Freud - Complete Works (305 page)

   We cannot in the first instance
guess what the basis may be of this urge to communicate the joke.
But we can see another peculiarity in jokes which distinguishes
them from the comic. If I come across something comic, I myself can
laugh heartily at it, though it is true that I am also pleased if I
can make someone else laugh by telling it to him. But I myself
cannot laugh at a
joke
that has occurred to me, that I have
made, in spite of the unmistakable enjoyment that the joke gives
me. It is possible that my need to communicate the joke to someone
else is in some way connected with the laughter produced by it,
which is denied to me but is manifest in the other person.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1732

   Why is it, then, that I do not
laugh at a joke of my own? And what part is played in this by the
other person?

   Let us take the second question
first. In the case of the comic, two persons are in general
concerned: besides myself, the person in whom I find something
comic. If inanimate things seem to me comic, that is on account of
a kind of personification which is not of rare occurrence in our
ideational life. The comic process is content with these two
persons: the self and the person who is the object; a third person
may come into it, but is not essential. Joking as a
play
with one’s own words and thoughts is to begin with without a
person as an object. But already at the preliminary stage of the
jest
, if it has succeeded in making play and nonsense safe
from the protests of reason, it demands another person to whom it
can communicate its result. But this second person in the case of
jokes does not correspond to the person who is the object, but to
the
third
person, the ‘other’ person in the case
of the comic. It seems as though in the case of a jest the other
person has the decision passed over to him on whether the joke-work
has succeeded in its task - as though the self did not feel certain
in its judgement on the point. Innocent jokes, too, jokes that
serve to reinforce a thought, require another person to test
whether they have attained their aim. If a joke enters the service
of the purpose of exposing or of a hostile purpose, it may be
described as a psychical process between three persons, who are the
same as in the case of the comic, though the part played by the
third person is different; the psychical process in jokes is
accomplished between the first person (the self) and the third (the
outside person) and not, as in the case of the comic, between the
self and the person who is the object.

   Jokes are confronted by
subjective determinants in the case of the third person too, and
these may make their aim of producing pleasurable excitation
unattainable. As Shakespeare (
Love’s Labour Lost
, V,
2) reminds us:

                                                               
A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear

                                                               
Of him that hears it, never in the tongue

                                                               
Of him that makes it . . .

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1733

   A person who is dominated by a
mood concerned with serious thoughts is not fitted to confirm the
fact that a jest has succeeded in rescuing the verbal pleasure. He
must himself be in a cheerful or at least in an indifferent state
of feeling in order to act as the jest’s third person. The
same obstacle applies to innocent and to tendentious jokes; but in
the latter there is a further obstacle in the form of opposition to
the purpose which the joke is trying to serve. The third person
cannot be ready to laugh at an excellent obscene joke if the
exposure applies to a highly respected relative of his own; before
a gathering of priests and ministers no one would venture to
produce Heine’s comparison of catholic and protestant clerics
to retail tradesmen and employees of a wholesale business; and an
audience composed of my opponent’s devoted friends would
receive my most successful pieces of joking invective against him
not as jokes but as invective, and would meet them with indignation
and not with pleasure. Some degree of benevolence or a kind of
neutrality, an absence of any factor that could provoke feelings
opposed to the purpose of the joke, is an indispensable condition
if the third person is to collaborate in the completion of the
process of making the joke.

   Where there are no such obstacles
to the operation of the joke, the phenomenon which is now the
subject of our enquiry emerges: the pleasure which the joke has
produced is more evident in the third person than in the creator of
the joke. We must be content to say more
‘
evident
’ where we should be inclined to ask
whether the hearer’s pleasure is not more
‘
intense
than that of the maker of the joke, since we
naturally have no means of measuring and comparing. We see,
however, that the hearer gives evidence of his pleasure with a
burst of laughter, after the first person has as a rule produced
the joke with a tensely serious look. If I repeat a joke that I
have heard myself, I must, if I am not to spoil its effect, behave
in telling it exactly like the person who made it. The question now
arises whether we can draw any conclusions about the psychical
process of constructing jokes from this factor of laughing at
jokes.

