Freud - Complete Works (298 page)

   The power which makes it
difficult or impossible for women, and to a lesser degree for men
as well, to enjoy undisguised obscenity is termed by us
‘repression’; and we recognize in it the same psychical
process which, in cases of serious illness, keeps whole complexes
of impulses, together with their derivatives, away from
consciousness, and which has turned out to be the main factor in
the causation of what are known as psycho-neuroses. It is our
belief that civilization and higher education have a large
influence in the development of repression, and we suppose that,
under such conditions, the psychical organization undergoes an
alteration (that can also emerge as an inherited disposition) as a
result of which what was formerly felt as agreeable now seems
unacceptable and is rejected with all possible psychical force. The
repressive activity of civilization brings it about that primary
possibilities of enjoyment, which have now, however, been
repudiated by the censorship in us, are lost to us. But to the
human psyche all renunciation is exceedingly difficult, and so we
find that tendentious jokes provide a means of undoing the
renunciation and retrieving what was lost. When we laugh at a
refined obscene joke, we are laughing at the same thing that makes
a peasant laugh at a coarse piece of smut. In both cases the
pleasure springs from the same source. We, however, could never
bring ourselves to laugh at the coarse smut; we should feel ashamed
or it would seem to us disgusting. We can only laugh when a joke
has come to our help.

   Thus what we suspected to begin
with seems to be confirmed: namely that tendentious jokes have
sources of pleasure at their disposal besides those open to
innocent jokes, in which all the pleasure is in some way linked to
their technique. And we may also once more repeat that with
tendentious jokes we are not in a position to distinguish by our
feeling what part of the pleasure arises from the sources of their
technique and what part from those of their purpose. Thus, strictly
speaking, we do not know what we are laughing at. With all obscene
jokes we are subject to glaring errors of judgement about the
‘goodness’ of jokes so far as this depends on formal
determinants; the technique of such jokes is often quite wretched,
but they have immense success in provoking laughter.

   We will now examine the question
of whether jokes play the same part in the service of a
hostile
purpose.

   Here, from the outset, we come
upon the same situation. Since our individual childhood, and,
similarly, since the childhood of human civilization, hostile
impulses against our fellow men have been subject to the same
restrictions, the same progressive repression, as our sexual urges.
We have not yet got so far as to be able to love our enemies or to
offer our left cheek after being struck on the right. Furthermore,
all moral rules for the restriction of active hatred give the
clearest evidence to this day that they were originally framed for
a small society of fellow clansmen. In so far as we are all able to
feel that we are members of one people, we allow ourselves to
disregard most of these restrictions in relation to a foreign
people. Nevertheless, within our own circle we have made some
advances in the control of hostile impulses. As Lichtenberg puts it
in drastic terms: ‘Where we now say "Excuse me!" we
used to give a box on the ears.’ Brutal hostility, forbidden
by law, has been replaced by verbal invective; and a better
knowledge of the interlinking of human impulses is more and more
robbing us - by its consistent ‘tout comprendre c’est
tout pardonner’ - of the capacity for feeling angry with a
fellow man who gets in our way. Though as children we are still
endowed with a powerful inherited disposition to hostility, we are
later taught by a higher personal civilization that it is an
unworthy thing to use abusive language; and even where fighting has
in itself remained permissible, the number of things which may not
be employed as methods of fighting has extraordinarily increased.
Since we have been obliged to renounce the expression of hostility
by deeds - held back by the passionless third person, in whose
interest it is that personal security shall be preserved - we have,
just as in the case of sexual aggressiveness, developed a new
technique of invective, which aims at enlisting this third person
against our enemy. By making our enemy small, inferior, despicable
or comic, we achieve in a roundabout way the enjoyment of
overcoming him - to which the third person, who has made no
efforts, bears witness by his laughter.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1698

   We are now prepared to realize
the part played by jokes in hostile aggressiveness. A joke will
allow us to exploit something ridiculous in our enemy which we
could not, on account of obstacles in the way, bring forward openly
or consciously; once again, then, the joke
will evade
restrictions and open sources of pleasure that have become
inaccessible
. It will further bribe the hearer with its yield
of pleasure into taking sides with us without any very close
investigation, just as on other occasions we ourselves have often
been bribed by an innocent joke into over estimating the substance
of a statement expressed jokingly. This is brought out with perfect
aptitude in the common phrase ‘
die Lacher auf seine Seite
ziehen
[to bring the laughers over to our side]’.

   Let us, for instance, consider
Herr N.’s jokes, which were scattered over the last chapter.
They are all of them pieces of invective. It is as though Herr N.
wanted to exclaim aloud: ‘The Minister for Agriculture is
himself an ox!’ ‘Don’t talk to me about * * * *!
He’s bursting with vanity!’ ‘I’ve never in
my life read anything more boring than this historian’s
essays on Napoleon in Austria!’ But the high position he
occupies makes it impossible for him to give out his judgements in
that form. They therefore bring in a joke to their help, and this
in turn guarantees them a reception with the hearer which they
would never have found in a non-joking form, in spite of the truth
they might contain. One of these jokes is particularly instructive
- the one about the ‘red
Fadian
’, perhaps the
most impressive of all of them. What is there about it that makes
us laugh and diverts our interest so completely from the question
of whether or not an injustice has been done to the poor author?
The joking form, of course - that is to say, the joke; but what is
there about it that we are laughing at? No doubt at the person
himself, who is introduced to us as the ‘red
Fadian
’, and in particular at his having red hair.
Educated people have broken themselves of the habit of laughing at
physical defects, and moreover they do not include having red hair
among the laughable physical failings. But there is no doubt that
it is so regarded by schoolboys and the common people - and this is
still true even at the level of education of certain municipal and
parliamentary representatives. And now Herr N. has made it possible
in the most ingenious manner for us, grown-up and sensitive people,
to laugh like the schoolboys at the historian X’s red hair.
This was certainly not Herr N.’s intention; but it is most
doubtful whether a person who gives free play to a joke must
necessarily know its precise intention.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1699

