Freud - Complete Works (311 page)

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1761

   With this last contribution,
however, which explains, even though still only hypothetically, the
joke-work in the first person, our interest in jokes is, strictly
speaking, at an end. It remains for us to make a further short
comparison between jokes and the better-known dream; and we may
expect that, apart from the single conformity we have already
considered, two such dissimilar mental functions will only reveal
differences. The most important difference lies in their social
behaviour. A dream is a completely asocial mental product; it has
nothing to communicate to anyone else; it arises within the subject
as a compromise between the mental forces struggling in him, it
remains unintelligible to the subject himself and is for that
reason totally uninteresting to other people. Not only does it not
need to set any store by intelligibility, it must actually avoid
being understood, for otherwise it would be destroyed; it can only
exist in masquerade. For that reason it can without hindrance make
use of the mechanism that dominates unconscious mental processes,
to the point of a distortion which can no longer be set straight. A
joke, on the other hand, is the most social of all the mental
functions that aim at a yield of pleasure. It often calls for three
persons and its completion requires the participation of someone
else in the mental process it starts. The condition of
intelligibility is, therefore, binding on it; it may only make use
of possible distortion in the unconscious through condensation and
displacement up to the point at which it can be set straight by the
third person’s understanding. Moreover, jokes and dreams have
grown up in quite different regions of mental life and must be
allotted to points in the psychological system far remote from each
other. A dream still remains a wish, even though one that has been
made unrecognizable; a joke is developed play. Dreams, in spite of
all their practical nonentity, retain their connection with the
major interests of life; they seek to fulfil needs by the
regressive detour of hallucination, and they are permitted to occur
for the sake of the one need that is active during the night - the
need to sleep. Jokes, on the other hand, seek to gain a small yield
of pleasure from the mere activity, untrammelled by needs, of our
mental apparatus. Later they try to catch hold of that pleasure as
a by-product during the activity of that apparatus and thus arrive
secondarily
at not unimportant functions directed to the
external world. Dreams serve predominantly for the avoidance of
unpleasure, jokes for the attainment of pleasure; but all our
mental activities converge in these two aims.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1762

VII

JOKES
AND THE SPECIES OF THE COMIC

We have approached the problems of the comic
in an unusual way. It seemed to us that jokes, which are ordinarily
regarded as a sub-species of the comic, offer enough peculiarities
to be attacked directly; thus we have avoided their relation to the
more inclusive category of the comic so long as that was possible,
though we have not failed to pick out
en passant
a few hints
that might throw light on the comic. We have had no difficulty in
discovering that socially the comic behaves differently from jokes.
It can be content with two persons: a first who finds what is comic
and a second in whom it is found. The third person, to whom the
comic thing is told, intensifies the comic process but adds nothing
new to it. In a joke this third person is indispensable for the
completion of the pleasure-producing process; but on the other hand
the second person may be absent, except where a tendentious,
aggressive joke is concerned. A joke is made, the comic is found -
and first and foremost in people, only by a subsequent transference
in things, situations, and so on, as well. As regards jokes, we
know that the sources of the pleasure that is to be fostered lie in
the subject himself and not in outside people. We have seen, too,
that jokes can sometimes re-open sources of the comic which have
become inaccessible, and that the comic often serves as a
façade for a joke and replaces the fore-pleasure which has
otherwise to be produced by the familiar technique (
p. 1739
). None of this precisely
suggests that the relations between jokes and the comic are very
simple. On the other hand, the problems of the comic have proved so
complicated and all the efforts of the philosophers at solving them
have been so unsuccessful that we cannot hold out any prospect that
we shall be able to master them in a sudden onslaught, as it were,
by approaching them from the direction of jokes. Moreover, for our
investigation of jokes we brought with us an instrument of which no
one else had hitherto made use - a knowledge of the dream-work. We
have no similar advantage at our command to help us to understand
the comic, and we must therefore expect that we shall discover no
more about the nature of the comic than what we have already found
in jokes, in so far as they form part of the comic and possess in
their own nature certain of its features unchanged or merely
modified.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1763

   The type of the comic which
stands nearest to jokes is the naïve. Like the comic in
general, the naïve is ‘found’ and not, like a
joke, ‘made’. Indeed, the naïve cannot be made at
all, whereas alongside the pure comic we have to take into account
the case in which something is made comic - an evocation of the
comic. The naïve must arise, without our taking any part in
it, in the remarks and actions of other people, who stand in the
position of the
second
person in the comic or in jokes. The
naïve occurs if someone completely disregards an inhibition
because it is not present in him - if, therefore, he appears to
overcome it without any effort. It is a condition for the
naïve’s producing its effect that we should know that
the person concerned does not possess the inhibition; otherwise we
call him not naïve but impudent. We do not laugh at him but
are indignant at him. The effect produced by the naïve is
irresistible, and seems simple to understand. An inhibitory
expenditure which we usually make suddenly becomes unutilizable
owing to our hearing the naïve remark, and it is discharged by
laughter. There is no need here for the attention to be distracted,
probably because the lifting of the inhibition occurs directly and
not through the intermediary of an operation that has been
provoked. In this we are behaving like the third person in a joke,
who is presented with the economy in inhibition without any effort
on his own part.

