Freud - Complete Works (295 page)

   Finally, another kind of allusion
consists in  ‘omission’, which may be compared to
condensation without the formation of a substitute. Actually, in
every allusion something is omitted, viz. the train of thought
leading to the allusion. It only depends on whether the more
obvious thing is the gap in the wording of the allusion or the
substitute which partly fills the gap. Thus a series of examples
would lead us back from blatant omission to allusion proper.

  
¹
[A non-existent word, which might be
translated ‘authoritis’ - from ‘
Dichter
(an author)'.]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1677

   Omission without a substitute is
shown in the following example: There is a witty and pugnacious
journalist in Vienna, whose biting invective has repeatedly led to
his being physically maltreated by the subjects of his attacks. On
one occasion, when a fresh misdeed on the part of one of his
habitual opponents was being discussed, somebody exclaimed:
‘If X hears of this, he’ll get his ears boxed
again.’ The technique of this joke includes, in the first
place, bewilderment at its apparent nonsense, since we cannot see
how getting one’s ears boxed can be an immediate consequence
of having heard something. The absurdity of the remark disappears
if we insert in the gap: ‘he’ll write such a scathing
article upon the man that . . . etc.’ Allusion by means of
omission, combined with nonsense, are accordingly the technical
methods used in this joke.

   ‘He praises himself so much
that the price of fumigating candles is going up.’ (Heine.)
This gap is easy to fill. What is omitted has been replaced by an
inference, which then leads back to what has been omitted, in the
form of an allusion: ‘self-praise stinks.’

   And now once again two Jews
outside the bath-house:

   One of them sighed:
‘Another year gone by already!’

   These examples leave us in no
doubt that here the omission forms part of the allusion.

   There is still quite a marked gap
to be seen in our next example, though it is a genuine and correct
allusive joke. After an artists’ carnival in Vienna a
jest-book was circulated, in which, among others, the following
highly remarkable epigram appeared:

   ‘A wife is like an
umbrella. Sooner or later one takes a cab.’

   An umbrella is not enough
protection against rain. The ‘sooner or later’ can only
mean ‘if it rains hard’, and a cab is a public vehicle.
But since we are only concerned here with the
form
of the
analogy, we will postpone the closer examination of this joke to a
later moment.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1678

   Heine’s ‘Bäder
von Lucca’ contains a regular wasp’s next of the most
stinging allusions and makes the most ingenious use of this form of
joke for polemical purposes (against Count Platen). Long before the
reader can suspect what is afoot, there are foreshadowings of a
particular theme, peculiarly ill-adapted for direct representation,
by allusions to material of the most varied kind, - for instance,
in Hirsch-Hyacinth’s verbal contortions: ‘You are too
stout and I am too thin; you have a good deal of imagination and I
have all the more business sense; I am a practicus and you are a
diarrheticus
; in short you are my complete
anti
podex
.’ - ‘Venus
Urinia
’ -
‘the stout Gudel von
Dreck
wall’ of Hamburg, and
so on. In what follows, the events described by the author take a
turn which seems at first merely to display his mischievous spirit
but soon reveals its symbolic relation to his polemical purpose and
at the same time shows itself as allusive. Eventually the attack on
Platen bursts out, and thenceforward allusions to the theme (with
which we have already been made acquainted) of the Count’s
love for men gushes out and overflows in every sentence of
Heine’s attack on his opponent’s talents and character.
For instance:

   ‘Even though the Muses do
not favour him, he has the Genius of Speech in his power, or rather
he knows how to do violence to him. For he does not possess the
free love of that Genius, he must unceasingly pursue this young
man, too, and he knows how to capture only the outer forms, which,
despite their lovely curves never speak nobly.’

   ‘He is like the ostrich,
which believes he is well hidden if he sticks his head in the sand,
so that only his behind can be seen. Our exalted bird would have
done better to hide his behind in the sand and show us his
head.’

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1679

   Allusion is perhaps the commonest
and most easily manageable method of joking and is at the bottom of
the majority of short-lived jokes which we are accustomed to
weaving into our conversations and which will not bear being
uprooted from their original soil and kept in isolation. But it
precisely reminds us once more of the fact that had begun to puzzle
us in our consideration of the technique of jokes. An allusion in
itself does not constitute a joke; there are correctly constructed
allusions which have no claim to such a character. Only allusions
that possess that character can be described as jokes. So that the
criterion of jokes, which we have pursued into their technique,
eludes us there once again.

   I have occasionally described
allusion as  ‘indirect representation’; and we may
now observe that the various species of allusion, together with
representation by the opposite and other techniques that have still
to be mentioned, may be united into a single large group, for which
‘indirect representation’ would be the most
comprehensive name. ‘Faulty reasoning’,
‘unification’, ‘indirect representation’ -
these, then, are the headings under which we can classify those
techniques of conceptual jokes which we have come to know.

   If we examine our material
further, we seem to recognize a fresh sub-species of indirect
representation which can be precisely characterized but of which
few examples can be adduced. This is representation by something
small or very small - which performs the task of giving full
expression to a whole characteristic by means of a tiny detail.
This group can be brought under the classification of
‘allusion’, if we bear in mind that this smallness is
related to what has to be represented, and can be seen to proceed
from it. For instance:

   ‘A Galician Jew was
travelling in a train. He had made himself really comfortable, had
unbuttoned his coat and put his feet up on the seat. Just then a
gentleman in modern dress entered the compartment. The Jew promptly
pulled himself together and took up a proper pose. The stranger
fingered through the pages of a notebook, made some calculations,
reflected for a moment and then suddenly asked the Jew:
"Excuse me, when is Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement)?"
"Oho!", said the Jew, and put his feet up on the seat
again before answering.’

