Freud - Complete Works (312 page)

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1767

   This comparison, and this economy
in expenditure by putting oneself into the mental process of the
producing person, can only claim to be of significance for the
naïve, however, if it is not in it alone that they are found.
A suspicion occurs to us, in fact, that this mechanism, which is
wholly alien to jokes, may be a part and perhaps an essential part
of the psychical process in the comic. Looked at from this point of
view - and this is undoubtedly the most important aspect of the
naïve - the naïve thus presents itself as a species of
the comic. The extra element in our examples of naïve speeches
that is added to the pleasure of a joke is ‘comic’
pleasure. We should be inclined to assume of it quite generally
that it arises from expenditure economized in a comparison of
someone else’s remarks with our own. But since this leads us
to far-reaching considerations, we will first conclude our
discussion of the naïve. The naïve, then, would be a
species of the comic in so far as its pleasure springs from the
difference in expenditure which arises in trying to understand
someone else; and it would approach the joke in being subject to
the condition that the expenditure economized in the comparison
must be an inhibitory expenditure.¹

   Let us hastily add a few points
of agreement and of difference between the concepts that we have
just reached and those which have long been familiar in the
psychology of the comic. The putting of oneself in the other
person’s place and trying to understand him is clearly
nothing other than the ‘comic lending’ which since Jean
Paul has played a part in the analysis of the comic; the
‘comparing’ of someone else’s mental process with
one’s own corresponds to the ‘psychological
contrast’ which we can at last find a place for here, after
not knowing what to do with it in jokes. But we differ in our
explanation of comic pleasure from many authorities who regard it
as arising from the oscillation of attention backwards and forwards
between contrasting ideas. A mechanism of pleasure like this would
seem incomprehensible to us;² but we may point out that in a
comparison between contrasts a difference in expenditure occurs
which, if it is not used for some other purpose, becomes capable of
discharge and may thus become a source of pleasure.

  
¹
In what I have written, I have all the time
identified the naïve with the naïve-comic, which is
certainly not in every case admissible. But it is enough for our
purposes to study the character of the naïve in
‘naïve jokes’ and in ‘naïve
smut’. Any further investigation would imply an intention on
my part of using this as a basis for my explanation of the
comic.

  
²
Bergson, too, rejects the idea of comic
pleasure having any such derivation, which is evidently influenced
by an effort to establish an analogy with the laughter caused by
tickling; and he supports his view with some good arguments (1900,
99). - The explanation of comic pleasure given by Lipps is on a
quite different plane: in accordance with his view of the comic, he
would regard it as something that is ‘unexpectedly
small’.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1768

   It is only with misgivings that I
venture to approach the problem of the comic itself. It would be
presumptuous to expect that my efforts would be able to make any
decisive contribution to its solution when the works of a great
number of eminent thinkers have failed to produce a wholly
satisfactory explanation. My intention is in fact no more than to
pursue the lines of thought that have proved valuable with jokes a
short distance further into the sphere of the comic.

   The comic arises in the first
instance as an unintended discovery derived from human social
relations. It is found in people - in their movements, forms,
actions and traits of character, originally in all probability only
in their physical characteristics but later in their mental ones as
well or, as the case may be, in the expression of those
characteristics. By means of a very common sort of personification,
animals become comic too, and inanimate objects. At the same time,
the comic is capable of being detached from people, in so far as we
recognize the conditions under which a person seems comic. In this
way the comic of situation comes about, and this recognition
affords the possibility of making a person comic at one’s
will by putting him in situations in which his actions are subject
to these comic conditions. The discovery that one has it in
one’s power to make someone else comic opens the way to an
undreamt-of yield of comic pleasure and is the origin of a highly
developed technique. One can make
oneself
comic, too, as
easily as other people. The methods that serve to make people comic
are: putting them in a comic situation, mimicry, disguise,
unmasking, caricature, parody, travesty, and so on. It is obvious
that these techniques can be used to serve hostile and aggressive
purposes. One can make a person comic in order to make him become
contemptible, to deprive him of his claim to dignity and authority.
But even if such an intention habitually underlies making people
comic, this need not be the meaning of what is comic
spontaneously.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1769

   This irregular survey of the
occurrences of the comic will already show us that a very extensive
field of origin is to be ascribed to it and that such specialized
conditions as we found, for instance, in the naïve are not to
be expected in it. In order to get on the track of the determining
condition that is valid for the comic, the most important thing is
the choice of an introductory case. We shall choose the comic of
movement, because we recollect that the most primitive kind of
stage performance - the pantomime - uses that method for making us
laugh. The answer to the question of why we laugh at the
clown’s movements is that they seem to us extravagant and
inexpedient. We are laughing at an expenditure that is too large.
Let us look now for the determining condition outside the comic
that is artificially constructed - where it can be found
unintended. A child’s movements do not seem to us comic,
although he kicks and jumps about. On the other hand, it
is
comic where a child who is learning to write follows the movements
of his pen with his tongue stuck out; in these associated motions
we see an unnecessary expenditure of movement which we should spare
ourselves if we were carrying out the same activity. Similarly,
other such associated motions, or merely exaggerated expressive
movements, seem to us comic in adults too. Pure examples of this
species of the comic are to be seen, for instance, in the movements
of someone playing skittles who, after he has released the ball,
follows its course as though he could still continue to direct it.
Thus, too, all grimaces are comic which exaggerate the normal
expression of the emotions, even if they are produced involuntarily
as in sufferers from St. Vitus’s dance (chorea). And in the
same way, the passionate movements of a modern conductor seem comic
to any unmusical person who cannot understand their necessity.
Indeed, it is from this comic of movement that the comic of bodily
shapes and facial features branches off; for these are regarded as
though they were the outcome of an exaggerated or pointless
movement. Staring eyes, a hooked nose hanging down to the mouth,
ears sticking out, a hump-back - all such things probably only
produce a comic effect in so far as movements are imagined which
would be necessary to bring about these features; and here the
nose, the ears and other parts of the body are imagined as more
movable than they are in reality. There is no doubt that it is
comic if someone can ‘waggle his ears’, and it would
certainly be still more comic if he could move his nose up and
down. A good deal of the comic effect produced on us by animals
comes from our perceiving in them movements such as these which we
cannot imitate ourselves.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1770