   In view of the insight we have
gained into the genesis of inhibitions from following the course of
development from play to jokes, it will not surprise us to find
that the naïve occurs far the most often in children, and is
then carried over to uneducated adults, whom we may regard as
childish so far as their intellectual development is concerned.
Naive
remarks
are, of course, better suited for comparison
with jokes than naïve actions, since remarks and not actions
are the usual form in which jokes are expressed. It is illuminating
to find that naïve remarks like those made by children may
also be described as ‘naïve jokes’. The conformity
between jokes and
naïveté
, as well as the
reasons for their dissimilarity, will be made clearer to us by a
few examples.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1764

   A three-and-a-half-year-old girl
gave this warning to her brother: ‘I say, don’t eat so
much of that pudding or you’ll get ill and have to have some
"
Bubizin
".’
‘"
Bubizin
"?’ asked her mother,
‘What’s that?’ ‘When I was ill’,
answered the child in self-justification, ‘I had to have some
Medizin
.’ The child thought that what the doctor
prescribed was called ‘
Mädi-zin
’ when it
was for a ‘
Mädi
’ [little girl] and
concluded that if it was for a ‘
Bubi
’ [little
boy] it would be called ‘
Bubi-zin
’. This is
constructed like a verbal joke working with the technique of
similarity of sound, and indeed it might have occurred as a real
joke, in which case we should have greeted it, half-unwillingly,
with a smile. As an example of
naïveté
it
strikes us as quite excellent and it raises a laugh. What is it
that makes the difference here between a joke and something
naïve? Evidently not the wording or the technique, which would
be the same for both possibilities, but a factor, rather, which at
first sight seems quite remote from both of them. It is merely a
question of whether we assume that the speaker has intended to make
a joke or whether we suppose that he - the child - has tried in
good faith to draw a serious conclusion on the basis of his
uncorrected ignorance. Only the latter case is one of
naïveté
. Here for the first time our attention
is drawn to the other person putting himself into the psychical
process that occurs in the person who produces the remark.

   This view will be confirmed if we
examine another example. A brother and sister - a twelve-year-old
girl and a ten-year-old boy - were performing a drama composed by
themselves before an audience of uncles and aunts. The scene
represented a hut by the sea-shore. In the first act the two
author-actors, a poor fisherman and his honest wife, are
complaining about the hard times and their small earnings. The
husband decides to cross the wide seas in his boat to seek his
fortune elsewhere, and, after tender farewells between the two of
them, the curtain falls. The second act takes place a few years
later. The fisherman has returned a wealthy man with a big bag of
money; and he tells his wife, who awaits his arrival outside the
hut, what good fortune he has met with in foreign lands. His wife
interrupts him proudly: ‘I too have not been idle.’ And
thereupon she opens the door of the hut and reveals to his eyes
twelve large dolls lying asleep on the floor. . . .
At this point in the drama the actors were interrupted by a storm
of laughter from the audience, which they were unable to
understand. They stared disconcerted at their fond relatives, who
had behaved properly till then and had listened with eager
attention. The laughter is explained on the supposition that the
audience assumed that the young authors still knew nothing of the
conditions governing the origin of children and were therefore able
to believe that a wife could boast of the offspring born during her
husband’s long absence and that a husband could rejoice with
her over them. What the authors produced on the basis of this
ignorance might be described as nonsense or absurdity.

   A third example will show us yet
another technique, the acquaintance of which we have made in jokes,
in the service of the naïve. A ‘Frenchwoman’¹
was engaged as governess for a little girl, but did not meet with
her personal approval. Scarcely had the newcomer left the room when
the little girl gave voice to loud criticism: ‘
That
a
Frenchwoman? She may
call
herself one because she once lay
beside a Frenchman!’ This might have been a joke - even a
tolerably good one (double meaning or allusion, with
double
entendre
) if the child had had the slightest notion of the
possibility of the double meaning. In fact she had merely
transferred to the stranger she disliked a facetious way of
describing a thing as ungenuine which she had often heard:
‘
That
genuine gold? It may once have lain beside
gold.’ Owing to the child’s ignorance, which so
completely altered the psychical process in her understanding
hearers, her remark became a naïve one. In consequence of this
condition, there is the possibility of a
misleading
naïveté
. We may assume in the child an ignorance
that no longer exists; and children often represent themselves as
naïve, so as to enjoy a liberty that they would not otherwise
be granted.

