokes, innocent jokes
are bound to be of more value to us than tendentious ones, and
trivial jokes of more value than profound ones. Innocent and
trivial jokes are likely to put the problem of jokes before us in
its purest form, since with them we avoid the danger of being
confused by their purpose or having our judgement misled by their
good sense. On the basis of such material our discoveries can make
fresh advances.
I will select the most innocent
possible example of a verbal joke:
‘A girl to whom a visitor
was announced while she was at her toilet complained: "Oh,
what a shame that one mayn’t let oneself be seen just when
one’s at one’s most
anziehend
"'¹
(Kleinpaul, 1890.)
Since, however, doubts arise in
me after all as to whether I have a right to describe this joke as
being non-tendentious, I will replace it by another one which is
extremely simple and should really not be open to that
objection.
At the end of a meal in a house
to which I had been invited as a guest, a pudding of the kind known
as a ‘
roulard
’ was served. It requires some
skill on the part of the cook to make it; so one of the guests
asked: ‘Made in the house?’ To which the host replied:
‘Yes, indeed. A home-
roulard
.’
¹
[‘
Anziehend
’ means both
‘dressing’ and ‘attractive’.]
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1692
This time we will not examine the
technique of the joke; we propose to turn our attention to another
factor, which is actually the most important one. When those of us
present heard this improvised joke it gave us pleasure - which I
can clearly recall - and made us laugh. In this instance, as in
countless others, the hearers’ feeling of pleasure cannot
have arisen from the purpose of the joke or from its intellectual
content; there is nothing left open to us but to bring that feeling
of pleasure into connection with the technique of the joke. The
technical methods of joking which we have earlier described -
condensation, displacement, indirect representation and so on -
thus possess the power of evoking a feeling of pleasure in the
hearer, though we cannot in the least see how they may have
acquired this power. In this simple way we arrive at the second
thesis in our clarification of jokes; the first (
p. 1623
) asserted that the
characteristic of jokes lay in their form of expression. Let us
further reflect that this second thesis has in fact taught us
nothing new. It merely isolates what was already included in an
observation we had made earlier. It will be recalled that when we
had succeeded in reducing a joke (that is, in replacing its form of
expression by another one, while carefully preserving its sense) it
had lost not only its character as a joke but also its power to
make us laugh - our enjoyment of the joke.
We cannot proceed further at this
point without a discussion with our philosophical authorities.
The philosophers, who count jokes
a part of the comic and who treat of the comic itself under the
heading of aesthetics, define an aesthetic idea by the condition
that in it we are not trying to get anything from things or do
anything with them, that we are not needing things in order to
satisfy one of our major vital needs, but that we are content with
contemplating them and with the enjoyment of the idea. ‘This
enjoyment, this kind of ideation, is the purely aesthetic one,
which lies only in itself, which has its aim only in itself and
which fulfils none of the other aims of life.’ (Fischer,
1889, 20.)