Freud - Complete Works (287 page)

   The multiple use of the same
word, once as a whole and again in the syllables into which it
falls, is the first instance we have come across of a technique
differing from that of condensation. But the profusion of examples
that have met us must convince us after a little reflection that
the newly-discovered technique can scarcely be limited to this one
method. There are a number of possible ways - how many it is as yet
quite impossible to guess - in which the same word or the same
verbal material can be put to multiple uses in one sentence. Are
all these possibilities to be regarded as technical methods of
making jokes? It seems to be so. And the examples of jokes which
follow will prove it.

  
¹
The goodness of these jokes depends on the
fact that another technical method of a far higher order is
simultaneously brought into use (see below). - At this point I may
also draw attention to a connection between jokes and riddles. The
philosopher Brentano composed a kind of riddle in which a small
number of syllables had to be guessed which when they were put
together into words gave a different sense according as they were
grouped in one way or another. For instance:
‘. . . liess mich das Platanenblatt
ahnen’ [‘the plane-tree leaf (
Platanenblatt
) led
me to think (
ahnen
)', where
‘
Platanen
’ and ‘
blatt ahnen
’
sound almost the same]. Or: ‘wie du dem Inder hast
verschrieben, in der Hast verschrieben’ [‘when you
wrote a prescription for the Indian, in your haste you made a slip
of the pen’, where ‘
Inder hast
(have to the
Indian)' and ‘
in der hast
(in your haste)'
sound the same.]

   The
syllables to be guessed were inserted into the appropriate place in
the sentence under the disguise of the repeated sound
‘dal’. [Thus the English example would be stated:
‘he said he would daldaldaldal daldaldaldal.’] A
colleague of the philosopher’s took a witty revenge on him
when he heard of the elderly man’s engagement. He asked:
‘Daldaldal daldaldal?’ - ‘Brentano
brennt-a-no?’ [‘Brentano - does he still
burn?’]

  
What is the difference between these daldal riddles and the jokes
in the text above? In the former the technique is given as a
precondition and the wording has to be guessed; while in the jokes
the wording is given and the technique is disguised.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1638

   In the first place, one can take
the same verbal material and merely make some alteration in its
arrangement
. The slighter the alteration - the more one has
the impression of something different being said in the same words
- the better is the joke technically.

   ‘Mr. and Mrs. X live in
fairly grand style. Some people think that the husband has earned a
lot and so has been able to lay by a bit [
sich etwas
zurückgelegt
]; others again think that the wife has lain
back a bit [
sich etwas zurückgelegt
] and so has been
able to earn a lot.’¹

   A really diabolically ingenious
joke! And achieved with such an economy of means! ‘Earned a
lot - lay by a bit [
sich etwas zurückgelegt
]; lain back
a bit [
sich etwas zurückgelegt
] - earned a lot.’
It is merely the inversion of these two phrases that distinguishes
what is said about the husband from what is hinted about the wife.
Here again, by the way, this is not the whole technique of the
joke.²

   A wide field of play lies open to
the technique of jokes if we extend the ‘multiple use of the
same material’ to cover cases in which the word (or words) in
which the joke resides may occur once unaltered but the second time
with a slight modification. Here, for instance, is another of Herr
N.’s jokes:

   He heard a gentleman who was
himself born a Jew make a spiteful remark about the Jewish
character. ‘Herr Hofrat’, he said, ‘your
ant
e
semitism was
well-known to me; your anti-semitism is new to me.’

   Here only a single letter is
altered, whose modification could scarcely be noticed in careless
speech. The example reminds us of Herr N.’s other
modification jokes (on
p. 1631 ff.
), but the difference is
that here there is no condensation; everything that has to be said
is said in the joke itself: ‘I know that earlier you were
yourself a Jew; so I am surprised that
you
should speak ill
of Jews.’

  
¹
Daniel Spitzer, 1912, 1, 280.

  
²
[
Footnote added
1912:] This is also
true of the excellent joke reported by Brill from Oliver Wendell
Holmes: ‘Put not your trust in money, but put your money in
trust.’ Here there is promise of an antithesis but it does
not materialize. The second part of the sentence cancels the
antithesis. Incidentally, this is a good instance of the
untranslatability of jokes with this technique.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1639

   An admirable example of a
modification joke of this kind is the well-known cry:
‘
Traduttore - Traditore!
’¹ The similarity,
amounting almost to identity, of the two words represents most
impressively the necessity which forces a translator into crimes
against his original.²

   The variety of possible slight
modifications in such jokes is so great that none of them exactly
resembles another.

   Here is a joke that is said to
have been made during an examination in jurisprudence. The
candidate had to translate a passage in the Corpus Juris:
‘"Labeo ait" . . . I fall, says
he.’ ‘You fail, say I’, replied the examiner, and
the examination was at an end. Anyone who mistakes the name of the
great jurist for a verbal form, and moreover one wrongly recalled,
no doubt deserves nothing better. But the technique of the joke
lies in the fact that almost the same words which proved the
ignorance of the candidate were used to pronounce his punishment by
the examiner. The joke is, moreover, an example of ‘ready
repartee’, the technique of which, as we shall see, does not
differ greatly from what we are illustrating here.

   Words are a plastic material with
which one can do all kinds of things. There are words which, when
used in certain connections, have lost their original full meaning,
but which regain it in other connections. A joke of
Lichtenberg’s carefully singles out circumstances in which
the watered-down words are bound to regain their full meaning:

   ‘"How are you getting
along?"³ the blind man asked the lame man. "As you
see", the lame man replied to the blind man.’

