Freud - Complete Works (300 page)

   The purpose of these stories is
always the same; it emerges most clearly in the next one:

   ‘The
Schnorrer
begged the Baron for some money for a journey to Ostend; his doctor
had recommended sea-bathing for his troubles. The Baron thought
Ostend was a particularly expensive resort; a cheaper one would do
equally well. The
Schnorrer
, however, rejected the proposal
with the words: "Herr Baron, I consider nothing too expensive
for my health."' This is an excellent displacement joke
which we might have taken as a model for that class.¹ The
Baron evidently wants to save his money, but the
Schnorrer
answers as though the Baron’s money was his own, which he may
then quite well value less than his health. Here we are expected to
laugh at the impertinence of the demand; but it is rarely that
these jokes are not equipped with a façade to mislead the
understanding. The truth that lies behind is that the
Schnorrer
, who in his thoughts treats the rich man’s
money as his own, has actually, according to the sacred ordinances
of the Jews, almost a right to make this confusion. The indignation
raised by this joke is of course directed against a Law which is
highly oppressive even to pious people.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1707

   Here is another anecdote:

   ‘A
Schnorrer
on his
way up a rich man’s staircase met a fellow member of his
profession, who advised him to go no further. "Don’t go
up to-day," he said, "the Baron is in a bad mood to-day;
he’s giving nobody more than one florin." -
"I’II go up all the same", said the first
Schnorrer
"Why should I give him a florin? Does he give
me
anything?" ‘

   This joke employs the technique
of absurdity, since it makes the
Schnorrer
assert that the
Baron gives him nothing at the very moment at which he is preparing
to beg him for a gift. But the absurdity is only apparent. It is
almost true that the rich man gives him nothing, since he is
obliged by the Law to give him alms and should, strictly speaking,
be grateful to him for giving him an opportunity for beneficence.
The ordinary, middle-class view of charity is in conflict here with
the religious one; it is in open rebellion against the religious
one in the other story, of the Baron who, deeply moved by a
Schnorrer’s
tale of woe, rang for his servants:
‘Throw him out! he’s breaking my heart!’ This
open revelation of its purpose constitutes once more a marginal
case of a joke. It is only in the fact that they present the matter
as applied to individual cases that these last stories differ from
a complaint which is no longer a joke: ‘There is really no
advantage in being a rich man if one is a Jew. Other people’s
misery makes it impossible to enjoy one’s own
happiness.’

   Other stories, which are once
again technically frontier cases of jokes, give evidence of a
profoundly pessimistic cynicism. For instance:

   ‘A man who was hard of
hearing consulted the doctor, who correctly diagnosed that the
patient probably drank too much brandy and was on that account
deaf. He advised him against it and the deaf man promised to take
his advice to heart. After a while the doctor met him in the street
and asked him in a loud voice how he was. "Thank you",
was the answer. "You needn’t shout so loud, doctor.
I’ve given up drinking and hear quite well again." A
little while later they met once more. The doctor asked him how he
was in his ordinary voice, but noticed that his question had not
been understood. "Eh? What was that?" - "It seems to
me you’re drinking brandy again", shouted the doctor in
his ear, "and that’s why you’re deaf again."
"You may be right," replied the deaf man, "I
have
begun drinking brandy again and I’II tell you
why. So long as I didn’t drink I was able to hear. But
nothing I heard was as good as the brandy."' Technically
this joke is nothing other than an object-lesson: dialect or skill
in narrative are necessary for raising a laugh, but in the
background lies the sad question: may not the man have been right
in his choice?

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1708

   It is on account of the allusion
made by these pessimistic stories to the manifold and hopeless
miseries of the Jews that I must class them with tendentious
jokes.

   Other jokes, which are in the
same sense cynical and which are not only Jewish anecdotes, attack
religious dogmas and even the belief in God. The story of the
Rabbi’s ‘
Kück
, the technique of which lay
in the faulty thinking which equated phantasy and reality (another
possible view was to regard it as a displacement), is a cynical or
critical joke of this kind, directed against miracle-workers and
certainly against the belief in miracles as well. Heine is said to
have made a definitely blasphemous joke on his death-bed. When a
friendly priest reminded him of God’s mercy and gave him hope
that God would forgive him his sins, he is said to have replied:
‘Bien sûr qu’il me pardonnera: c’est son
métier.’¹ This is a disparaging comparison
(technically perhaps only having the value of an allusion), since a
‘
métier
’, a trade or profession, is what
a workman or a doctor has - and he has only a single
métier
. But the force of the joke lies in its
purpose. What it means to say is nothing else than: ‘Of
course he’ll forgive me. That’s what he’s there
for, and that’s the only reason I’ve taken him on (as
one engages one’s doctor or one’s lawyer).’ So in
the dying man, as he lay there powerless, a consciousness stirred
that he had created God and equipped him with power so as to make
use of him when the occasion arose. What was supposed to be the
created being revealed itself just before its annihilation as the
creator.

  
¹
[‘Of course he’ll forgive me:
that’s his job.’]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1709

   To the classes of tendentious
jokes that we have considered so far -

       exposing
or obscene jokes,

      
aggressive (hostile) jokes,

       cynical
(critical, blasphemous) jokes -

I should like to add another, the fourth and
rarest, the nature of which can be illustrated by a good
example:

   ‘Two Jews met in a railway
carriage at a station in Galicia. "Where are you going?"
asked one. "To Cracow", was the answer. "What a liar
you are!" broke out the other. "If you say you’re
going to Cracow, you want me to believe you’re going to
Lemberg. But I know that in fact you’re going to Cracow. So
why are you lying to me?"'