   If in these cases the obstacle to
the aggressiveness which the joke helped to evade was an internal
one - an aesthetic objection to the invective - elsewhere it can be
of a purely external sort. This was so in the case in which
Serenissimus asked a stranger by whose similarity to his own person
he had been struck: ‘Was your mother in the Palace at one
time?’ and the repartee was: ‘No, but my father
was.’ The person to whom the question was put would no doubt
have liked to knock down the impertinent individual who dared by
such an allusion to cast a slur on his beloved mother’s
memory. But the impertinent individual was Serenissimus, whom one
may not knock down or even insult unless one is prepared to
purchase that revenge at the price of one’s whole existence.
The insult must therefore, it would seem, be swallowed in silence.
But fortunately a joke shows the way in which the insult may be
safely avenged - by making use of the technical method of
unification in order to take up the allusion and turn it back
against the aggressor. Here the impression of a joke is so much
determined by its purpose that, in face of the joking character of
the rejoinder, we are inclined to forget that the question asked by
the aggressor had itself the character of a joke with the technique
of allusion.

   The prevention of invective or of
insulting rejoinders by external circumstances is such a common
case that tendentious jokes are especially favoured in order to
make aggressiveness or criticism possible against persons in
exalted positions who claim to exercise authority. The joke then
represents a rebellion against that authority, a liberation from
its pressure. The charm of caricatures lies in this same factor: we
laugh at them even if they are unsuccessful simply because we count
rebellion against authority as a merit.

   If we bear in mind the fact that
tendentious jokes are so highly suitable for attacks on the great,
the dignified and the mighty, who are protected by internal
inhibitions and external circumstances from direct disparagement,
we shall be obliged to take a special view of certain groups of
jokes which seem to be concerned with inferior and powerless
people. I am thinking of the anecdotes about marriage-brokers, some
of which we became acquainted with in the course of our
investigation of the various techniques of conceptual jokes. In a
few of them, for instance in the examples ‘She’s deaf
as well’ and ‘Who would lend these people
anything?’, the broker is laughed at for his improvidence and
thoughtlessness and he becomes comic because the truth escapes him
as it were automatically. But does what we have learnt of the
nature of tendentious jokes on the one hand and on the other hand
our great enjoyment of these stories fit in with the paltriness of
the people whom these jokes seem to laugh at? Are they worthy
opponents of the jokes? Is it not rather the case that the jokes
only put forward the marriage-brokers in order to strike at
something more important?  Is it not a case of saying one
thing and meaning another? It is really not possible to reject this
view.

   This interpretation of the broker
anecdotes may be carried further. It is true that there is no
necessity
for my entering into them, that I can content
myself with regarding these anecdotes as
‘
Schwänke
[funny stories]’ and deny that
they have the character of a joke. Thus jokes can also have a
subjective determinant of this kind. Our attention has now been
drawn to that possibility and we shall have to examine it later. It
declares that only what I allow to be a joke
is
a joke. What
is a joke to me may be merely a comic story to other people. But if
a joke admits of this doubt, the reason can only be that it has a
façade - in these instances a comic one - in the
contemplation of which one person is satiated while another may try
to peer behind it. A suspicion may arise, moreover, that this
façade is intended to dazzle the examining eye and that
these stories have therefore something to conceal.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1700

   In any case, if our
marriage-broker anecdotes are jokes, they are all the better jokes
because, thanks to their façade, they are in a position to
conceal not only what they have to say but also the fact that they
have something - forbidden - to say. The continuation of this
interpretation - and this uncovers the hidden meaning and reveals
these anecdotes with a comic façade as tendentious jokes -
would be as follows. Anyone who has allowed the truth to slip out
in an unguarded moment is in fact glad to be free of pretence. This
is a correct and profound piece of psychological insight. Without
this internal agreement no one lets himself be mastered by the
automatism which in these cases brings the truth to light.¹
But this converts the laughable figure of the
Schadchen
into
a sympathetic one, deserving of pity. How happy the man must be to
be able at last to throw off the burden of pretence, since he makes
use of the first chance of shouting out the very last scrap of
truth! As soon as he sees that the case is lost, that the bride
does not please the young man, he gladly betrays yet another
concealed defect which has escaped notice, or he takes the
opportunity of producing an argument that settles a detail in order
to express his contempt for the people he is working for: ‘I
ask you - who would lend these people anything?’ The whole of
the ridicule in the anecdote now falls upon the parents, barely
touched on in it, who think this swindle justified in order to get
their daughter a husband, upon the pitiable position of girls who
let themselves be married on such terms, and upon the
disgracefulness of marriages contracted on such a basis. The
marriage-broker is the right man to express such criticisms, for he
knows most about these abuses; but he must not say them aloud, for
he is a poor man whose existence depends on exploiting them. The
popular mind, which created these stories, and others like them, is
torn by a similar conflict; for it knows that the sacredness of
marriages after they have been contracted is grievously affected by
the thought of what happened at the time when they were
arranged.

  
¹
This is the same mechanism that governs
slips of the tongue and other phenomena of self-betrayal. See
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
(1901
b
).