Freud - Complete Works (313 page)

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1773

   To return now to the comic of
movement. When, I repeat, a particular movement is perceived, the
impulsion is given to forming an idea of it by means of a certain
expenditure of energy. In ‘trying to understand’,
therefore, in apperceiving this movement, I make a certain
expenditure, and in this portion of the mental process I behave
exactly as though I were putting myself in the place of the person
I am observing. But at the same moment, probably, I bear in mind
the aim of this movement, and my earlier experience enables me to
estimate the scale of expenditure required for reaching that aim.
In doing so I disregard the person whom I am observing and behave
as though I myself wanted to reach the aim of the movement. These
two possibilities in my imagination amount to a comparison between
the observed movement and my own. If the other person’s
movement is exaggerated and inexpedient, my increased expenditure
in order to understand i| is inhibited
in statu nascendi
, as
it were in the act of being mobilized; it is declared superfluous
and is free for use elsewhere or perhaps for discharge by laughter.
This would be the way in which, other circumstances being
favourable, pleasure in a comic movement is generated - an
innervatory expenditure which has become an unusable surplus when a
comparison is made with a movement of one’s own.

   It will be seen that our
discussions must proceed in two different directions: first, to
establish the conditions governing the discharge of the surplus,
and second, to examine whether the other cases of the comic can be
looked at in the same way as the comic of movement.

   We will take the second question
first and will turn from the comic of movement and action to the
comic which is found in the intellectual functions and the
character traits of other people.

   As a sample of this class we may
choose comic nonsense, as it is produced by ignorant candidates in
an examination; it is no doubt more difficult to give a simple
example of character traits. We should not be confused if we find
that nonsense and stupidity, which so often produce a comic effect,
are nevertheless not felt as comic in every case, just as the same
characters which on one occasion can be laughed at as comic may on
another occasion strike one as contemptible or hateful. This fact,
of which we must not lose sight, merely points out that other
factors are concerned in producing the comic effect besides the
comparison we know about - factors which we may be able to trace
out in another connection.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1774

   The comic that is found in
someone else’s intellectual and mental characteristics is
evidently once again the outcome of a comparison between him and my
own self, though, curiously enough, a comparison which has as a
rule produced the opposite result to that in the case of a comic
movement or action. In this latter case it was comic if the other
person had made a greater expenditure than I thought I should need.
In the case of a mental function, on the contrary, it becomes comic
if the other person has spared himself expenditure which I regard
as indispensable (for nonsense and stupidity are inefficiencies of
function). In the former case I laugh because he has taken too much
trouble, in the latter because he has taken too little. The comic
effect apparently depends, therefore, on the
difference
between the two cathectic expenditures - one’s own and the
other person’s as estimated by ‘empathy’ - and
not on which of the two the difference favours. But this
peculiarity, which at first sight confuses our judgement, vanishes
when we bear in mind that a restriction of our muscular work and an
increase of our intellectual work fit in with the course of our
personal development towards a higher level of civilization. By
raising our intellectual expenditure we can achieve the same result
with a diminished expenditure on our movements. Evidence of this
cultural success is provided by our machines.¹

   Thus a uniform explanation is
provided of the fact that a person appears comic to us if, in
comparison with ourselves, he makes too great an expenditure on his
bodily functions and too little on his mental ones; and it cannot
be denied that in both these cases our laughter expresses a
pleasurable sense of the superiority which we feel in relation to
him. If the relation in the two cases is reversed - if the other
person’s physical expenditure is found to be less than ours
or his mental expenditure greater - then we no longer laugh, we are
filled with astonishment and admiration.²

  
¹
As the proverb says: ‘Was man nicht
im Kopfe hat, muss man in den Beinen haben.’ [Literally:
‘What one hasn’t in one’s head one must have in
one’s legs,’]

  
²
The contradictoriness with which the
determining conditions of the comic are pervaded - the fact that
sometimes an excess and sometimes an insufficiency seems to be the
source of comic pleasure - has contributed no little to the
confusion of the problem. Cf. Lipps (1898, 47).

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1775

   The origin of comic pleasure
which has been discussed here - its derivation from a comparison of
another person with our self, from the difference between our own
psychical expenditure and the other person’s as estimated by
empathy - is probably the most important genetically. It is
certain, however, that it has not remained the only one. We have
learnt at one time or other to disregard this comparison between
the other person and ourself and to derive the pleasurable
difference from the one side only, whether from the empathy or from
the processes in ourself - which proves that the feeling of
superiority bears no essential relation to comic pleasure. A
comparison is indispensable for the generation of this pleasure. We
find that it is made between two cathectic expenditures that occur
in rapid succession and are concerned with the same function, and
these expenditures are either brought about in us through empathy
into someone else or, without any such relation, are discovered in
our own mental processes.

