Freud - Complete Works (293 page)
The next examples of jokes, with
which we shall pursue our enquiry, offer an easier task. Their
technique, in particular, reminds us of what we already know.
First, here is a joke of
Lichtenberg’s:
‘January is the month in
which we offer our dear friends wishes, and the rest are the months
in which they are not fulfilled.’
Since these jokes are to be
described as refined rather than strong, and work by methods that
are unobtrusive, we will begin by presenting a number of them in
order to intensify their effect:
‘Human life falls into two
halves. In the first half we wish the second one would come; and in
the second we wish the first one were back.’
‘Experience consists in
experiencing what we do not wish to experience.’
(Both these last two are from
Fischer, 1889.)
These examples cannot fail to
remind us of a group with which we have already dealt and which is
distinguished by the ‘multiple use of the same
material’. The last example in particular will raise the
question of why we did not include it in that group instead of
introducing it here in a fresh connection. ‘Experience’
is once again described in its own terms, just as
‘jealousy’ was earlier (
p. 1640
). I should not be inclined to
dispute this classification very seriously. But as regards the
other two examples (which are of a similar nature), I think another
factor is more striking and more important than the multiple use of
the same words, in which in this case there is nothing that fringes
on double meaning. I should like in particular to stress the fact
that here new and unexpected unities are set up, relations of ideas
to one another, definitions made mutually or by reference to a
common third element. I should like to name this process
‘unification’. It is clearly analogous to condensation
by compression into the same words. Thus the two halves of human
life are described by a mutual relation discovered to exist between
them: in the first we wish the second would come and in the second
we wish the first were back. Speaking more precisely, two very
similar mutual relations have been chosen for representation. To
the similarity of the relations there corresponds a similarity of
the words, which may indeed remind us of the multiple use of the
same material: ‘wish . . . would come’ - ‘wish .
. . back’. In Lichtenberg’s joke January and the months
contrasted with it are characterized by a (once again, modified)
relation to a third element; these are the good wishes, which are
received in the first month and not fulfilled in the remaining
ones. Here the distinction from the multiple use of the same
material (which approximates to double meaning) is very
clear.¹
¹
In order to give a better description of
‘unification’ than the examples above allow of, I will
make use of something I have already mentioned - namely the
peculiar negative relation that holds between jokes and riddles,
according to which the one conceals what the other exhibits. Many
of the riddles with the production of which G. T. Fechner, the
philosopher, passed his time when he was blind, are characterized
by a high degree of unification, which lends them a special charm.
Take, for instance, as a neat example, Riddle No. 203 (Dr.
Mises’
Rätselbüchlein
, 4th edition,
enlarged, N.D.):
Die beiden ersten finden ihre Ruhestätte
Im Paar der andern, und das Ganze macht ihr Bette.
[My
two first (
Toten
, the dead) find their resting-place in my
two last (
Gräber
, graves), and my whole
(
Totengräber
, grave-digger) makes their
bed.]
We
are told nothing about the two pairs of syllables that have to be
guessed except a relation that holds between them, and about the
whole we are only told its relation to the first pair.
The
following are two examples of description by relation to the same
or a slightly modified third element:
Die erste Silb’hat Zähn’ und Haare,
Die zweite Zähne in den Haaren,
Wer auf den Zähnen nicht hat Haare,
Vom Ganzen kaufe keine Waren.
No. 170.
[The first syllable has teeth and hair (
Ross
, horse), the
second has teeth in the hair (
Kamm
, comb). No one who has
not hair on his teeth (i.e. who is not able to look after his
interests) should buy goods from the whole (
Rosskamm
,
horse-dealer).]
Die erste Silbe frisst,
Die andere Silbe isst,
Die dritte wird gefressen,
Das Ganze wird
gegessen.
No. 168.
[The first syllable gobbles (
Sau
, sow), the second syllable
eats (
Er
, he), the third is gobbled (
Kraut
, weeds),
the whole is eaten (
Sauerkraut
).]
The
most perfect instance of unification is to be found in a riddle of
Schleiermacher’s, which cannot be denied the character of a
joke:
Von der letzten umschlungen
Schwebt das vollendete Ganze
Zu den zwei ersten empor.
[Entwined by my last (
Strick
, rope), my completed whole
(
Galgenstrick
, rogue) swings to the top of my two first
(
Galgen
, gallows).]
The
great majority of all such riddles lack unification. That is to
say, the clue by which one syllable is to be guessed is quite
independent of those that point to the second or third, as well as
of the indication which is to lead to the separate discovery of the
whole.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1668
Here is a neat example of a
unification joke which needs no explanation:
‘The French poet J. B.
Rousseau wrote an Ode to Posterity. Voltaire was not of opinion
that the poem merited survival, and jokingly remarked: "This
poem will not reach its destination."' (Fischer,
1889.)
This last example draws attention
to the fact that it is essentially unification that lies at the
bottom of jokes that can be described as ‘ready
repartees’. For repartee consists in the defence going to
meet the aggression, in ‘turning the tables on someone’
or ‘paying someone back in his own coin’ - that is, in
establishing an unexpected unity between attack and counter-attack.
For instance:
‘An innkeeper had a whitlow
on his finger and the baker said to him: "You must have got
that by putting your finger in your beer." "It
wasn’t that", replied the innkeeper, "I got a piece
of your bread under my nail."' (From Überhorst (1900,
2).)
‘Serenissimus was making a
tour through his provinces and noticed a man in the crowd who bore
a striking resemblance to his own exalted person. He beckoned to
him and asked: "Was your mother at one time in service in the
Palace?"- "No, your Highness," was the reply,
"but my father was."'