   There are, too, words in German
that can be taken, according as they are ‘full’ or
‘empty’, in a different sense, and, indeed, in more
than one. For there can be two different derivatives from the same
stem, one of which has developed into a word with a full meaning
and the other into a watered-down final syllable or suffix, both of
which, however, are pronounced exactly the same. The identity of
sound between a full word and a watered-down syllable may also be a
chance one. In both cases the joke-technique can take advantage of
the conditions thus prevailing in the linguistic material.

  
¹
[‘Translator -
traitor!’]

  
²
[
Footnote added
1912:] Brill quotes
a quite analogous modification joke:
Amantes amentes
(lovers
are fools).

  
³
[‘
Wie geht’s?
’
Literally, ‘how do you walk?’]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1640

   A joke, for instance, which is
attributed to Schleiermacher, is of importance to us as being an
almost pure example of these technical methods:
‘
Eifersucht
[jealousy] is a
Leidenschaft
[passion] which
mit Eifer sucht
[with eagerness seeks] what
Leiden schafft
[causes pain].’

   This is undeniably in the nature
of a joke, though not particularly effective as one. A quantity of
factors are absent here which might mislead us in analysing other
jokes so long as we examined each of those factors separately. The
thought expressed in the wording is worthless; the definition it
gives of jealousy is in any case thoroughly unsatisfactory. There
is not a trace of ‘sense in nonsense’, of ‘hidden
meaning’ or of ‘bewilderment and illumination’.
No efforts will reveal a ‘contrast of ideas’: a
contrast between the words and what they mean can be found only
with great difficulty. There is no sign of abbreviation; on the
contrary, the wording gives an impression of prolixity. And yet it
is a joke, and even a very perfect one. At the same time, its only
striking characteristic is the one in the absence of which the joke
disappears: the fact that here the same words are put to multiple
uses. We can then choose whether to include this joke in the
sub-class of those in which words are used first as a whole and
then divided up (e.g. Rousseau or Antigone) or in the other
sub-class in which the multiplicity is produced by the full or the
watered-down meaning of the verbal constituents. Apart from this,
only one other factor deserves notice from the point of view of the
technique of jokes. We find here an unusual state of things
established: a kind of ‘unification’ has taken place,
since ‘
Eifersucht
[jealousy]’ is defined by
means of its own name - by means of itself, as it were. This, as we
shall see, is also a technique of jokes. These two factors,
therefore, must in themselves be sufficient to give a remark the
character of a joke.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1641

   If now we enter still further
into the variety of forms of the ‘multiple use’ of the
same word, we suddenly notice that we have before us examples of
‘double meaning’ or ‘play upon words’ -
forms which have long been generally known and recognized as a
technique of jokes. Why have we taken the trouble to discover
afresh what we might have gathered from the most superficial essay
on jokes? To begin with, we can only plead in our own justification
that we have nevertheless brought out another aspect of the same
phenomenon of linguistic expression. What is supposed by the
authorities to show the character of jokes as a kind of
‘play’ has been classified by us under the heading of
‘multiple use’.

   The further cases of multiple
use, which can also be brought together under the title of
‘double meaning’ as a new, third group, can easily be
divided into sub-classes, which, it is true, cannot be separated
from one another by essential distinctions any more than can the
third group as a whole from the second. We find:

   (
a
) Cases of the double
meaning of a name and of a
thing
denoted by it. For
instance: ‘Discharge thyself of our company, Pistol!‘
(Shakespeare.)

   ‘More
Hof
than
Freiung
' said a witty Viennese about a number of pretty
girls who had been admired for many years but had never found a
husband. ‘Hof’ and ‘Freiung’ are the names
of two neighbouring squares in the centre of Vienna.

   ‘Vile Macbeth does not rule
here in Hamburg: the ruler here is
Banko
.’
(Heine.)

   Where the name cannot be used (we
should perhaps say ‘misused’) unaltered, a double
meaning can be got out of it by one of the slight modifications we
are familiar with:

   ‘Why’, it was asked,
in times that are now past, ‘have the French rejected
Lohengrin
?’ ‘On Elsa’s (Elsass [Alsace])
account.’

   (
b
) Double meaning arising
from the literal and metaphorical meanings of a word. This is one
of the most fertile sources for the technique of jokes. I will
quote only one example:

   A medical friend well-known for
his jokes once said to Arthur Schnitzler the dramatist:
‘I’m not surprised that you’ve become a great
writer. After all your father held a mirror up to his
contemporaries.’ The mirror which was handled by the
dramatist’s father, the famous Dr. Schnitzler, was the
laryngoscope. A well-known remark of Hamlet’s tells us that
the purpose of a play, and so also of the dramatist who creates it,
is ‘to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature; to
show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age
and body of the time his form and pressure.’ (III, 2.)

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1642

   (
c
) Double meaning proper,
or play upon words. This may be described as the ideal case of
‘multiple use’. Here no violence is done to the word;
it is not cut up into its separate syllables, it does not need to
be subjected to any modification, it does not have to be
transferred from the sphere it belongs to (the sphere of proper
names, for instance) to another one. Exactly as it is and as it
stands in the sentence, it is able, thanks to certain favourable
circumstances, to express two different meanings.

   Examples of this are at our
disposal in plenty:

   One of Napoleon III’s first
acts when he assumed power was to seize the property of the House
of Orleans. This excellent play upon words was current at the time:
‘C’est le premier vol de l’aigle.’
[‘It is the eagle’s first
vol
.’]
‘
Vol
’ means ‘flight’ but also
‘theft’. (Quoted by Fischer, 1889.)

   Louis XV wanted to test the wit
of one of his courtiers, of whose talent he had been told. At the
first opportunity he commanded the gentleman to make a joke of
which he, the king, should be the ‘
sujet
'. The
courtier at once made the clever reply: ‘Le roi n’est
pas sujet.’ [‘The King is not a subject.’]