Freud - Complete Works (303 page)

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1722

   In this way the problem of the
essential character of jokes is already explained in jests. We may
now turn to the further development of jests, to the point at which
they reach their height in tendentious jokes. Jests still give the
foremost place to the purpose of giving us enjoyment, and are
content if what they say does not appear senseless or completely
devoid of substance. If what a jest says possesses substance and
value, it turns into a joke. A thought which would deserve our
interest even if it were expressed in the most unpretentious form
is now clothed in a form which must give us enjoyment on its own
account.¹ A combination like this can certainly not, we must
suppose, have come about unintentionally; and we must try to
discover the intention underlying the construction of the joke. An
observation which we made earlier (in passing, as it seemed) will
put us on the track. We said above (
p. 1691
) that a good joke makes, as it
were, a
total
impression of enjoyment on us, without our
being able to decide at once what share of the pleasure arises from
its joking form and what share from its apt thought-content. We are
constantly making mistakes in this apportionment. Sometimes we
over-estimate the goodness of the joke on account of our admiration
of the thought it contains; another time, on the contrary, we
over-estimate the value of the thought on account of the enjoyment
given us by its joking envelope. We do not know what is giving us
enjoyment and what we are laughing at. This uncertainty in our
judgement, which must be assumed to be a fact, may have provided
the motive for the construction of jokes in the proper sense of the
word. The thought seeks to wrap itself in a joke because in that
way it recommends itself to our attention and can seem more
significant and more valuable, but above all because this wrapping
bribes our powers of criticism and confuses them. We are inclined
to give the
thought
the benefit of what has pleased us in
the
form
of the joke; and we are no longer inclined to find
anything wrong that has given us enjoyment and so to spoil the
source of a pleasure. If the joke has made us laugh, moreover, a
disposition most unfavourable for criticism will have been
established in us; for in that case something will have forced us
into the mood which play has previously sufficed to produce, and
for which the joke has tried by every possible means to make itself
a substitute. Even though we have earlier asserted that such jokes
are to be described as innocent and not yet tendentious, we must
not forget that strictly speaking only jests are non-tendentious -
that is, serve solely the aim of producing pleasure. Jokes, even if
the thought contained in them is non-tendentious and thus only
serves theoretical intellectual interests, are in fact never
non-tendentious. They pursue the second aim: to promote the thought
by augmenting it and guarding it against criticism. Here they are
once again expressing their original nature by setting themselves
up against an inhibiting and restricting power - which is now the
critical judgement.

  
¹
As an example which shows the difference
between a jest and a joke proper we may take the excellent joking
remark with which a member of the ‘Bürger’
Ministry in Austria answered a question about the cabinet’s
solidarity: ‘How can we
einstehen
[stand up] for one
another if we can’t
ausstehen
[stand] one
another?’ Technique: use of the same material with slight
(contrary) modification. Logical and apposite thought: there can be
no solidarity without mutual understanding. The contrary nature of
the modification (
ein
[in] -
aus
[out]) corresponds
to the incompatibility asserted in the thought and serves as a
representation of it.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1723

   This, the first use of jokes that
goes beyond the production of pleasure, points the way to their
further uses. A joke is now seen to be a psychical factor possessed
of power: its weight, thrown into one scale or the other, can be
decisive. The major purposes and instincts of mental life employ it
for their own ends. The originally non-tendentious joke, which
began as play, is
secondarily
brought into relation with
purposes from which nothing that takes form in the mind can
ultimately keep away. We know already what it is able to achieve in
the service of the purpose of exposure, and of hostile, cynical and
sceptical purposes. In the case of obscene jokes, which are derived
from smut, it turns the third person who originally interfered with
the sexual situation into an ally, before whom the woman must feel
shame, by bribing him with the gift of its yield of pleasure. In
the case of aggressive purposes it employs the same method in order
to turn the hearer, who was indifferent to begin with, into a
co-hater or co-despiser, and creates for the enemy a host of
opponents where at first there was only one. In the first case it
overcomes the inhibitions of shame and respectability by means of
the bonus of pleasure which it offers; in the second it upsets the
critical judgement which would otherwise have examined the dispute.
In the third and fourth cases, in the service of cynical and
sceptical purposes, it shatters respect for institutions and truths
in which the hearer has believed, on the one hand by reinforcing
the argument, but on the other by practising a new species of
attack. Where argument tries to draw the hearer’s criticism
over on to its side, the joke endeavours to push the criticism out
of sight. There is no doubt that the joke has chosen the method
which is psychologically the more effective.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1724

   In this survey of the
achievements of tendentious jokes, most prominence has been assumed
by - what is more easily seen - the effect of jokes on the person
who hears them. More important, however, from the point of view of
our understanding, are the functions accomplished by jokes in the
mind of the person who makes them or, to put it in the only correct
way, the person to whom they occur. We have already proposed - and
here we have occasion to repeat the notion - that we should try to
study the psychical phenomena of jokes with reference to their
distribution between two people. We will make a provisional
suggestion that the psychical process provoked by the joke in the
hearer is in most cases modelled on that which occurs in its
creator. The external obstacle which is to be overcome in the
hearer corresponds to an internal inhibition in the maker of the
joke. At the least the
expectation
of an external obstacle
is present in the latter as an inhibiting idea. In certain cases
the internal obstacle which is overcome by the tendentious joke is
obvious; in Herr N.’s jokes, for instance, we were able to
assume (
p. 1699
) that not only did
they make it possible for their hearers to enjoy aggressiveness in
the form of insults, but that above all they made it possible for
him to produce them. Among the various kinds of internal inhibition
or suppression there is one which deserves our special interest,
because it is the most far-reaching. It is given the name of
‘repression’, and is recognized by its function of
preventing the impulses subjected to it, and their derivatives,
from becoming conscious. Tendentious jokes, as we shall see, are
able to release pleasure even from sources that have undergone
repression. If, as has been suggested above, the overcoming of
external obstacles can in this way be traced back to the overcoming
of internal inhibitions and repressions, we may say that
tendentious jokes exhibit the main characteristic of the joke-work
- that of liberating pleasure by getting rid of inhibitions more
clearly than any other of the developmental stages of jokes. Either
they strengthen the purposes which they serve, by bringing
assistance to them from impulses that are kept suppressed, or they
put themselves entirely at the service of suppressed purposes.

