Freud - Complete Works (292 page)

   ‘A gentleman entered a
pastry-cook’s shop and ordered a cake; but he soon brought it
back and asked for a glass of liqueur instead. He drank it and
began to leave without having paid. The proprietor detained him.
"What do you want?" asked the customer. -
"You’ve not paid for the liqueur." - "But I
gave you the cake in exchange for it." - "You
didn’t pay for that either." - "But I hadn’t
eaten it."'

   This anecdote too has an
appearance of logic about it, which, as we already know, is a
suitable façade for a piece of faulty reasoning. The mistake
evidently lies in the crafty customer’s constructing a
connection which did not exist between the giving back of the cake
and the taking of the liqueur in its place. The episode in fact
fell into two processes, which were independent of each other so
far as the vendor was concerned and were substitutes for each other
only from the point of view of the purchaser’s intention.
First he took the cake and gave it back, and therefore owed nothing
for it; then he took the liqueur, and for it he owed payment. We
might say that the customer used the relation ‘in exchange
for’ with a double meaning. But it would be more correct to
say that by means of a double meaning he constructed a connection
which was not in reality valid.¹

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1912:] A similar
nonsensical technique appears if a joke seeks to maintain a
connection which seems to be excluded by the special conditions
implied in its content. Such, for instance, is Lichtenberg’s
knife without a blade which has no handle. So, too, the joke
repeated by Von Falke: ‘Is this the place where the Duke of
Wellington spoke those words?’  - ‘Yes, it is the
place; but he never spoke the words.’

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   This is an opportunity for making
a not unimportant admission. We are engaged in investigating the
technique of jokes as shown in examples; and we should therefore be
certain that the examples we have chosen are really genuine jokes.
It is the case, however, that in a number of instances we are in
doubt whether the particular example ought to be called a joke or
not. We have no criterion at our disposal before our investigation
has given us one. Linguistic usage is untrustworthy and itself
needs to have its justification examined. In coming to our decision
we can base ourselves on nothing but a certain
‘feeling’, which we may interpret as meaning that the
decision is made in our judgement in accordance with particular
criteria that are not yet accessible to our knowledge. In the case
of our last example we must feel a doubt whether it should be
represented as a joke, or perhaps as a ‘sophistical’
joke, or simply as a piece of sophistry. For the fact is that we do
not yet know in what the characteristic of being a joke
resides.

   On the other hand, the next
example, which exhibits a type of faulty reasoning that may be said
to be complementary to the former instance, is an undoubted joke.
It is once again a story of a marriage-broker:

   ‘The
Schadchen
was
defending the girl he had proposed against the young man’s
protests. "I don’t care for the mother-in-law",
said the latter. "She’s a disagreeable, stupid
person." - "But after all you’re not marrying the
mother-in-law. What you want is her daughter." - "Yes,
but she’s not young any longer, and she’s not precisely
a beauty." - "No matter. If she’s neither young nor
beautiful she’ll be all the more faithful to you."-
"And she hasn’t much money." - "Who’s
talking about money? Are you marrying money then? After all
it’s a wife that you want." - "But she’s got
a hunchback too." - "Well, what
do
you want?
Isn’t she to have a single fault?"'

   What was really in question,
then, was an unbeautiful girl, no longer young, with a scanty dowry
and an unpleasant mother, who was moreover the victim of a serious
deformity - not very inviting conditions for contracting a
marriage. The marriage broker was able, in the case of each one of
these defects, to point out how it would be possible to come to
terms with it. He was then able to claim that the inexcusable hunch
back was the single defect that every individual must be allowed to
possess. Once more there is the appearance of logic which is
characteristic of a piece of sophistry and which is intended to
conceal the faulty reasoning. Clearly the girl had a number of
defects - several that might be overlooked and one that it was
impossible to disregard; she was unmarriageable. The broker behaved
as though each separate defect was got rid of by his evasions,
whereas in fact each one of them left a certain amount of
depreciation behind which had to be added to the next one. He
insisted on treating each defect in isolation and refused to add
them up into a total.

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   The same omission is the core of
another piece of sophistry which has been much laughed over, but
whose right to be called a joke might be doubted:

   ‘A. borrowed a copper
kettle from B. and after he had returned it was sued by B. because
the kettle now had a big hole in it which made it unusable. His
defence was: "First, I never borrowed a kettle from B. at all;
secondly, the kettle had a hole in it already when I got it from
him; and thirdly, I gave him back the kettle undamaged."'
Each one of these defences is valid in itself, but taken together
they exclude one another. A. was treating in isolation what had to
be regarded as a connected whole, just as the marriage-broker
treated the girl’s defects. We might also say: ‘A. has
put an "and" where only an "either-or" is
possible.’

   We find another piece of
sophistry in the following marriage broker story:

   ‘The would-be bridegroom
complained that the bride had one leg shorter than the other and
limped. The
Schadchen
contradicted him: "You’re
wrong. Suppose you marry a woman with healthy, straight limbs! What
do you gain from it? You never have a day’s security that she
won’t fall down, break a leg and afterwards be lame all her
life. And think of the suffering then, the agitation, and the
doctor’s bill! But if you take
this
one, that
can’t happen to you. Here you have a
fait
accompli
.’

