Freud - Complete Works (294 page)

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1671

   No great distance separates this
example from a small group which might be described as
‘overstatement’ jokes. In these the ‘yes’
which would be in place in the reduction is replaced by a
‘no’, which, however, on account of its content, has
the force of an intensified ‘yes’, and
vice
versa
. A denial is a substitute for an overstated confirmation.
Thus, for instance, in Lessing’s epigram:¹

                                               
Die gute Galathee! Man sagt, sie schwärz’ ihr
Haar;

                                               
Da doch ihr Haar schon schwarz, als sie es kaufte, war.

                                               
[Good Galathea blacks her hair, ‘tis thought;

                                               
And yet her hair was black when it was bought.]

   Or Lichtenberg’s malicious
defence of philosophy:

   ‘There are more things in
heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy’, said
Prince Hamlet contemptuously. Lichtenberg knew that this
condemnation is not nearly severe enough, for it does not take into
account all the objections that can be made to philosophy. He
therefore added what was missing: ‘But there is much, too, in
philosophy that is not to be found in heaven or earth.’ His
addition, it is true, emphasizes the way in which philosophy
compensates us for the insufficiency for which Hamlet censures it.
But this compensation implies another and still greater
reproach.

   Two Jewish jokes, though they are
of a coarse type, are even clearer, since they are free from any
trace of displacement:

   ‘Two Jews were discussing
baths. "I have a bath every year", said one of them,
"whether I need one or not."'

   It is obvious that this boastful
insistence on his cleanliness only serves to convict him of
uncleanliness.

   ‘A Jew noticed the remains
of some food in another one’s beard. "I can tell you
what you had to eat yesterday." - "Well, tell me." -
"Lentils, then." - "Wrong: the day before yesterday!
"'

   The following example is an
excellent ‘overstatement’ joke, which can easily be
traced back to representation by the opposite:

   ‘The King condescended to
visit a surgical clinic and came on the professor as he was
carrying out the amputation of a leg. He accompanied all its stages
with loud expressions of his royal satisfaction: "Bravo!
bravo! my dear Professor!" When the operation was finished,
the professor approached him and asked him with a deep bow:
"Is it your Majesty’s command that I should remove the
other leg too?" ‘

  
¹
Modelled on one in the Greek
Anthology.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1672

   The professor’s thoughts
during the royal applause could certainly not have been expressed
unaltered: ‘This makes it look as though I were taking off
the poor fellows bad leg by royal command and only for the royal
satisfaction. After all I really have other reasons for the
operation.’ But he then goes to the King and says: ‘I
have no reasons for carrying out an operation other than your
Majesty’s command. The applause you honoured me with has made
me so happy that I only await your Majesty’s orders to
amputate the sound limb too.’ In this way he succeeds in
making himself understood by saying the opposite of what he thinks
but must keep to himself. This opposite is an overstatement that
cannot be believed.

   As these examples show,
representation by the opposite is an instrument of joke-technique
that is used frequently and works powerfully. But there is
something else that we should not overlook: namely that this
technique is by no means peculiar to jokes. When Mark Antony, after
he has made a long speech in the Forum and has reversed the
emotional attitude of his audience round Caesar’s corpse,
finally exclaims once more:

                                               
‘For Brutus is an honourable
man . . .’

he knows that the people will now shout back
to him the true sense of his words:

                                               
‘They were traitors: honourable men!’

   Or when
Simplicissimus
describes a collection of incredible pieces of brutality and
cynicism as the expressions of ‘men of feeling’, this
too is a representation by the opposite. But we call this
‘irony’ and no longer a joke. The only technique that
characterizes irony is representation by the opposite. Moreover we
read and hear of ‘ironical jokes’. So it can no longer
be doubted that technique alone is insufficient to characterize the
nature of jokes. Something further is needed which we have not yet
discovered. But on the other hand it remains an uncontradicted fact
that if we undo the technique of a joke it disappears. For the time
being we may find difficulty in thinking how these two fixed points
that we have arrived at in explaining jokes can be reconciled.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1673

   If representation by the opposite
is one of the technical methods of jokes, we can expect that jokes
may also make use of its contrary - representation by something
similar
or akin. A further pursuit of our enquiry will in
fact show us that this is the technique of a fresh and particularly
comprehensive group of conceptual jokes. We shall describe the
peculiarity of this technique far more appropriately if, instead of
representation by something ‘akin’, we say by something
‘correlated’ or ‘connected’. We will take
our start, in fact, with this latter characteristic and illustrate
it at once by an example.

   Here is an American anecdote:
‘Two not particularly scrupulous business men had succeeded,
by dint of a series of highly risky enterprises, in amassing a
large fortune, and they were now making efforts to push their way
into good society. One method, which struck them as a likely one,
was to have their portraits painted by the most celebrated and
highly paid artist in the city, whose pictures had an immense
reputation. The precious canvases were shown for the first time at
a large evening party, and the two hosts themselves led the most
influential connoisseur and art critic up to the wall upon which
the portraits were hanging side by side, to extract his admiring
judgement on them. He studied the works for a long time, and then,
shaking his head, as though there was something he had missed,
pointed to the gap between the pictures and asked quietly:
"But where’s the Saviour?"' (I.e. ‘I
don’t see the picture of the Saviour’.)

