Freud - Complete Works (288 page)
A doctor, as he came away from a
lady’s bedside, said to her husband with a shake of his head:
‘I don’t like her looks.’ ‘I’ve not
liked her looks for a long time’, the husband hastened to
agree.
The doctor was of course
referring to the lady’s condition; but he expressed his
anxiety about the patient in words which the husband could
interpret as a confirmation of his own marital aversion.
Heine said of a satirical comedy:
‘This satire would not have been so biting if its author had
had more to bite.’ This joke is more an example of
metaphorical and literal double meaning than of a play upon words
proper. But what is to be gained by drawing a sharp distinction
here?
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1643
Another good example of play upon
words is told by the authorities (Heymans and Lipps) in a form
which makes it unintelligible. Not long ago I came upon the correct
version and setting of the anecdote in a collection of jokes which
has not proved of much use apart from this.¹
‘One day Saphir and
Rothschild met each other. After they had chatted for a little
while, Saphir said: "Listen, Rothschild, my funds have got
low, you might lend me a hundred ducats." "Oh
well!", said Rothschild, "that’ll suit me all right
- but only on condition that you make a joke."
"That’ll suit me all right too", replied Saphir.
"Good. Then come to my office tomorrow." Saphir appeared
punctually. "Ah!", said Rothschild, when he saw him come
in, "
Sie kommen um Ihre 100 Dukaten
."
"No", answered Saphir, "
Sie kommen um Ihre 100
Dukaten
because I shan’t dream of paying you back before
the Day of Judgement.’²
¹
Hermann, 1904.
²
[‘
Sie kommen um
. . .’ may mean equally ‘You are coming
about’ or ‘You are losing’.]
-’"Saphir", so Heymans tells us, "was asked by
a rich creditor whom he had come to visit: ‘
Sie kommen
wohl um die 300 Gulden?
[No doubt you’ve come about the
300 florins?]’ and he replied: ‘
Nein, Sie kommen um
die 300 Gulden
[No, you’re going to lose the 300
florins].’ In giving this answer he was expressing his
meaning in a perfectly correct and by no means unusual form."
That is in fact the case. Saphir’s answer,
considered in
itself
, is in perfect order. We understand, too, what he means
to say - namely that he has no intention of paying his debt. Rut
Saphir makes use of the same words that had previously been used by
his creditor. We therefore cannot avoid also taking them in the
sense in which they had been used by the latter. And in that case
Saphir’s answer no longer has any meaning whatever. The
creditor is not "coming" at all. Nor can he be coming
"about the 300 florins" - that is, he cannot be coming to
bring 300 florins. Moreover, as a creditor, it is not his business
to bring but to demand. Since Saphir’s words are in this way
recognized as being at once sense and nonsense, a comic situation
arises.’ (Lipps, 1898, 97.)
The
version which I have given in full in the text above for the sake
of clarity shows that the technique of the joke is far simpler than
Lipps supposes. Saphir does not come to
bring
the 300
florins but to
fetch
them from the rich man. Accordingly the
discussions of ‘sense and nonsense’ in this joke become
irrelevant.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1644
‘What do these statues
vorstellen
[represent or put forward]?’ asked a
stranger to Berlin of a native Berliner, looking at a row of
monuments in a public square. ‘Oh, well,’ was the
reply: ‘either their right leg or their left leg.’
‘At this moment I cannot
recall all the students’ names, and of the professors there
are some who still have no name at all.’ (Heine,
Harzreise
.)
We shall be giving ourselves
practice, perhaps, in diagnostic differentiation if at this point
we insert another well-known joke about professors. ’The
distinction between Professors Ordinary [
ordentlich
] and
Professors Extraordinary [
ausserordentlich
] is that the
ordinary ones do nothing extraordinary and the extraordinary ones
do nothing properly [
ordentlich
].’ This, of course, is
a play on the two meanings of the words
‘
ordentlich
’ and
‘
ausserordentlich
’: viz. on the one hand
‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the
‘
ordo
(the Establishment)' and on the other hand
‘efficient’ and ‘outstanding’. But the
conformity between this joke and some others we have already met
reminds us that here the ‘multiple use’ is far more
noticeable than the ‘double meaning’. All through the
sentence we hear nothing but a constantly recurring
‘
ordentlich
’, sometimes in that form and
sometimes modified in a negative sense. (Cf.
p. 1639
.) Moreover, the feat is again
achieved here of defining a concept by means of its own wording
(cf. the example of ‘
Eifersucht
’,
p. 1640
), or, more precisely, of
defining (even if only negatively) two correlative concepts by
means of one another, which produces an ingenious interlacement.
Finally, the aspect of ‘unification’ can also be
stressed here - the eliciting of a more intimate connection between
the elements of the statement than one would have had a right to
expect from their nature.
‘The beadle¹
Sch[äfer] greeted me quite as a colleague, for he too is a
writer, and has often mentioned me in his half-yearly writings; and
apart from that, he has often
cited
²) me, and if he
did not find me at home he was always kind enough to write the
citation
in chalk on my study door.’ (Heine,
Harzreise
.)
¹
[A university officer (at Göttingen)
in charge of undergraduate discipline.]
²
[For breaches of discipline.]
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1645
Daniel Spitzer, in
Wiener
Spaziergänge
, produced a laconic biographical description,
which is certainly also a good joke, of a social type which
flourished at the time of the outbreak of speculation: ‘Iron
front - iron cash-box - Iron Crown.’ (This last was an order
which carried noble rank with it.) A striking example of
‘unification’ - everything, as it were, made of iron!