   The appearance of logic is very
thin in this case, and no one will be ready to prefer an already
‘accomplished misfortune’ to one that is merely a
possibility. The fault in this train of thought can be more easily
shown in another example - a story which I cannot entirely divest
of its dialect:

   ‘In the temple at Cracow
the Great Rabbi N. was sitting and praying with his disciples.
Suddenly he uttered a cry, and, in reply to his disciples’
anxious enquiries, exclaimed: "At this very moment the Great
Rabbi L. has died in Lemberg." The community put on mourning
for the dead man. In the course of the next few days people
arriving from Lemberg were asked how the Rabbi had died and what
had been wrong with him; but they knew nothing about it, and had
left him in the best of health. At last it was established with
certainty that the Rabbi L. in Lemberg had not died at the moment
at which the Rabbi N. had observed his death by telepathy, since he
was still alive. A stranger took the opportunity of jeering at one
of the Cracow Rabbi’s disciples about this occurrence:
"Your Rabbi made a great fool of himself that time, when he
saw the Rabbi L. die in Lemberg. The man’s alive to this
day." "That makes no difference", replied the
disciple. "Whatever you may say, the
Kück
¹
from Cracow to Lemberg was a magnificent one."'

   The faulty reasoning common to
the last two examples is here undisguisedly admitted. The value of
phantasy is exalted unduly in comparison with reality; a
possibility is almost equated with an actual event. The distant
look across the stretch of country separating Cracow and Lemberg
would have been an impressive telepathic achievement if it had
produced something that was true. But the disciple was not
concerned with that. It might after all have possibly happened that
the Rabbi in Lemberg had died at the moment at which the Cracow
Rabbi announced his death; and the disciple displaced the emphasis
from the condition subject to which the teacher’s achievement
deserved admiration on to an unconditional admiration of the
achievement. ‘
In magnis rebus voluisse sat est
’
² expresses a similar point of view. Just as in this example
reality is disregarded in favour of possibility, so in the former
one the marriage-broker suggests to the would-be bridegroom that
the possibility of a woman being made lame by an accident should be
regarded as something far more important than the question of
whether she is really lame or not.

  
¹
[A Yiddish word] from the German
‘
gucken
[to look or peep]’: ‘look’,
‘distant look’.

  
²
[‘In great things it is enough to
have wished.’]

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   This group of
‘sophistical’ pieces of faulty reasoning is resembled
by another interesting group in which the faulty reasoning can be
described as ‘automatic’. It may be due to no more than
a whim of chance that all the examples that I shall bring forward
of this new group are once more
Schadchen
stories:

   ‘A
Schadchen
had
brought an assistant with him to the discussion about the proposed
bride, to bear out what he had to say. "She is straight as a
pine-tree", said the
Schadchen
. - "As a
pine-tree", repeated the echo. - "And she has eyes that
ought to be seen!" - "What eyes she has!" confirmed
the echo.- "And she is better educated than anyone!" -
"What an education!" - "It’s true
there’s one thing", admitted the broker, "she has a
small hump." - "And
what
a hump!" the echo
confirmed once more.’ The other stories are analogous, but
have more sense.

   ‘The bridegroom was most
disagreeably surprised when the bride was introduced to him, and
drew the broker on one side and whispered his remonstrances:
"Why have you brought me here?" he asked reproachfully.
"She’s ugly and old, she squints and has bad teeth and
bleary eyes . . ." - "You needn’t
lower your voice", interrupted the broker, "she’s
deaf as well."'

   ‘The bridegroom was paying
his first visit to the bride’s house in the company of the
broker, and while they were waiting in the
salon
for the
family to appear, the broker drew attention to a cupboard with
glass doors in which the finest set of silver plate was exhibited.
"There! Look at that! You can see from these things how rich
these people are." - "But", asked the suspicious
young man, "mightn’t it be possible that these fine
things were only collected for the occasion - that they were
borrowed to give an impression of wealth?" - "What an
idea!" answered the broker protestingly. "Who do you
think would lend these people anything?"'

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   The same thing happens in all
three cases. A person who has reacted in the same way several times
in succession repeats this mode of expression on the next occasion,
when it is unsuitable and defeats his own intentions. He neglects
to adapt himself to the needs of the situation, by giving way to
the automatic action of habit. Thus, in the first story the
assistant forgets that he was brought along in order to prejudice
the would-be bridegroom in favour of the proposed bride. And since
to begin with he has performed his task and underlined the
bride’s advantages by repeating each one as it is brought
forward, he goes on to underline her timidly admitted hump, which
he should have minimized. The broker in the second story is so much
fascinated by the enumeration of the bride’s defects and
infirmities that he completes the list out of his own knowledge,
though that was certainly not his business or purpose. In the third
story, finally, he allows himself to be so much carried away by his
eagerness to convince the young man of the family’s wealth
that, in order to establish one confirmatory point, he brings up
something that is bound to upset all his efforts. In every case
automatic action triumphs over the expedient modification of
thought and expression.

   This is easy to see; but it is
bound to have a confusing effect when we notice that these three
stories have as much right to be called ‘comic’ as we
had to produce them as ‘jokes’. The uncovering of
psychical automatism is one of the techniques of the comic, just as
is any kind of revelation or self-betrayal. We suddenly find
ourselves faced at this point with the problem of the relation of
jokes to the comic which we intended to evade. (See the
introduction.) Are these stories perhaps only ‘comic’
and not ‘jokes’? Is the comic operating here by the
same methods as jokes do? And, once again, what constitutes the
peculiar characteristics of jokes?

   We must keep to our view that the
technique of this last group of jokes that we have examined lies in
nothing else than in bringing forward ‘faulty
reasoning’. But we are obliged to admit that their
examination has so far led us more into obscurity than
understanding. Nevertheless we do not abandon our expectation that
a more complete knowledge of the techniques of jokes will lead us
to a result which can serve as a starting point for further
discoveries.

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