Freud - Complete Works (306 page)

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1737

   If the person in whom the joke is
formed cannot laugh, this, as we have already said, points to a
divergence from what happens in the third person that lies either
in the lifting of the inhibitory cathexis or in the possibility of
its discharge. But the first of these alternatives will not meet
the case, as we shall see at once. The inhibitory cathexis must
have been lifted in the first person as well, or otherwise no joke
would have come about, since its formation was precisely in order
to overcome a resistance of that kind; otherwise, too, it would be
impossible for the first person to feel the pleasure in the joke
which we have been obliged to trace back precisely to the lifting
of the inhibition. All that remains, then, is the other
alternative, namely that the first person cannot laugh, although he
feels pleasure, because there is an interference with the
possibility of discharge. An interference of this kind with the
possibility of discharge, which is a necessary precondition of
laughter, may arise from the liberated cathectic energy being
immediately applied to some other endopsychic use. It is a good
thing that our attention has been drawn to that possibility; and
our interest in it will very soon be further engaged. Another
condition, however, leading to the same result, may be realized in
the first person of a joke. It is possible that no quota of energy
at all that is capable of being manifested may be liberated, in
spite of the lifting of the inhibitory cathexis. In the first
person of a joke the joke-work is performed, which must correspond
to a certain quota of new psychical expenditure. Thus the first
person himself produces the force which lifts the inhibition. This
no doubt results in a yield of pleasure for him, and even, in the
case of tendentious jokes, a very considerable one, since the
fore-pleasure obtained by the joke-work itself takes over the
lifting of
further
inhibitions; but the expenditure on the
joke-work is in every case deducted from the yield resulting from
the lifting of the inhibition - an expenditure which is the same as
the one which the hearer of the joke avoids. What I have just said
may be confirmed by observing that a joke loses its effect of
laughter even in the third person as soon as he is required to make
an expenditure on intellectual work in connection with it. The
allusions made in a joke must be obvious and the omissions easy to
fill; an awakening of conscious intellectual interest usually makes
the effect of the joke impossible. There is an important
distinction here between jokes and riddles. Perhaps the psychical
constellation during the joke-work is in general not favourable to
the free discharge of what has been gained. We are not, it seems,
in a position to see further on this point; we have been more
successful in throwing light on one part of our problem - on why
the third person laughs - than on its other part - on why the first
person does
not
laugh.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1738

   Nevertheless, if we firmly accept
these views on the determinants of laughter and on the psychical
process in the third person, we are now in a position to give a
satisfactory explanation of a whole number of peculiarities which
jokes have been known to possess but which have not been
understood. If a quota of cathectic energy capable of discharge is
to be liberated in the third person, there are several conditions
which must be fulfilled or which are desirable in order to act as
encouragements: (1) It must be ensured that the third person is
really making this cathectic expenditure. (2) It is necessary to
guard against the cathectic expenditure, when it is liberated,
finding some other psychical use instead of offering itself for
motor discharge. (3) It cannot but be an advantage if the cathexis
which is to be liberated in the third person is intensified before
hand, raised to a greater height. All these aims are served by
particular methods of the joke-work, which may be classed together
as secondary or auxiliary techniques:-

   The first of these conditions
lays down one of the necessary qualifications of the third person
as hearer of the joke. It is essential that he should be in
sufficient psychical accord with the first person to possess the
same internal inhibitions, which the joke-work has overcome in the
latter. A person who is responsive to smut will be unable to derive
any pleasure from witty jokes of exposure; Herr N.’s attacks
will not be understood by uneducated people who are accustomed to
give free play to their desire to insult. Thus every joke calls for
a public of its own and laughing at the same jokes is evidence of
far reaching psychical conformity. Here moreover we have arrived at
a point which enables us to guess still more precisely what takes
place in the third person. He must be able as a matter of habit to
erect in himself the same inhibition which the first person’s
joke has overcome, so that, as soon as he hears the joke, the
readiness for this inhibition will compulsively or automatically
awaken. This readiness for inhibition, which I must regard as a
real expenditure, analogous to mobilization in military affairs,
will at the same moment be recognized as superfluous or too late,
and so be discharged
in statu nascendi
by
laughter.¹

   The second condition for making
free discharge possible - that the liberated energy shall be
prevented from being used in any other way - seems very much the
more important. It provides the theoretical explanation of the
uncertainty of the effect of jokes when the thoughts expressed in a
joke arouse powerfully exciting ideas in the hearer; in that case
the question whether the purposes of the joke agree with or
contradict the circle of thoughts by which the hearer is dominated
will decide whether his attention will remain with the joking
process or be withdrawn from it. Of still greater theoretical
interest, however, are a class of auxiliary techniques which
clearly serve the end of entirely detaching the hearer’s
attention from the joking process, and of allowing that process to
run its course automatically. I deliberately say
‘automatically’ and not ‘unconsciously’,
because the latter description would be misleading. It is only a
question here of holding back an increased cathexis of attention
from the psychical process when the joke is heard; and the
usefulness of these auxiliary techniques rightly leads us to
suspect that precisely the cathexis of attention has a great share
in the supervision and fresh employment of liberated cathectic
energy.