   The meaning of this remark is
clear. It is once again a question of the representation of
something that cannot be expressed directly. How does this
‘indirect representation’ come about?  Starting
from the representation in the joke, we trace the path backwards
through a series of easily established associations and
inferences.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1674

   We can guess from the question
‘Where’s the Saviour: Where’s the picture of the
Saviour?’ that the sight of the two pictures had reminded the
speaker of a similar sight, familiar to him, as to us, which
however, included an element that was missing here - the picture of
the Saviour between two other pictures. There is only one such
situation: Christ hanging between the two thieves. The missing
element is brought into prominence by the joke. The similarity lies
in the pictures, hanging to the right and left of the Saviour,
which the joke passes over; it can only consist in the fact that
the pictures hanging on the walls are pictures of thieves. What the
critic wanted to say but could not say was: ‘You are a couple
of rascals’ or, in greater detail: ‘What do I care
about your pictures? You are a couple of rascals - I know
that!’ And he did in fact end by saying it by means of a few
associations and inferences, using the method which we speak of as
an ‘allusion’.

   We at once recall where we have
already come across allusion -  in connection, namely, with
double meaning. When two meanings are expressed in one word and one
of them is so much more frequent and usual that it occurs to us at
once, while the second is more out of the way and therefore less
prominent, we proposed to speak of this as ‘double meaning
with an allusion’. In a whole number of the examples we have
already examined we remarked that the technique was not a simple
one, and we now perceive that the ‘allusion’ was the
complicating factor in them. (See, for instance, the inversion joke
about the wife who has lain back a bit and so has been able to earn
a lot or the nonsensical joke about the man who replied to
congratulations on the birth of his youngest child by saying that
it was remarkable what human hands could accomplish.)

   In the American anecdote we now
have before us an allusion without any double meaning, and we see
that its characteristic is replacement by something linked to it in
a conceptual connection. It may easily be guessed that the
utilizable connection can be of more than one kind. In order not to
lose ourselves in a maze of detail, we will discuss only the most
marked variants and these only in a few examples.

   The connection used for the
replacement may be merely a resemblance in sound, so that this
sub-species becomes analogous to puns among verbal jokes. Here,
however, it is not the resemblance in sound between two
words
, but between whole sentences, characteristic phrases,
and so on.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1675

   For instance, Lichtenberg coined
the saying: ‘New spas cure well’, which at once reminds
us of the proverb: ‘New brooms sweep clean.’ The two
phrases share the first one and a half words and the last word, as
well as the whole structure of the sentence.¹ And there is no
doubt that the sentence came into the witty philosopher’s
head as an imitation of the familiar proverb. Thus
Lichtenberg’s saying becomes an allusion to the proverb. By
means of this allusion something is suggested that is not said
straight out - namely that something else is responsible for the
effects produced by spas besides the unvarying characteristics of
thermal springs.

   A similar technical solution
applies to another jest [
Scherz
] or joke [
Witz
] of
Lichtenberg’s: ‘A girl scarcely twelve
Moden
old.’ This sounds like ‘twelve
Monden
[moons]’, i.e. months, and may originally have been a slip of
the pen for the latter, which is a permissible expression in
poetry. But it also makes good sense to use the changing fashion
instead of the changing moon as a method of determining a
woman’s age.

   The connection may also consist
in similarity except for a ‘slight modification’. So
that this technique, too, is parallel to a verbal technique. Both
species of joke make almost the same impression, but they can be
better distinguished from each other if we consider the processes
of the joke-work.

   Here is an example of a verbal
joke or pun of this kind: Marie Wilt was a great singer, famous,
however, for the compass not only of her voice. She suffered the
humiliation of having the title of a play based on Jules
Verne’s well-known novel used as an allusion to her misshapen
figure: ‘Round the Wilt in 80 Days’.²

   Or: ‘Every fathom a
queen’, a modification of Shakespeare’s familiar
‘Every inch a king’. The allusion to this quotation was
made with reference to an aristocratic and over-life-size lady. No
very serious objection could really be made if anyone were to
prefer to include this joke among the ‘condensations
accompanied by modifications as substitute’. (See
‘tête-à-bête’,
p. 1631
.)

  
¹
[In the German the first syllables of
‘spas (
Bäder
)' and ‘brooms
(
Besen
)' sound alike; and in the German proverb the last
word is ‘well (
gut
)'.]

  
²
[The German for ‘world’ is
‘
Welt
'.]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1676

   A friend said of someone who had
lofty views but was obstinate in the pursuit of his aims: ‘Er
hat ein Ideal vor dem Kopf.’ The current phrase is:
‘Ein Brett vor dem Kopf haben’. The modification
alludes to this phrase and makes use of its meaning for its own
purposes. Here, once more, the technique might be described as
‘condensation with modification’.

   It is almost impossible to
distinguish between ‘allusion by means of modification’
and ‘condensation with substitution’, if the
modification is limited to a change of letters. For instance:
‘Di
ch
teritis’¹ This allusion to the scourge
of ‘Di
ph
teritis ' represents authorship by
unqualified persons as another public danger.

   Negative particles make very neat
allusions possible at the cost of slight alterations:

   ‘My
fellow-
un
believer Spinoza’, says Heine. ‘We, by
the
un
grace of God, day-labourers, serfs, negroes,
villeins . . .’ is how Lichtenberg begins a
manifesto (which he carries no further) made by these unfortunates
- who certainly have more right to this title than kings and
princes have to its unmodified form.