   It cannot be our design to
consider at this point all that has been propounded and published
on the nature of laughter. We may well be deterred from any such
plan by the remarks with which Dugas, a pupil of Ribot’s,
prefaces his book
La psychologie du rire
(1902, 1):
‘Il n’est pas de fait plus banal et plus
étudié que le rire; il n’en est pas qui ait eu
le don d’exciter davantage la curiosité du vulgaire et
celle des philosophes; il n’en est pas sur lequel on ait
receuilli plus d’observations et bâti plus de
théories, et avec cela il n’en est pas qui demeure
plus inexpliqué. On serait tenté de dire avec les
sceptiques qu’il faut être content de rire et de ne pas
chercher à savoir pourquoi on rit, d’autant que
peut-être la réflexion tue le rire, et qu’il
serait alors contradictoire qu’elle en découvrît
les causes.’¹

  
¹
[‘There is no action that is more
commonplace or that has been more widely studied than laughter.
There is none that has succeeded more in exciting the curiosity
both of ordinary people and of philosophers. There is none on which
more observations have been collected and more theories built. But
at the same time there is none that remains more unexplained. It
would be tempting to say with the sceptics that we must be content
to laugh and not try to know why we laugh, since it may be that
reflection kills laughter and it would thus be a contradiction to
think that it could discover its causes.’]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1734

   On the other hand we shall not
miss the opportunity of making use for our purposes of an opinion
on the mechanism of laughter which fits in excellently with our own
line of thought. I have in mind the attempt at an explanation made
by Herbert Spencer in his essay on ‘The Physiology of
Laughter’ (1860). According to Spencer, laughter is a
phenomenon of the discharge of mental excitation and a proof that
the psychical employment of this excitation has suddenly come up
against an obstacle. He describes the psychological situation which
ends in laughter in the following words: ‘Laughter naturally
results only when consciousness is unawares transferred from great
things to small - only when there is what we may call a
descending
incongruity.’¹

  
¹
Various points in this definition would
call for detailed examination in an investigation of comic
pleasure; this has already been undertaken by other authors and in
any case does not concern us here. - I do not think Spencer has
been happy in his explanation of why the discharge takes the
particular paths whose excitation produces the somatic picture of
laughter. The theme of the physiological explanation of laughter -
that is, the tracing back or interpretation of the muscular actions
characteristic of laughter - has been treated at length both before
and since Darwin, but has still not been finally cleared up. I have
one contribution to make to this theme. So far as I know, the
grimace characteristic of smiling, which twists up the corners of
the mouth, appears first in an infant at the breast when it is
satisfied and satiated and lets go of the breast as it falls
asleep. Here it is a genuine expression of the emotions, for it
corresponds to a decision to take no more nourishment, and
represents as it were an ‘enough’ or rather a
‘more than enough’. This original meaning of
pleasurable satiety may have brought the smile, which is after all
the basic phenomenon of laughter, into its later relation with
pleasurable processes of discharge.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1735

   In a quite similar sense French
authors (e.g. Dugas) describe laughter as a
‘
détente
’, a phenomenon of relaxation of
tension. So too the formula proposed by Bain - ‘laughter a
release from constraint’ - seems to me to diverge from
Spencer’s view much less than some authorities would have us
believe.