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1680

   It cannot be denied that this
representation by something small is related to the ‘tendency
to economy’ which we were left with as the last common
element after our investigation of verbal technique.

   Here is a very similar
example:

   ‘The doctor, who had been
asked to look after the Baroness at her confinement, pronounced
that the moment had not come, and suggested to the Baron that in
the meantime they should have a game of cards in the next room.
After a while a cry of pain from the Baroness struck the ears of
the two men: "Ah, mon Dieu, que je souffre!" Her husband
sprang up, but the doctor signed to him to sit down:
"It’s nothing. Let’s go on with the game!" A
little later there were again sounds from the pregnant woman:
"Mein Gott, mein Gott, what terrible pains!" -
"Aren’t you going in, Professor?" asked the Baron.
- "No, no. It’s not time yet." - At last there came
from next door an unmistakable cry of "Aa-ee, aa-ee,
aa-ee!" The doctor threw down his cards and exclaimed:
"
Now
it’s time."'

   This successful joke demonstrates
two things from the example of the way in which the cries of pain
uttered by an aristocratic lady in child-birth changed their
character little by little. It shows how pain causes primitive
nature to break through all the layers of education, and how an
important decision can be properly made to depend on an apparently
trivial phenomenon.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1681

   There is another kind of indirect
representation used by jokes, namely the ‘analogy’. We
have kept it back so long because the consideration of it comes up
against new difficulties, or makes particularly evident
difficulties that we have already come up against in other
connections. We have already admitted that in some of the examples
we have examined we have not been able to banish a doubt as to
whether they ought to be regarded as jokes at all; and in this
uncertainty we have recognized that the foundations of our enquiry
have been seriously shaken. But I am aware of this uncertainty in
no other material more strongly or more frequently than in jokes of
analogy. There is a feeling - and this is probably true of a large
number of other people under the same conditions - which tells me
‘this is a joke, I can pronounce this to be a joke’
even before the hidden essential nature of jokes has been
discovered. This feeling leaves me in the lurch most often in the
case of joking analogies. If to begin with I unhesitatingly
pronounce an analogy to be a joke, a moment later I seem to notice
that the enjoyment it gives me is of a quality different from what
I am accustomed to derive from a joke. And the circumstance that
joking analogies are very seldom able to provoke the explosive
laugh which signalizes a good joke makes it impossible for me to
resolve the doubt in my usual way - by limiting myself to the best
and most effective examples of a species.

   It is easy to demonstrate that
there are remarkably fine and effective examples of analogies that
do not in the least strike us as being jokes. The fine analogy
between the tenderness in Ottilie’s diary and the scarlet
thread of the English navy (
p. 1629
 
n
.) is one such. And
I cannot refrain from quoting in the same sense another one, which
I am never tired of admiring and the effect of which I have not
grown out of. It is the analogy with which Ferdinand Lassalle ended
one of his celebrated speeches for the defence (‘Science and
the Workers’): ‘Upon a man such as I have shown you
this one to be, who has devoted his life to the watchword
"Science and the Workers", being convicted, if it were
his lot, would make no more impression than would the bursting of a
retort upon a chemist deep in his scientific experiments. As soon
as the interruption is past, with a slight frown over the
rebelliousness of his material, he will quietly pursue his
researches and his labours.’

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1682

   A rich selection of apt and
joking analogies are to be found among Lichtenberg’s writings
(the second volume of the Göttingen edition of 1853), and it
is from there that I shall take the material for our
investigation.

   ‘It is almost impossible to
carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing
someone’s beard.’

   No doubt that seems to be a joke;
but on closer examination we, notice that the joking effect does
not arise from the analogy itself but from a subsidiary
characteristic. ‘The torch of truth’ is not a new
analogy but one that has been common for a very long time and has
become reduced to a
cliché
- as always happens when
an analogy is lucky and accepted into linguistic usage. Though we
scarcely notice the analogy any longer in the phrase ‘the
torch of truth’, it is suddenly given back its full original
force by Lichtenberg, since an addition is now made to the analogy
and a consequence is drawn from it. But we are already familiar
with a process like this of giving its full meaning to a
watered-down expression as a technique of joking. It finds a place
in the multiple use of the same material (
p. 1639 f.
). It might quite well be
that the joking impression produced by Lichtenberg’s remark
arises only from its dependence on this joke-technique.

   The same judgement may certainly
apply as well to another joking analogy by the same author:

   ‘To be sure, the man was
not a great light [
Licht
], but a great candlestick
[
Leuchter
] . . . He was a Professor of
Philosophy.’

   To describe a man of learning as
a great light, a
lumen mondi
, has long ceased to be an
effective analogy, whether or not it originally had an effect as a
joke. But the analogy is refreshed, it is given back its full
force, if a modification is derived from it and a second, new,
analogy is thus obtained from it. The way in which this second
analogy comes about seems to be what determines the joke, not the
two analogies themselves. This would be an instance of the same
joke-technique as in the example of the torch.

   The following example seems to
have the character of a joke for another reason, but one that must
be judged similarly:

   ‘Reviews seem to me to be a
kind of childish illness to which new-born books are more or less
liable. There are examples of the healthiest dying of it; and the
weakest often get through it. Some escape it altogether. Attempts
have often been made to guard against it by the amulets of preface
and dedication, or even to inoculate against it by judgements of
one’s own. But this does not always help.’