  
¹
The notion of the
status nascendi
has been used by Heymans (1896) in a somewhat different
connection.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1739

   It appears to be far from easy to
avoid the endopsychic employment of cathexes that have become
superfluous, for in our thought-processes we are constantly in the
habit of displacing such cathexes from one path to another without
losing any of their energy by discharge. Jokes make use of the
following methods with that aim in view. Firstly, they try to keep
their expression as short as possible, so as to offer fewer points
of attack to the attention. Secondly, they observe the condition of
being easy to understand (see above); as soon as they call for
intellectual work which would demand a choice between different
paths of thought, they would endanger their effect not only by the
unavoidable expenditure of thought but also by the awakening of
attention. But besides this they employ the device of distracting
attention by putting forward something in the joke’s form of
expression which catches it, so that in the meantime the liberation
of the inhibitory cathexis and its discharge may be completed
without interruption. This aim is already fulfilled by the
omissions in the joke’s wording; they offer an incitement to
filling up the gaps and in that way succeed in withdrawing the
joking process from attention. Here the technique of riddles, which
attract the attention, is, as it were, brought into the service of
the joke-work. Far more effective even are the façades which
we have found especially in some groups of tendentious jokes (
p. 1699 ff.
). The syllogistic
façades admirably fulfil the aim of holding the attention by
setting it a task. While we are beginning to wonder what was wrong
with the reply, we are already laughing; our attention has been
caught unawares and the discharge of the liberated inhibitory
cathexis has been completed. The same is true of jokes with a
comic
façade, in which the comic comes to the help of
the joke-technique. A comic façade encourages the
effectiveness of a joke in more than one way; not only does it make
the automatism of the joking process possible, by holding the
attention, but it also facilitates the discharge by the joke, by
sending on ahead a discharge of a comic kind. The comic is here
operating exactly like a bribing fore-pleasure, and we can in this
way understand how some jokes are able to renounce entirely the
fore-pleasure produced by the ordinary methods of joking and make
use only of the comic for fore-pleasure. Among the joke-techniques
proper, it is in particular displacement and representation by
something absurd which, apart from their other qualifications, give
rise, too, to a distraction of the attention which is desirable for
the automatic course of the joking process.¹

  
¹
I should like to discuss yet another
interesting characteristic of joke-technique, in connection with an
example of a displacement joke. Once when Gallmeyer, that actress
of genius, was asked the unwelcome question ‘Your age?’
she is said to have replied ‘in the tone of voice of a
Gretchen and with her eyes bashfully cast down: "at
Brünn".’ This is a model displacement. When she was
asked her age she replied by giving the place of her birth. She was
thus anticipating the next question and was letting it be
understood that she would be glad to know that this one question
had been passed over. Yet we feel that in this instance the
characteristic of jokes is not expressed in all its purity. It is
too clear that the question is being evaded, the displacement is
too obvious. Our attention understands at once that what is in
question is an intentional displacement. In the other displacement
jokes the displacement is disguised; our attention is held by the
effort to detect it. In the displacement joke recorded on
p. 1658
, in the reply made to a
recommendation of a riding horse ‘What should I be doing in
Pressburg at half-past six?’ the displacement is also
prominent. But to make up for this it has a confusing effect on the
attention through its nonsensical nature, whereas in the
actress’s examination we are able to recognize her
displacement-reply immediately. - [
Added
1912] What are
known as ‘
Scherzfragen
[facetious questions]’
deviate from jokes in another direction, though apart from this
they may make use of the best techniques. Here is an example of one
of them, which uses the technique of displacement: ‘What is a
cannibal who has eaten his father and his mother?’ -
‘An orphan.’ - ‘And if he, has eaten all his
other relations as well?’ - ‘The sole heir.’ -
‘And where will a monster of that kind find sympathy?’
- ‘In the dictionary under "S".’
‘Facetious questions’ of this kind are not proper jokes
because the joking answers that they call for cannot be guessed in
the same way as are the allusions, omissions, etc. of
jokes.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1740

   As we can already guess, and as
we shall see more clearly later on, we have discovered in the
condition of distracting the attention a by no means unessential
feature of the psychical process in the hearer of a joke. In
connection with this there are still other things that we can
understand. Firstly, there is the question why we scarcely ever
know what we are laughing at in a joke, though we can discover it
by an analytic investigation. The laughter is in fact the product
of an automatic process which is only made possible by our
conscious attention’s being kept away from it. Secondly, we
are able to understand the peculiar fact about jokes that they only
produce their full effect on the hearer if they are new to him, if
they come as a surprise to him. This characteristic of jokes (which
determines the shortness of their life and stimulates the constant
production of new jokes) is evidently due to the fact that the very
nature of surprising someone or taking him unawares implies that it
cannot succeed a second time. When a joke is repeated, the
attention is led back to the first occasion of hearing it as the
memory of it arises. And from this we are carried on to an
understanding of the urge to tell a joke one has heard to other
people who have not yet heard it. One probably recovers from the
impression the joke makes on a new-comer some of the possibility of
enjoyment that has been lost owing to its lack of novelty. And it
may be that it was an analogous motive that drove the creator of
the joke in the first instance to tell it to someone else.

   In the third place I shall bring
forward - but this time not as necessary conditions but only as
encouragements to the process of joking - the auxiliary technical
methods of the joke-work which are calculated to increase the quota
which obtains discharge and in that way intensify the effect of the
joke. These, it is true, also for the most part increase the
attention that is paid to the joke, but they make this effect
innocuous once more by simultaneously holding it and inhibiting its
mobility. Anything that provokes interest and bewilderment works in
these two directions - thus, in particular, nonsense, and
contradiction, too, the ‘contrast of ideas’ which some
authorities have tried to make into the essential characteristic of
jokes, but which I can only regard as a means of intensifying their
effect. Anything that bewilders calls up in the hearer the state of
distribution of energy which Lipps has called ‘psychical
damming up’; and he is no doubt also correct in supposing
that the discharge is the more powerful, the higher was the
preceding damming up. Lipps’s account, it is true, does not
relate specifically to jokes but to the comic in general; but we
may regard it as most probable that in jokes, too, the discharge of
an inhibitory cathexis is similarly increased by the height of the
damming up.