   But how is it that we laugh when
we have recognized that some other person’s movements are
exaggerated and inexpedient? By making a comparison, I believe,
between the movement I observe in the other person and the one that
I should have carried out myself in his place. The two things
compared must of course be judged by the same standard, and this
standard is my expenditure of innervation, which is linked to my
idea of the movement in both of the two cases. This statement calls
for elucidation and expansion.

   What we are here comparing is on
the one hand the psychical expenditure while we are having a
certain idea and on the other hand the content of the thing that we
are having the idea of. Our statement says that the former is not
in general and in theory independent of the latter, the content of
the idea, and in particular that the idea of something large
demands more expenditure than the idea of something small. So long
as it is only a matter of the idea of different large
movements
, there should be no difficulties over the
theoretical grounds for our statement or over proving it by
observation. We shall see that in this case an attribute of the
idea in fact coincides with an attribute of what we have an idea
of, though psychology warns us as a rule against such a
confusion.

   I have acquired the idea of a
movement of a particular size by carrying the movement out myself
or by imitating it, and through this action I have learnt a
standard for this movement in my innervatory sensations.¹

   When, now, I perceive a movement
like this of greater or lesser size in someone else, the securest
way to an understanding (an apperception) of it will be for me to
carry it out by imitation, and I can then decide from the
comparison on which of the movements my expenditure was the
greater. An impulsion of this kind to imitation is undoubtedly
present in perceptions of movements. But actually I do not carry
the imitation through, any more than I still spell words out if I
learnt to read by spelling. Instead of imitating the movement with
my muscles, I have an idea of it though the medium of my
memory-traces of expenditures on similar movements. Ideation or
‘thinking’ differs from acting or performing above all
in the fact that it displaces far smaller cathectic energies and
holds back the main expenditure from discharge.

  
¹
The memory of this innervatory expenditure
will remain the essential part of my idea of this movement, and
there will always be modes of thinking in my mental life in which
the idea will be represented by nothing else than this expenditure.
In other circumstances, indeed, this element may be replaced by
another - for instance, by visual images of the aim of the movement
or by a verbal image; and in certain kinds of abstract thinking a
token will suffice instead of the full content of the
idea.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1771

   But how is the
quantitative
factor - the greater or lesser size - of the
perceived movement to be given expression in the idea? And if there
can be no representation of quantity in the idea, which is made up
of qualities, how can I distinguish the ideas of movements of
different sizes? - how can I make the comparison on which
everything here depends? The way is pointed out by physiology, for
it teaches us that even during the process of ideation innervations
run out to the muscles, though these, it is true, correspond to a
very modest expenditure of energy. Now it becomes very plausible to
suppose that this innervatory energy that accompanies the process
of ideation is used to represent the quantitative factor of the
idea: that it is larger when there is an idea of a large movement
than when it is a question of a small one. Thus the idea of the
larger movement would in this case in fact be the larger one - that
is, it would be the idea accompanied by the larger expenditure of
energy.

   Direct observation shows that
human beings are in the habit of expressing the attributes of
largeness and smallness in the contents of their ideas by means of
a varying expenditure in a kind of
ideational mimetics
. If a
child or a man from the common people, or a member of certain
races, narrates or describes something, it is easy to see that he
is not content to make his idea plain to the hearer by the choice
of clear words, but that he also represents its subject-matter in
his expressive movements: he combines the mimetic and the verbal
forms of representation. And he especially demonstrates quantities
and intensities: ‘a high mountain’ - and he raises his
hand over his head, ‘a little dwarf’ - and he holds it
near the ground. He may have broken himself of the habit of
painting with his hands, yet for that reason he will do it with his
voice; and if he exercises self-control in this too, it may be
wagered that he will open his eyes wide when he describes something
large and squeeze them shut when he comes to something small. What
he is thus expressing is not his affects but actually the content
of what he is having an idea of.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1772

   Are we to suppose, then, that
this need for mimetics is only aroused by the requirements of
communicating something, in spite of the fact that a good part of
this method of representation altogether escapes the hearer’s
attention? On the contrary, I believe that these mimetics exist,
even if with less liveliness, quite apart from any communication,
that they occur as well when the subject is forming an idea of
something for his own private benefit and is thinking of something
pictorially, and that he then expresses ‘large’ and
‘small’ in his own body just as he does in speech, at
all events by a change in the innervation of his features and sense
organs. I can even believe that the somatic innervation which is
commensurate with the content of what he is having an idea of may
have been the beginning and origin of mimetics for purposes of
communication; it only needed to be intensified and made noticeable
to other people in order to be able to serve that end. If I support
the view that to the ‘expression of the emotions’,
which is well known as the physical concomitant of mental
processes, there should be added the ‘expression of the
ideational content’, I can see quite clearly that my remarks
relating to the category of large and small do not exhaust the
subject. I might myself add a variety of points even before
arriving at the phenomena of tension by which a person indicates
somatically the concentration of his attention and the level of
abstraction at which his thinking is at the moment proceeding. I
regard the matter as a really important one, and I believe that if
ideational mimetics are followed up, they may be as useful in other
branches of aesthetics as they are here for an understanding of the
comic.