   The first of these cases - in
which, therefore, the other person still plays a part, though no
longer in comparison with our own self - arises when the
pleasurable difference in cathectic expenditures is brought about
by external influences, which we may sum up as a
‘situation’. For that reason, this species of the comic
is also known as ‘the comic of situation’. The
characteristics of the person who provides the comic effect do not
in this case play an essential part: we laugh even if we have to
confess that
we
should have had to do the same in that
situation. We are here extracting the comic from the relation of
human beings to the often over-powerful external world; and so far
as the mental processes of a human being are concerned, this
external world also comprises social conventions and necessities
and even his own bodily needs. A typical instance of the latter
kind is provided if, in the middle of an activity which makes
demands on a person’s mental powers, he is suddenly
interrupted by a pain or an excretory need. The contrast which,
through empathy, offers us the comic difference is that between the
high degree of interest taken by him
before
the interruption
and the minimal one that he has left over for his mental activity
when the interruption has occurred. The person who offers us this
difference becomes comic to us once again for his inferiority; but
he is inferior only in comparison with his earlier self and not in
comparison with
us
, for we know that in the same
circumstances we could not have behaved otherwise. But it is
noteworthy that we only find someone’s being put in a
position of inferiority comic where there is empathy - that is,
where someone else is concerned: if we ourselves were in similar
straits we should be conscious only of distressing feelings. It is
probably only by keeping such feelings away from ourselves that we
are able to enjoy pleasure from the difference arising out of a
comparison between these changing cathexes.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1776

   The other source of the comic,
which we find in the transformations of
our own
cathexes,
lies in our relations with the future, which we are accustomed to
anticipate with our expectant ideas. I assume that a quantitatively
definite expenditure underlies each of our ideas - an expenditure
which, in the event of a disappointment, is therefore diminished by
a definite difference. Here I may once again recall the remarks I
made earlier on ‘ideational mimetics’. But it seems to
me to be easier to prove a real mobilization of cathectic energy in
the case of expectation. It is quite obviously true of a number of
cases that motor preparations are what form the expression of
expectation - above all in all cases in which the expected event
makes demands on my motility - and that these preparations can be
at once determined quantitatively. If I am expecting to catch a
ball which is being thrown to me, I put my body into tensions which
will enable it to meet the impact of the ball; and, should the ball
when it is caught turn out to be too light, my superfluous
movements make me comic to the spectators. I have let myself be
enticed by my expectation into an exaggerated expenditure of
movement. The same is true if, for instance, I lift a fruit which I
have judged to be heavy out of a basket, but which, to my
disappointment, turns out to be a sham one, hollow and made of wax.
My hand, by jumping up, betrays the fact that I had prepared an
innervation too large for the purpose - and I am laughed at for it.
There is at least one case in which the expenditure on expectation
can be directly demonstrated measurably by physiological
experiments on animals. In Pavlov’s experiments on salivary
secretions, various kinds of food are set before dogs in whom a
salivary fistula has been opened; the amounts of saliva secreted
then vary according to whether the experimental conditions confirm
or disappoint the dogs’ expectations of being fed with the
food set before them.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1777

   Even when what is expected makes
demands on my sense organs and not on my motility, I may assume
that the expectation is expressed in a certain motor expenditure
towards making the senses tense and towards holding back other
impressions that are not expected; and, in general, I may regard an
attitude of attention as being a motor function equivalent to a
certain expenditure. I may further take it as a premiss that the
preparatory activity of expectation will not be independent of the
magnitude of the impression that is expected, but that I shall
represent its largeness or smallness mimetically by a larger or
smaller preparatory expenditure, as in the case of making a
communication and in the case of thinking unaccompanied by
expectation. The expenditure on expectation is, however, put
together from several components, and in the case of my
disappointment, too, various points will be involved - not only
whether what happens is perceptually greater or smaller than what
is expected, but also whether it is worthy of the great interest
which I had expended on the expectation. In this way I shall
perhaps be led to take into account, besides the expenditure on the
representation of large and small (the ideational mimetics), the
expenditure on tightening the attention (the expenditure on
expectation), and beyond this in other cases the expenditure on
abstraction. But these other kinds of expenditure can easily be
traced back to that on large and small, since what is more
interesting, more sublime and even more abstract are only special
cases, with particular qualities, of what is larger. If we consider
in addition that, according to Lipps and other writers,
quantitative
(and not qualitative) contrast is to be
regarded primarily as the source of comic pleasure, we shall on the
whole feel glad that we chose the comic of movement as the
starting-point of our enquiry.

   Lipps, in the volume which has
been so often quoted in these pages, has attempted, as an
amplification to Kant’s statement that the comic is ‘an
expectation that has turned to nothing’, to derive comic
pleasure quite generally from expectation. In spite, however, of
the many instructive and valuable findings which this attempt has
brought to light, I should like to support the criticism made by
other authorities that Lipps has taken the field of origin of the
comic far too narrowly and has been obliged to use great violence
in order to bring its phenomena within the scope of his
formula.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1778

   Mankind have not been content to
enjoy the comic where they have come upon it in their experience;
they have also sought to bring it about intentionally, and we can
learn more about the nature of the comic if we study the means
which serve to
make
things comic. First and foremost, it is
possible to produce the comic in relation to oneself in order to
amuse other people - for instance, by making oneself out clumsy or
stupid. In that way one produces a comic effect exactly as though
one really were these things, by fulfilling the condition of the
comparison which leads to the difference in expenditure. But one
does not in this way make oneself ridiculous or contemptible, but
may in some circumstances even achieve admiration. The feeling of
superiority does not arise in the other person if he knows that one
has only been pretending; and this affords fresh evidence of the
fundamental independence of the comic from the feeling of
superiority.