   This excellent story, which gives
an impression of over-subtlety, evidently works by the technique of
absurdity. The second Jew is reproached for lying because he says
he is going to Cracow, which is in fact his destination! But the
powerful technical method of absurdity is here linked with another
technique, representation by the opposite, for, according to the
uncontradicted assertion of the first Jew, the second is lying when
he tells the truth and is telling the truth by means of a lie. But
the more serious substance of the joke is the problem of what
determines the truth. The joke, once again, is pointing to a
problem and is making use of the uncertainty of one of our
commonest concepts. Is it the truth if we describe things as they
are without troubling to consider how our hearer will understand
what we say? Or is this only jesuitical truth, and does not genuine
truth consist in taking the hearer into account and giving him a
faithful picture of our own knowledge? I think that jokes of this
kind are sufficiently different from the rest to be given a special
position. What they are attacking is not a person or an institution
but the certainty of our knowledge itself, one of our speculative
possessions. The appropriate name for them would therefore be
‘sceptical’ jokes.

   In the course of our discussion
of the purposes of jokes we have perhaps thrown light on a number
of questions and have certainly come upon plenty of suggestions for
further enquiries. But the findings of this chapter combine with
those of the last one to present us with a difficult problem. If it
is correct to say that the pleasure provided by jokes depends on
the one hand on their technique and on the other hand on their
purpose, from what common point of view can such different sources
of the pleasure in jokes be brought together?

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1710

B.  SYNTHETIC PART

IV

THE
MECHANISM OF PLEASURE AND THE PSYCHOGENESIS OF JOKES

We can now start out from an assured knowledge
of the sources of the peculiar pleasure given us by jokes. We are
aware that we may be deceived into confusing our enjoyment of the
intellectual content of what is stated with the pleasure proper to
jokes; but we know that that pleasure itself has at bottom two
sources - the technique and the purposes of jokes. What we now want
to discover is the way in which the pleasure arises from these
sources, the mechanism of the pleasurable effect.

   We shall, I think, find the
explanation we are in search of far easier from tendentious jokes
than from innocent ones. We will therefore begin with the
former.

   The pleasure in the case of a
tendentious joke arises from a purpose being satisfied whose
satisfaction would otherwise not have taken place. That a
satisfaction such as this is a source of pleasure calls for no
further remark. But the manner in which a joke leads to this
satisfaction is linked with particular conditions, from which we
may perhaps arrive at some further information. Two cases are to be
distinguished here. The simpler one is where the satisfaction of
the purpose is opposed by an external obstacle which is evaded by
the joke. We found this, for instance, in the reply received by
Serenissimus to his question of whether the mother of the man he
was speaking to had ever lived in the Palace and in the
critic’s rejoinder to the two rich rascals who showed him
their portraits: ‘But where’s the Saviour?’ In
the former case the purpose was to answer one insult by another,
and in the latter it was to hand across an insult instead of the
assessment that had been asked for. What opposed the purpose were
purely external factors - the powerful position of the people at
whom the insults were directed. It may nevertheless strike us that,
however much these and analogous jokes of a tendentious nature may
satisfy us, they are not able to provoke much laughter.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1711

   It is otherwise when what stands
in the way of the direct realization of the purpose is not an
external factor but an internal obstacle, when an internal impulse
opposes the purpose. This condition would seem, on our hypothesis,
to be fulfilled in the jokes of Herr N., in whom a strong
inclination to invective is held in check by a highly developed
aesthetic culture. By the help of a joke, this internal resistance
is overcome in the particular case and the inhibition lifted. By
that means, as in the instance of the external obstacle, the
satisfaction of the purpose is made possible and its suppression,
together with the ‘psychical damming-up’ that this
would involve, is avoided. To that extent the mechanism of the
generation of pleasure would be the same in the two cases.

   Nevertheless, we are inclined
here to go more deeply into the distinctions between the
psychological situation in the cases of an external and an internal
obstacle, for we have a suspicion that the removal of an internal
obstacle may make an incomparably higher contribution to the
pleasure. But I suggest that at this point we should exercise
moderation and be satisfied for the moment with establishing what
remains the essential point for us. The cases of an external and an
internal obstacle differ only in the fact that in the latter an
already existing inhibition is lifted and that in the former the
erection of a new one is avoided. That being so, we shall not be
relying too much on speculation if we assert that both for erecting
and for maintaining a psychical inhibition some ‘psychical
expenditure’ is required. And, since we know that in both
cases of the use of tendentious jokes pleasure is obtained, it is
therefore plausible to suppose that
this yield of pleasure
corresponds to the psychical expenditure that is saved
.

   Here then we have once more come
upon the principle of economy which we met first in discussing the
technique of verbal jokes. But whereas in the earlier case we
seemed to find the economy in the use of as few words as possible
or of words as much alike as possible, we now have a suspicion of
an economy in the far more comprehensive sense of psychical
expenditure in general; and we must regard it as possible that a
closer understanding of what is still the very obscure concept of
‘psychical expenditure’ may bring us nearer to the
essential nature of jokes.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1712

   A certain lack of clarity which
we have been unable to overcome in our handling of the mechanism of
pleasure in tendentious jokes may be taken as an appropriate
punishment for our having tried to clear up the more complex
problem before the simpler one, tendentious jokes before innocent
ones. We take note of the fact that ‘
economy in
expenditure on inhibition or suppression
’ appears to be
the secret of the pleasurable effect of tendentious jokes, and pass
on to the mechanism of pleasure in innocent jokes.