The various, but not very markedly contrasting, meanings of the
epithet ‘iron’ make these ‘multiple uses’
possible.
Another example of a play upon
words may make the transition to a fresh sub-species of the
technique of double meaning easier. The joking medical colleague
already mentioned above (on
p. 1640
)
was responsible for this joke at the time of the Dreyfus case:
‘This girl reminds me of Dreyfus. The army doesn’t
believe in her innocence.’
The word ‘innocence’,
on the double meaning of which the joke is constructed, has in the
one context its usual meaning, with ‘fault’ or
‘crime’ as its opposite; but in the other context it
has a
sexual
meaning, of which the opposite is ‘sexual
experience’. Now there are a very large number of similar
examples of double meaning, in all of which the effect of the joke
depends quite specially on the sexual meaning. For this group we
may reserve the name of ‘
double entendre
[
Zweideutigkeit
]’.
An excellent example of a
double entendre
of this kind is Spitzer’s joke which
has already been recorded on
p. 1639
:
‘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.’
But if we compare this example of
double meaning accompanied by
double entendre
with other
examples, a distinction becomes evident which is not without its
interest from the point of view of technique. In the
‘innocence’ joke, the one meaning of the word was just
as obvious as the other; it would really be hard to decide whether
its sexual or non-sexual meaning was the more usual and familiar.
But it is otherwise with Spitzer’: example. In this the
commonplace meaning of the words ‘
sich etwas
zurückgelegt
’ is by far the more prominent, whereas
their sexual meaning is, as it were, covered and hidden and might
even escape the notice of an unsuspecting person altogether. By way
of a sharp contrast let us take another example of double meaning,
in which no attempt is made at thus concealing the sexual meaning:
for instance, Heine’s description of the character of a
complaisant lady: ‘She could
abschlagen
¹ nothing
except her own water.’ This sounds like a piece of obscenity
and hardly gives the impression of a joke.² This peculiarity,
however, where in a case of double meaning the two meanings are not
equally obvious, can also occur in jokes with no sexual reference -
whether because one meaning is more usual than the other or because
it is brought to the front by a connection with the other parts of
the sentence. (Cf., for instance, ‘C’est le premier vol
de l’aigle’.) I propose to describe all these as
‘double meaning with an allusion.’
¹
[‘To refuse’; vulgarly
‘to urinate’.]
²
Cf. on this Fischer (1889, 86). He gives
the name of ‘
Zweideutigkeit
’, which I have
applied differently in the text, to jokes with a double meaning in
which the two meanings are not equally prominent but in which one
lies behind the other. Nomenclature of this kind is a matter of
convention; linguistic usage has arrived at no firm
decision.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1646
We have already made the
acquaintance of such a large number of different joke-techniques
that I fear there is some danger of losing our grasp of them. Let
us therefore try to summarize them:
I.
Condensation:
(
a
)
with formation of composite word,
(
b
)
with modification.
II. Multiple use of the
same material:
(
c
)
as a whole and in parts,
(
d
)
in a different order,
(
e
)
with slight modification,
(
f
)
of the same words full and empty.
III. Double meaning:
(
g
)
Meaning as a name and as a thing,
(
h
)
metaphorical and literal meanings,
(
i
)
double meaning proper (play upon words),
(
j
)
double entendre
,
(
k
)
double meaning with an allusion.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1647
This variety and number of
techniques has a confusing effect. It might make us feel annoyed at
having devoted ourselves to a consideration of the technical
methods of jokes, and might make us suspect that after all we have
exaggerated their importance as a means for discovering the
essential nature of jokes. If only this convenient suspicion were
not contradicted by the one incontestable fact that the joke
invariably disappears as soon as we eliminate the operation of
these techniques from its form of expression! So, in spite of
everything, we are led to look for the unity in this multiplicity.
It ought to be possible to bring all these techniques under a
single heading. As we have already said, it is not difficult to
unite the second and third groups. Double meaning (play upon words)
is indeed only the ideal case of the multiple use of the same
material. Of these the latter is evidently the more inclusive
concept. The examples of dividing up, of re-arrangement of the same
material and of multiple use with slight modification (
c
,
d
and
e
) might - though only with some difficulty -
be brought under the concept of double meaning. But what is there
in common between the technique of the first group (condensation
with substitute formation) and that of the two others (multiple use
of the same material)?
Well, something very simple and
obvious, I should have thought. The multiple use of the same
material is, after all, only a special case of condensation; play
upon words is nothing other than a condensation
without
substitute-formation; condensation remains the wider category. All
these techniques are dominated by a tendency to compression, or
rather to saving. It all seems to be a question of economy. In
Hamlet’s words: ‘Thrift, thrift, Horatio!’
Let us test this economy on the
different examples. ‘C’est le premier vol de
l’aigle.’ It is the eagle’s first flight. Yes,
but it is a thieving flight. Luckily for the existence of this
joke, ‘
vol
' means not only ‘flight’
but ‘theft’ as well. Has no condensation and economy
been made? Most certainly. There has been a saving of the whole of
the second thought and it has been dropped without leaving a
substitute. The double meaning of the word ‘
vol
' has made such a substitute unnecessary; or it would be
equally true to say that the word ‘
vol
' contains
the substitute for the suppressed thought without any addition of
change having to be made to the first one. That is the advantage of
a double meaning.