   Nevertheless, we feel a need to
modify Spencer’s notion, in part to give a more definite form
to the ideas contained in it and in part to change them. We should
say that laughter arises if a quota of psychical energy which has
earlier been used for the cathexis of particular psychical paths
has become unusable, so that it can find free discharge. We are
well aware what ‘evil looks’ we are inviting with such
a hypothesis; but we will venture to quote in our defence an
apposite sentence from Lipps’s book
Komik und Humor
(1898, 71), from which illumination is to be derived on more
subjects than that of the comic and humour: ‘Finally,
specific psychological problems always lead fairly deep into
psychology, so that at bottom no psychological problem can be
treated in isolation.’ The concepts of ‘psychical
energy’ and ‘discharge’ and the treatment of
psychical energy as a quantity have become habitual in my thoughts
since I began to arrange the facts of psychopathology
philosophically; and already in my
Interpretation of Dreams
(1900
a
) I tried (in the same sense as Lipps) to establish
the fact that what are ‘really psychically effective’
are psychical processes which are unconscious in themselves, not
the contents of consciousness.¹ It is only when I speak of the
‘cathexis of psychical paths’ that I seem to depart
from the analogies commonly used by Lipps. My experiences of the
displaceability of psychical energy along certain paths of
association, and of the almost indestructible persistence of the
traces of psychical processes, have in fact suggested to me an
attempt at picturing the unknown in some such way. To avoid
misunderstanding, I must add that I am making no attempt to
proclaim that the cells and nerve fibres, or the systems of
neurones which are taking their place to-day, are these psychical
paths, even though it would have to be possible in some manner
which cannot yet be indicated to represent such paths by organic
elements of the nervous system.

  
¹
Cf. the sections ‘On Psychical
Force’, etc. in Chapter VIII of Lipps’s book quoted
above. ‘Thus the following general statement holds good: The
factors of psychical life are not the contents of consciousness but
the psychical processes which are in themselves unconscious. The
task of psychology, if it does not merely wish to describe the
contents of consciousness, must therefore consist in inferring the
nature of these unconscious processes from the character of the
contents of consciousness and their temporal connections.
Psychology must be a theory of these processes. But a psychology of
this kind will very soon find that there are quite a number of
characteristics of these processes which are not represented in the
corresponding contents of consciousness.’ (Lipps, ibid.,
123-4.) See also Chapter VII of my
Interpretation of
Dreams
.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1736

   In laughter, therefore, on our
hypothesis, the conditions are present under which a sum of
psychical energy which has hitherto been used for cathexis is
allowed free discharge. And since laughter - not all laughter, it
is true, but certainly laughter at a joke - is an indication of
pleasure, we shall be inclined to relate this pleasure to the
lifting of the cathexis which has previously been present. If we
see that the hearer of a joke laughs but that its creator cannot
laugh, this may amount to telling us that in the hearer a cathectic
expenditure has been lifted and discharged, while in the
construction of the joke there have been obstacles either to the
lifting or to the possibility of discharge. The psychical process
in the hearer, the joke’s third person, can scarcely be more
aptly described than by stressing the fact that he has bought the
pleasure of the joke with very small expenditure on his own part.
He might be said to have been presented with it. The words of the
joke he hears necessarily bring about in him the idea or train of
thought to the construction of which great internal inhibitions
were opposed in him too. He would have had to make an effort of his
own in order to bring it about spontaneously as the first person,
he would have had to use at least as much psychical expenditure on
doing so as would correspond to the strength of the inhibition,
suppression or repression of the idea. He has saved this psychical
expenditure. On the basis of our earlier discussions (
p. 1711
) we should say that his pleasure
corresponds to this economy. Our insight into the mechanism of
laughter leads us rather to say that, owing to the introduction of
the proscribed idea by means of an auditory perception, the
cathectic energy used for the inhibition has now suddenly become
superfluous and has been lifted, and is therefore now ready to be
discharged by laughter. The two ways of expressing the facts amount
to the same thing in essentials, since the expenditure economized
corresponds exactly to the inhibition that has become superfluous.
But the second method of expression is the more illuminating, since
it allows us to say that the hearer of the joke laughs with the
quota of psychical energy which has become free through the lifting
of the inhibitory cathexis; we might say that he laughs this quota
off.