Freud - Complete Works (283 page)

   This last mistake seems to occur
in Bahr’s
Die Andere
, apart from a second one which is
implicit in the problem presented in the play - namely, that it is
impossible for us to put ourselves with conviction into the
position of believing that one particular person has a prescriptive
right to give the girl complete satisfaction. So that her case
cannot become ours. Moreover, there remains a third mistake: namely
that there is nothing left for us to discover and that our entire
resistance is mobilized against this predetermined condition of
love which is so unacceptable to us. Of the three formal
preconditions that I have been discussing, the most important seems
to be that of the diversion of attention.

   In general, it may perhaps be
said that the neurotic instability of the public and the
dramatist’s skill in avoiding resistances and offering
fore-pleasures can alone determine the limits set upon the
employment of abnormal characters on the stage.

1613

JOKES AND THEIR RELATION TO THE UNCONSCIOUS

(1905)

1614

Intentionally left blank

1615

JOKES AND THEIR RELATION TO THE UNCONSCIOUS

A.  ANALYTIC PART

I

INTRODUCTION

Anyone who has at any time had occasion to
enquire from the literature of aesthetics and psychology what light
can be thrown on the nature of jokes and on the position they
occupy will probably have to admit that jokes have not received
nearly as much philosophical consideration as they deserve in view
of the part they play in our mental life. Only a small number of
thinkers can be named who have entered at all deeply into the
problems of jokes. Among those who have discussed jokes, however,
are such famous names as those of the novelist Jean Paul (Richter)
and of the philosophers Theodor Vischer, Kuno Fischer and Theodor
Lipps. But even with these writers the subject of jokes lies in the
background, while the main interest of their enquiry is turned to
the more comprehensive and attractive problem of the comic.

   The first impression one derives
from the literature is that it is quite impracticable to deal with
jokes otherwise than in connection with the comic.

   According to Lipps (1898),¹
a joke is ‘something comic which is entirely
subjective’ - that is, something comic ‘which
we
produce, which is attached to action of ours as such, to which we
invariably stand in the relation of subject and never of object,
not even of voluntary object’ (ibid., 80). This is explained
further by a remark to the effect that in general we call a joke
‘any conscious and successful evocation of what is comic,
whether the comic of observation or of situation’ (ibid.,
78).

  
¹
It is this book that has given me the
courage to undertake this attempt as well as the possibility of
doing so.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1616

   Fischer (1889) illustrates the
relation of jokes to the comic with the help of caricature, which
in his account he places between them. The comic is concerned with
the ugly in one of its manifestations: ‘If it is concealed,
it must be uncovered in the light of the comic way of looking at
things; if it is noticed only a little or scarcely at all, it must
be brought forward and made obvious, so that it lies clear and open
to the light of day . . . In this way caricature comes
about.’ (Ibid., 45.)  - ’Our whole spiritual
world, the intellectual kingdom of our thoughts and ideas, does not
unfold itself before the gaze of external observation, it cannot be
directly imagined pictorially and visibly; and yet it too contains
its inhibitions, its weaknesses and its deformities - a wealth of
ridiculous and comic contrasts. In order to emphasize these and
make them accessible to aesthetic consideration, a force is
necessary which is able not merely to imagine objects directly but
itself to reflect on these images and to clarify them: a force that
can illuminate thoughts. The only such force is
judgement
. A
joke is a judgement which produces a comic contrast; it has already
played a silent part in caricature, but only in judgement does it
attain its peculiar form and the free sphere of its
unfolding.’ (Ibid., 49-50.)

   It will be seen that the
characteristic which distinguishes the joke within the class of the
comic is attributed by Lipps to action, to the active behaviour of
the subject, but by Fischer to its relation to its
object
,
which he considers is the concealed ugliness of the world of
thoughts. It is impossible to test the validity of these
definitions of the joke - indeed, they are scarcely intelligible -
unless they are considered in the context from which they have been
torn. It would therefore be necessary to work through these
authors’ accounts of the comic before anything could be
learnt from them about jokes. Other passages, however, show us that
these same authors are able to describe essential and generally
valid characteristics of the joke without any regard to its
connection with the comic.