   We may be ready to admit that
this is what tendentious jokes achieve; yet we must bear in mind
that we do not understand how they are able to put these
achievements into effect. Their power lies in the yield of pleasure
which they draw from the sources of play upon words and of
liberated nonsense; but if we are to judge by the impressions
gained from non-tendentious jests, we cannot possibly think the
amount of this pleasure great enough to attribute to it the
strength to lift deeply-rooted inhibitions and repressions. What we
have before us here is in fact no simple effect of force but a more
complex situation of release. Instead of setting out the long
detour by which I reached an understanding of this situation, I
will try to give a short synthetic exposition of it.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1725

   Fechner (1897,
1
, Chapter
V) has put forward a ‘principle of aesthetic assistance or
intensification’, which he has expressed as follows:
‘
If determinants of pleasure that in themselves produce
little effect converge without mutual contradiction, there results
a greater, and often a much greater, outcome of pleasure than
corresponds to the pleasure-value of the separate determinants - a
greater pleasure than could be explained as the sum of the separate
effects. Indeed, a convergence of this kind can even lead to a
positive resultant of pleasure and the threshold of pleasure may be
crossed, where the separate factors are too weak to do so: though
they must, in comparison with others, show a perceptible advantage
in enjoyableness
.’ (Ibid., 51. The italics are
Fechner’s.)

   The topic of jokes does not, I
think, give us much opportunity of confirming the correctness of
this principle, which can be shown to hold good in many other
aesthetic structures. As regards jokes we have learnt something
else, which at least fringes upon this principle: namely, that
where several pleasure-giving factors operate together we are not
able to attribute to each of them the share it has really taken in
bringing about the result. (
p. 1691
.)
We can, however, vary the situation that is assumed in the
‘principle of assistance’ and, as a result of these
fresh conditions, arrive at a number of questions which would
deserve reply. What happens in general if, in a combination,
determinants of pleasure and determinants of unpleasure converge?
On what does the outcome depend and what decides whether that
outcome is in pleasure or unpleasure?

   The case of tendentious jokes is
a special one among these possibilities. An impulse or urge is
present which seeks to release pleasure from a particular source
and, if it were allowed free play, would release it. Besides this,
another urge is present which works against this generation of
pleasure - inhibits it, that is, or suppresses it. The suppressing
current must, as the outcome shows, be a certain amount stronger
than the suppressed one, which, however, is not on that account
abolished. Now let us suppose that yet another urge makes its
appearance which would release pleasure through the same process,
though from other sources, and which thus operates in the same
sense as the suppressed urge. What can the result be in such a
case?

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1726

   An example will give us our
bearings better than this schematic discussion. Let us assume that
there is an urge to insult a certain person; but this is so
strongly opposed by feelings of propriety or of aesthetic culture
that the insult cannot take place. If, for instance, it were able
to break through as a result of some change of emotional condition
or mood, this break through by the insulting purpose would be felt
subsequently with unpleasure. Thus the insult does not take place.
Let us now suppose, however, that the possibility is presented of
deriving a good joke from the material of the words and thoughts
used for the insult - the possibility, that is, of releasing
pleasure from other sources which are not obstructed by the same
suppression. This second development of pleasure could,
nevertheless, not occur unless the insult were permitted; but as
soon as the latter is permitted the new release of pleasure is also
joined to it. Experience with tendentious jokes shows that in such
circumstances the suppressed purpose can, with the assistance of
the pleasure from the joke, gain sufficient strength to overcome
the inhibition, which would otherwise be stronger than it. The
insult takes place, because the joke is thus made possible. But the
enjoyment obtained is not only that produced by the joke: it is
incomparably greater. It is so much greater than the pleasure from
the joke that we must suppose that the hitherto suppressed purpose
has succeeded in making its way through, perhaps without any
diminution whatever. It is in such circumstances that the
tendentious joke is received with the heartiest laughter.

   An examination of the
determinants of laughing will perhaps lead us to a plainer idea of
what happens when a joke affords assistance against suppression.
Even now, however, we can see that the case of tendentious jokes is
a special case of the ‘principle of assistance’. A
possibility of generating pleasure supervenes in a situation in
which another possibility of pleasure is obstructed so that, as far
as the latter alone is concerned, no pleasure would arise. The
result is a generation of pleasure far greater than that offered by
the supervening possibility. This has acted, as it were, as an
incentive bonus
with the assistance of the offer of a small
amount of pleasure, a much greater one, which would otherwise have
been hard to achieve, has been gained. I have good reason to
suspect that this principle corresponds with an arrangement that
holds good in many widely separated departments of mental life and
it will, I think, be expedient to describe the pleasure that serves
to initiate the large release of pleasure as
‘fore-pleasure’, and the principle as the
‘fore-pleasure principle’.