  
¹
[‘
Französin
.’ The
ordinary term for a French governess in Austria.]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1765

   We can illustrate from these
examples the position occupied by the naïve between jokes and
the comic. The naïve (in speech) agrees with jokes as regards
wording and content: it brings about a misuse of words, a piece of
nonsense, or a piece of smut. But the psychical process in the
first person, who produces it, which raised so many interesting and
puzzling questions for us in regard to jokes, is here completely
absent. A naïve person thinks he has used his means of
expression and trains of thought normally and simply, and he has no
arrière pensée
in mind; nor does he derive any
yield of pleasure from producing something naïve. None of the
characteristics of the naïve exist except in the apprehension
of the person who hears it - a person who coincides with the third
person in jokes. Moreover the person who produces it does so
without any effort. The complicated technique, which in jokes is
designed to paralyse the inhibition arising from rational
criticism, is absent in him; he does not possess this inhibition as
yet, so that he can produce nonsense and smut directly and without
compromise. In that respect the naïve is a marginal case of
the joke; it arises if in the formula for the construction of jokes
we reduce the value of the censorship to zero.

   Whereas it was a condition for
the effectiveness of a joke that both persons should be subject to
approximately the same inhibitions or internal resistances, it will
be seen that it is a condition for the naïve that the one
person should possess inhibitions which the other is without. The
apprehension of the naïve lies with the person provided with
inhibitions, and he alone obtains the yield of pleasure which the
naïve brings about. We have come near to guessing that that
pleasure arises from the lifting of inhibitions. Since the pleasure
from jokes has the same origin - a core of verbal pleasure and
pleasure from nonsense, and a casing of pleasure in the lifting of
inhibitions or in the relief of psychical expenditure - this
similar relation to inhibition explains the internal kinship
between the naïve and jokes. In both of them the pleasure
arises through the lifting of internal inhibition.

   The psychical process in the
receptive person, however, is as much more complicated in the case
of the naïve as it is simplified in comparison with jokes in
the productive person. (In the case of the naïve,
incidentally, our own self invariably coincides with the receptive
person, while in the case of jokes we may equally occupy the
position of the productive one.) When the receptive person hears
something naïve, it must on the one hand affect him like a
joke - and our examples give evidence precisely of this - for, as
with a joke, the lifting of the censorship is made possible for him
by no more than the effort of listening. But only a part of the
pleasure created by the naïve can be explained in this way;
and even this might be endangered in certain instances - for
example, at hearing a naïve piece of smut. We might react to
this at once with the same indignation that might be felt against a
real piece of smut, if it were not that another factor spares us
this indignation and at the same time offers us the more important
part of our pleasure in the naïve. This other factor is the
condition already mentioned that, in order to recognize the
naïve, we must know that the internal inhibition is absent in
the producing person. Only when this is certain do we laugh instead
of being indignant. Thus we take the producing person’s
psychical state into consideration, put ourselves into it and try
to understand it by comparing it with our own. It is these
processes of empathy and comparison that result in the economy in
expenditure which we discharge by laughing.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1766

   It would be possible to prefer a
simpler account - that our indignation is made superfluous by the
fact that the other person has had no need to overcome a
resistance; in that case the laughter would occur at the cost of
the economy in indignation. In order to discourage this view, which
is on the whole misleading, I will make a sharper distinction
between two cases which I have treated together above. The
naïve which we come across can either be in the nature of a
joke, as it was in our examples, or in the nature of smut (or of
what is in general objectionable); and the latter will occur
especially when it is expressed not in speech but in action. This
second alternative is really misleading: one could suppose, as far
as it is concerned, that the pleasure arises from the economized
and transformed indignation. But the first alternative throws more
light on things. A naïve remark - e.g. ‘
Bubizin
-
can in itself act like a minor joke and give no cause for
indignation. This alternative is certainly the less frequent; but
it is the purer and by far the more instructive. In so far as what
we are concerned with is the fact that the child has seriously and
without
arrière pensée
believed that the
syllable ‘
Medi
’ in ‘
Medizin
’
is identical with her own name ‘
Mädi
’, our
pleasure in what we hear receives an increase which has no longer
anything to do with pleasure in a joke. We now look at what has
been said from two points of view - once in the way it happened in
the child and once in the way it would have happened to us; and in
making this comparison we see that the child has found an identity
and that she has overcome a barrier that exists for us; and we then
seem to go further and say to ourselves: ‘If you choose to
understand what you’ve heard, you can economize the
expenditure on keeping up this barrier.’ The expenditure
liberated in a comparison like this is the source of pleasure in
the naïve and it is discharged by laughter; and it is,
incidentally, the same pleasure that we should otherwise have
transformed into indignation, if this had not been excluded by our
understanding of the producing person and, in this case, by the
nature of what was said as well. But if we take the instance of a
naïve joke as a model for the other alternative, of something
naïve that is objectionable, we shall see that there too the
economy in inhibition can arise directly from the comparison, that
there is no necessity for us to assume an indignation that begins
and is then stifled, and that this indignation in fact only
corresponds to using the liberated expenditure in another way -
against which in the case of jokes complicated protective
arrangements were necessary.