Freud - Complete Works (297 page)

   We shall scarcely be
contradicting this statement of Fischer’s - we shall perhaps
be doing no more than translating his thoughts into our mode of
expression - if we insist that the joking activity should not,
after all, be described as pointless or aimless, since it has the
unmistakable aim of evoking pleasure in its hearers. I doubt if we
are in a position to undertake
anything
without having an
intention in view. If we do not require our mental apparatus at the
moment for supplying one of our indispensable satisfactions, we
allow it itself to work in the direction of pleasure and we seek to
derive pleasure from its own activity. I suspect that this is in
general the condition that governs all aesthetic ideation, but I
understand too little of aesthetics to try to enlarge on this
statement. As regards joking, however, I can assert, on the basis
of the two discoveries we have already made, that it is an activity
which aims at deriving pleasure from mental processes, whether
intellectual or otherwise. No doubt there are other activities
which have the same aim. They are perhaps differentiated according
to the fields of mental activity from which they seek to derive
pleasure or perhaps according to the methods of which they make
use. We cannot for the moment decide about this; but we hold firmly
to the view that the joke technique and the tendency towards
economy by which it is partly governed (
p. 1647 ff.
) have been brought into
connection with the production of pleasure.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1693

   But before we set about solving
the riddle of how the technical methods of the joke-work are able
to excite pleasure in the hearer, we have to recall the fact that,
with a view to simplification and greater perspicuity, we have left
tendentious jokes entirely on one side. We must, after all, try to
throw light on the question of what the purposes of jokes are, and
how they serve those purposes.

   There is, first and foremost, one
observation which warns us not to leave tendentious jokes on one
side in our investigation of the origin of the pleasure we take in
jokes. The pleasurable effect of innocent jokes is as a rule a
moderate one; a clear sense of satisfaction, a slight smile, is as
a rule all it can achieve in its hearers. And it may be that a part
even of this effect is to be attributed to the joke’s
intellectual content, as we have seen from suitable examples (
p. 1690
). A non-tendentious joke
scarcely ever achieves the sudden burst of laughter which makes
tendentious ones so irresistible. Since the technique of both can
be the same, a suspicion may be aroused in us that tendentious
jokes, by virtue of their purpose, must have sources of pleasure at
their disposal to which innocent jokes have no access.

   The purposes of jokes can easily
be reviewed. Where a joke is not an aim in itself - that is, where
it is not an innocent one - there are only two purposes that it may
serve, and these two can themselves be subsumed under a single
heading. It is either a
hostile
joke (serving the purpose of
aggressiveness, satire, or defence) or an
obscene
joke
(serving the purpose of exposure). It must be repeated in advance
that the technical species of the joke - whether it is a verbal or
a conceptual joke - bears no relation to these two purposes.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1694

   It is a much lengthier business
to show the way in which jokes serve these two purposes. In this
investigation I should prefer to deal first not with the hostile
jokes but with the exposing jokes. It is true that these have been
far more rarely deemed worthy of investigation, as though aversion
to the thing itself had here been transferred to the discussion of
it. But we will not allow ourselves to be disconcerted by this, for
we shall immediately come upon a marginal case of joking which
promises to bring us enlightenment on more than one obscurity,

   We know what is meant by
‘smut’: the intentional bringing into prominence of
sexual facts and relations by speech. This definition, however, is
no more valid than other definitions. In spite of this definition,
a lecture on the anatomy of the sexual organs or the physiology of
procreation need not have a single point of contact with smut. It
is a further relevant fact that smut is directed to a particular
person, by whom one is sexually excited and who, on hearing it, is
expected to become aware of the speaker’s excitement and as a
result to become sexually excited in turn. Instead of this
excitement the other person may be led to feel shame or
embarrassment, which is only a reaction against the excitement and,
in a roundabout way, is an admission of it. Smut is thus originally
directed towards women and may be equated with attempts at
seduction. If a man in a company of men enjoys telling or listening
to smut, the original situation, which owing to social inhibitions
cannot be realized, is at the same time imagined. A person who
laughs at smut that he hears is laughing as though he were the
spectator of an act of sexual aggression.

   The sexual material which forms
the content of smut includes more than what is
peculiar
to
each sex; it also includes what is
common
to both sexes and
to which the feeling of shame extends - that is to say, what is
excremental in the most comprehensive sense. This is, however, the
sense covered by sexuality in childhood, an age at which there is,
as it were, a cloaca within which what is sexual and what is
excremental are barely or not at all distinguished.¹
Throughout the whole range of the psychology of the neuroses, what
is sexual includes what is excremental, and is understood in the
old, infantile, sense.

  
¹
See my
Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality
(1905
d
), which is appearing at the same time
as the present work.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1695

   Smut is like an exposure of the
sexually different person to whom it is directed. By the utterance
of the obscene words it compels the person who is assailed to
imagine the part of the body or the procedure in question and shows
her that the assailant is himself imagining it. It cannot be
doubted that the desire to see what is sexual exposed is the
original motive of smut.