   The characterization of jokes
which seems best to satisfy Fischer himself is as follows: ‘A
joke is a
playful
judgement.’ (Ibid., 51.) By way of
illustration of this, we are given an analogy: ‘just as
aesthetic freedom lies in the playful contemplation of
things’ (ibid., 50). Elsewhere (ibid., 20) the aesthetic
attitude towards an object is characterized by the condition that
we do not ask anything of the object, especially no satisfaction of
our serious needs, but content ourselves with the enjoyment of
contemplating it. The aesthetic attitude is
playful
in
contrast to work. - ‘It might be that from aesthetic freedom
there might spring too a sort of judging released from its usual
rules and regulations, which, on account of its origin, I will call
a "playful judgement", and that in this concept is
contained the first determinant, if not the whole formula, that
will solve our problem. "Freedom produces jokes and jokes
produce freedom", wrote Jean Paul. "Joking is merely
playing with ideas."' (Ibid., 24.)

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1617

   A favourite definition of joking
has long been the ability to find similarity between dissimilar
things - that is, hidden similarities. Jean Paul has expressed this
thought itself in a joking form: ‘Joking is the disguised
priest who weds every couple.’ Vischer carries this further:
‘He likes best to wed couples whose union their relatives
frown upon.’ Vischer objects, however, that there are jokes
where there is no question of comparing - no question, therefore,
of finding a similarity. So he, slightly diverging from Jean Paul,
defines joking as the ability to bind into a unity, with surprising
rapidity, several ideas which are in fact alien to one another both
in their internal content and in the nexus to which they belong.
Fischer, again, stresses the fact that in a large number of joking
judgements
differences
rather than similarities are found,
and Lipps points out that these definitions relate to joking as an
ability possessed by the joker and not to the jokes which he
makes.

   Other more or less interrelated
ideas which have been brought up as defining or describing jokes
are: ‘a contrast of ideas’, ‘sense in
nonsense’, ‘bewilderment and illumination’.

   Definitions such as that of
Kraepelin lay stress on contrasting ideas. A joke is ‘the
arbitrary connecting or linking, usually by means of a verbal
association, of two ideas which in some way contrast with each
other’. A critic like Lipps had no difficulty in showing the
total inadequacy of this formula; but he does not himself exclude
the factor of contrast, but merely displaces it elsewhere.
‘The contrast remains, but it is not some contrast between
the ideas attached to the words, but a contrast or contradiction
between the meaning and the meaninglessness of the words.’
(Lipps, 1898, 87.) He gives examples to show how this is to be
understood. ‘A contrast arises only
because . . . we grant its words a meaning which,
again, we nevertheless cannot grant them.’ (Ibid., 90.)

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1618

   If this last point is developed
further, the contrast between ‘sense and nonsense’
becomes significant. ‘What at one moment has seemed to us to
have a meaning, we now see is completely meaningless. That is what,
in this case, constitutes the comic process . . . A remark seems to
us to be a joke, if we attribute a significance to it that has
psychological necessity and, as soon as we have done so, deny it
again. Various things can be understood by this
"significance". We attach
sense
to a remark and
know that logically it cannot have any. We discover
truth
in
it, which nevertheless, according to the laws of experience or our
general habits of thought, we cannot find in it. We grant it
logical or practical consequences in excess of its true content,
only to deny these consequences as soon as we have clearly
recognized the nature of the remark. In every instance, the
psychological process which the joking remark provokes in us, and
on which the feeling of the comic rests, consists in the immediate
transition, from this attaching of sense, from this discovering of
truth, and from this granting of consequences, to the consciousness
or impression of relative nothingness.’ (Ibid., 85.)

   However penetrating this
discussion may sound the question may be raised here whether the
contrast between what has meaning and what is meaningless, on which
the feeling of the
comic
is said to rest, also contributes
to defining the concept of the
joke
in so far as it differs
from that of the comic.