‘Duke Charles of
Württemberg happened on one of his rides to come upon a dyer
who was engaged on his job. Pointing to the grey horse he was
riding, the Duke called out: "Can you dye him blue?"
"Yes, of course, your Highness," came the answer,
"if he can stand boiling."'
In this excellent
tu
quoque
, in which a nonsensical question is met by an equally
impossible condition, there is another technical factor at work
which would have been absent if the dyer had answered: ‘No,
your Highness. I’m afraid the horse wouldn’t stand
boiling.’
Unification has another, quite
specially interesting technical instrument at its disposal:
stringing things together with the conjunction ‘and’.
If things are strung together in this way it implies that they are
connected: we cannot help understanding it so. For instance, when
Heine, speaking of the city of Göttingen in the
Harzreise
, remarks: ‘Speaking generally, the
inhabitants of Göttingen are divided into students,
professors, philistines and donkeys’, we take this grouping
in precisely the sense which Heine emphasizes in an addition to the
sentence: ‘and these four classes are anything but sharply
divided.’ Or, again, when he speaks of the school in which he
had to put up with ‘so much Latin, caning and
Geography’, this series, which is made even more transparent
by the position of the ‘caning’ between the two
educational subjects, tells us that the unmistakable view taken by
the schoolboys of the caning certainly extended to Latin and
Geography was well.
Among the examples given by Lipps
of ‘joking enumeration’ (‘co-ordination’),
we find the following lines quoted as being closely akin to
Heine’s ‘students, professors, philistines and
donkeys’:
Mit einer Gabel und mit Müh’
Zos ihn die Mutter aus der Brüh.
[With a fork and much to-do
His mother dragged him from the stew.]
It is as though (Lipps comments),
the
Müh
[trouble, to-do] were an instrument like the
fork. We have a feeling, however, that these lines, though they are
very comic, are far from being a joke, while Heine’s list
undoubtedly is one. We may perhaps recall these examples later,
when we need no longer evade the problem of the relation between
the comic and jokes.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1669
We observed in the example of the
Duke and the dyer that it would remain a joke by unification if the
dyer had replied: ‘
No
, I’m afraid the horse
wouldn’t stand boiling.’ But his actual reply was:
‘
Yes
, your Highness, if he can stand boiling.’
The replacement of the really appropriate ‘no’ by a
‘yes’ constitutes a new technical method of joking, the
employment of which we will pursue in some other examples.
A joke similar to the one we have
just mentioned (also quoted by Fischer) is simpler:
‘Frederick the Great heard
of a preacher in Silesia who had the reputation of being in contact
with spirits. He sent for the man and received him with the
question "You can conjure up spirits?" The reply was:
"At your Majesty’s command. But they don’t
come."' It is quite obvious here that the method used in
the joke lay in nothing else than the replacing of the only
possible answer ‘no’ by its opposite. In order to carry
out the replacement, it was necessary to add a ‘but’ to
the ‘yes’; so that ‘yes’ and
‘but’ are equivalent in sense to ‘no’.
This ‘representation by the
opposite’, as we shall call it, serves the joke-work in
various forms. In the next two examples it appears almost pure:
‘This lady resembles the
Venus of Milo in many respects: she, too, is extraordinarily old,
like her she has no teeth, and there are white patches on the
yellowish surface of her body.’ (Heine.)
Here we have a representation of
ugliness through resemblances to what is most beautiful. It is true
that these resemblances can only exist in qualities that are
expressed in terms with a double meaning or in unimportant details.
This latter feature applies to our second example - ‘The
Great Spirit’, by Lichtenberg:
‘He united in himself the
characteristics of the greatest men. He carried his head askew like
Alexander; he always had to wear a
toupet
like Caesar; he
could drink coffee like Leibnitz; and once he was properly settled
in his armchair, he forgot eating and drinking like Newton, and had
to be woken up like him; he wore his wig like Dr. Johnson, and he
always left a breeches-button undone like Cervantes.’
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1670
Von Falke (1897, 271) brought
home a particularly good example of representation by the opposite
from a journey to Ireland, an example in which no use whatever is
made of words with a double meaning. The scene was a wax-work show
(as it might be, Madame Tussaud’s). A guide was conducting a
company of old and young visitors from figure to figure and
commenting on them: ‘This is the Duke of Wellington and his
horse’, he explained. Whereupon a young lady asked:
‘Which is the Duke of Wellington and which is his
horse?’ ‘Just as you like, my pretty child,’ was
the reply. ‘You pays your money and you takes your
choice.’
The reduction of this Irish joke
would be: ‘Shameless the things these wax-work people dare to
offer the public! One can’t distinguish between the horse and
its rider! (Facetious exaggeration.) And that’s what one pays
one’s money for!’ This indignant exclamation is then
dramatized, based on a small occurrence. In place of the public in
general an individual lady appears and the figure of the rider is
particularized: he must be the Duke of Wellington, who is so
extremely popular in Ireland. But the shamelessness of the
proprietor or guide, who takes money out of people’s pockets
and offers them no thing in return, is represented by the opposite
- by a speech in which he boasts himself a conscientious man of
business, who has nothing more closely at heart than regard for the
rights which the public has acquired by its payment. And now we can
see that the technique of this joke is not quite a simple one. In
so far as it enables the swindler to insist on his
conscientiousness it is a case of representation by the opposite;
but in so far as it effects this on an occasion on which something
quite different is demanded of him - so that he replies with
business like respectability where what we expect of him is the
identification of the figures - it is an instance of displacement.
The technique of the joke lies in a combination of the two
methods.