   It can only help to clarify
things if at this point we go back to fundamental facts. A desire
to see the organs peculiar to each sex exposed is one of the
original components of our libido. It may itself be a substitute
for something earlier and go back to a hypothetical primary desire
to touch the sexual parts. As so often, looking has replaced
touching.¹ The libido for looking and touching is present in
everyone in two forms, active and passive, male and female; and,
according to the preponderance of the sexual character, one form or
the other predominates. It is easy to observe the inclination to
self-exposure in young children. In cases in which the germ of this
inclination escapes its usual fate of being buried and suppressed,
it develops in men into the familiar perversion known as
exhibitionism. In women the inclination to passive exhibitionism is
almost invariably buried under the imposing reactive function of
sexual modesty, but not without a loophole being left for it in
relation to clothes. I need only hint at the elasticity and
variability in the amount of exhibitionism that women are permitted
to retain in accordance with differing convention and
circumstances.

   In men a high degree of this
trend persists as a portion of their libido, and it serves to
introduce the sexual act. When this urge makes itself felt at the
first approach to a woman, it must make use of words, for two
reasons; firstly, to announce itself to her, and secondly, because
if the idea is aroused by speech it may induce a corresponding
excitement in the woman herself and may awaken an inclination in
her to passive exhibitionism. A wooing speech like this is not yet
smut, but it passes over into it. If the woman’s readiness
emerges quickly the obscene speech has a short life; it yields at
once to a sexual action. It is otherwise if quick readiness on the
woman’s part is not to be counted on, and if in place of it
defensive reactions appear. In that case the sexually exciting
speech becomes an aim in itself in the shape of smut. Since the
sexual aggressiveness is held up in its advance towards the act, it
pauses at the evocation of the excitement and derives pleasure from
the signs of it in the woman. In so doing, the aggressiveness is no
doubt altering its character as well, just as any libidinal impulse
will if it is met by an obstacle. It becomes positively hostile and
cruel, and it thus summons to its help against the obstacle the
sadistic components of the sexual instinct.

   The woman’s inflexibility
is therefore the first condition for the development of smut,
although, to be sure, it seems merely to imply a postponement and
does not indicate that further efforts will be in vain. The ideal
case of a resistance of this kind on the woman’s part occurs
if another man is present at the same time - a third person -, for
in that case an immediate surrender by the woman is as good as out
of the question. This third person soon acquires the greatest
importance in the development of the smut; to begin with, however,
the presence of the woman is not to be overlooked. Among country
people or in inns of the humbler sort it will be noticed that it is
not until the entrance of the barmaid or the innkeeper’s wife
that smuttiness starts up. Only at higher social levels is the
opposite found, and the presence of a woman brings the smut to an
end. The men save up this kind of entertainment, which originally
presupposed the presence of a woman who was feeling ashamed, till
they are ‘alone together’. So that gradually, in place
of the woman, the onlooker, now the listener, becomes the person to
whom the smut is addressed, and owing to this transformation it is
already near to assuming the character of a joke.

   From this point onwards our
attention will be drawn to two factors: the part played by the
third person, the listener, and the conditions governing the
subject-matter of the smut itself.

  
¹
Cf. Moll’s instinct of
‘contrectation’ (Moll, 1898).

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1696

   Generally speaking, a tendentious
joke calls for three people: in addition to the one who makes the
joke, there must be a second who is taken as the object of the
hostile or sexual aggressiveness, and a third in whom the
joke’s aim of producing pleasure is fulfilled. We shall have
later to examine the deeper reasons for this state of things; for
the moment let us keep to the fact to which this testifies - namely
that it is not the person who makes the joke who laughs at it and
who therefore enjoys its pleasurable effect, but the inactive
listener. In the case of smut the three people are in the same
relation. The course of events may be thus described. When the
first person finds his libidinal impulse inhibited by the woman, he
develops a hostile trend against that second person and calls on
the originally interfering third person as his ally. Through the
first person’s smutty speech the woman is exposed before the
third, who, as listener, has now been bribed by the effortless
satisfaction of his own libido.

   It is remarkable how universally
popular a smutty interchange of this kind is among the common
people and how it unfailingly produces a cheerful mood. But it also
deserves to be noticed that in this complicated procedure, which
involves so many of the characteristics of tendentious jokes, none
of the formal requirements which characterize jokes are made of the
smut itself. The uttering of an undisguised indecency gives the
first person enjoyment and makes the third person laugh.

   Only when we rise to a society of
a more refined education do the formal conditions for jokes play a
part. The smut becomes a joke and is only tolerated when it has the
character of a joke. The technical method which it usually employs
is the allusion - that is, replacement by something small,
something remotely connected, which the hearer reconstructs in his
imagination into a complete and straightforward obscenity. The
greater the discrepancy between what is given directly in the form
of smut and what it necessarily calls up in the hearer, the more
refined becomes the joke and the higher, too, it may venture to
climb into good society. As can easily be shown from examples, smut
which has the characteristics of a joke has at its disposal, apart
from allusion, whether coarse or refined, all the other methods of
verbal and conceptual jokes.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1697

   And here at last we can
understand what it is that jokes achieve in the service of their
purpose. They make possible the satisfaction of an instinct
(whether lustful or hostile) in the face of an obstacle that stands
in its way. They circumvent this obstacle and in that way draw
pleasure from a source which the obstacle had made inaccessible.
The obstacle standing in the way is in reality nothing other than
women’s incapacity to tolerate undisguised sexuality, an
incapacity correspondingly increased with a rise in the educational
and social level. The woman who is thought of as having been
present in the initial situation is afterwards retained as though
she were still present, or in her absence her influence still has
an intimidating effect on the men. We can observe how men of a
higher class are at once induced, when they are in the company of
girls of an inferior class, to reduce their smutty jokes to the
level of simple smut.