   The factor of ‘bewilderment
and illumination’, too, leads us deep into the problem of the
relation of the joke to the comic. Kant says of the comic in
general that it has the remarkable characteristic of being able to
deceive us only for a moment. Heymans (1896) explains how the
effect of a joke comes about through bewilderment being succeeded
by illumination. He illustrates his meaning by a brilliant joke of
Heine’s, who makes one of his characters, Hirsch-Hyacinth,
the poor lottery-agent, boast that the great Baron Rothschild had
treated him quite as his equal - quite
‘famillionairely’. Here the word that is the vehicle of
the joke appears at first simply to be a wrongly constructed word,
something unintelligible, incomprehensible, puzzling. It
accordingly bewilders. The comic effect is produced by the solution
of this bewilderment, by understanding the word. Lipps (1898, 95)
adds to this that this first stage of enlightenment - that the
bewildering word means this or that  - is followed by a second
stage, in which we realize that this meaningless word has
bewildered us and has then shown us its true meaning. It is only
this second illumination, this discovery that a word which is
meaningless by normal linguistic usage has been responsible for the
whole thing - this resolution of the problem into nothing - it is
only this second illumination that produces the comic effect.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1619

   Whether the one or the other of
these two views seems to us to throw more light on the question,
the discussion of bewilderment and enlightenment brings us closer
to a particular discovery. For if the comic effect of Heine’s
‘famillionairely’ depends on the solution of the
apparently meaningless word, the ‘joke’ must no doubt
be ascribed to the formation of that word and to the
characteristics of the word thus formed.

   Another peculiarity of jokes,
quite unrelated to what we have just been considering, is
recognized by all the authorities as essential to them.
‘
Brevity
is the body and the soul of wit, it is its
very self,’ says Jean Paul (1804, Part II, Paragraph 42),
merely modifying what the old chatterbox Polonius says in
Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
(II, 2):

                                               
‘Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit

                                               
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,

                                               
I will be brief.’

In this connection the account given by Lipps
(1898, 90) of the brevity of jokes is significant: ‘A joke
says what it has to say, not always in few words, but in
too
few words - that is, in words that are insufficient by strict logic
or by common modes of thought and speech. It may even actually say
what it has to say by not saying it.’

   We have already learnt from the
connection of jokes with caricature that they ‘must bring
forward something that is concealed or hidden’ (Fischer,
1889, 51). I lay stress on this determinant once more, because it
too has more to do with the nature of jokes than with their being
part of the comic.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1620

   I am well aware that these scanty
extracts from the works of writers upon jokes cannot do them
justice. In view of the difficulties standing in the way of my
giving an unmistakably correct account of such complicated and
subtle trains of thought, I cannot spare curious enquirers the
labour of obtaining the information they desire from the original
sources. But I am not sure that they will come back fully
satisfied. The criteria and characteristics of jokes brought up by
these authors and collected above - activity, relation to the
content of our thoughts, the characteristic of playful judgement,
the coupling of dissimilar things, contrasting ideas, ‘sense
in nonsense’, the succession of bewilderment and
enlightenment, the bringing forward of what is hidden, and the
peculiar brevity of wit - all this, it is true, seems to us at
first sight so very much to the point and so easily confirmed by
instances that we cannot be in any danger of underrating such
views. But they are
dijecta membra
, which we should like to
see combined into an organic whole. When all is said and done, they
contribute to our knowledge of jokes no more than would a series of
anecdotes to the description of some personality of whom we have a
right to ask for a biography. We are entirely without insight into
the connection that presumably exists between the separate
determinants - what, for instance, the brevity of a joke can have
to do with its characteristic of being a playful judgement. We need
to be told, further, whether a joke must satisfy
all
these
determinants in order to be a proper joke, or need only satisfy
some
, and if so which can be replaced by others and which
are indispensable. We should also wish to have a grouping and
classification of jokes on the basis of the characteristics
considered essential. The classification that we find in the
literature rests on the one hand on the technical methods employed
in them (e.g. punning or play upon words) and on the other hand on
the use made of them in speech (e.g. jokes used for the purposes of
caricature or of characterization, or joking snubs).