Freud - Complete Works (316 page)
However attractive it may be to
follow up these more intimate determinants of the yield of comic
pleasure, the author must bear in mind that neither his education
nor his daily occupation justify his extending his enquiries far
beyond the sphere of jokes; and he must confess that the topic of
comic comparisons makes him particularly aware of his
inability.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1789
We therefore readily recall that
many authorities do not recognize the sharp conceptual and material
distinction between jokes and the comic to which we have found
ourselves led, and that they regard jokes as simply ‘the
comic of speech’ or ‘of words’. In order to test
this view we will choose one example each of something
intentionally and of something involuntarily comic in words to
compare with jokes. We have remarked earlier that we believe
ourselves very well able to distinguish a comic remark from a
joke:
‘With a fork and much to-do
His mother dragged him from the stew’
is merely comic; Heine’s remark about
the four castes among the inhabitants of Göttingen -
‘professors, students, philistines and donkeys’ is
par excellence
a joke.
For something intentionally comic
I will take as a model Stettenheim’s ‘Wippchen’.
People speak of Stettenheim as ‘witty’ because he
possesses to a special degree the gift of evoking the comic. This
capacity does in fact aptly determine the ‘wit’ that
one ‘has’ in contrast to the ‘joke’ that
one ‘makes’.¹ It cannot be disputed that the
letters of Wippchen, the Correspondent from Bernau, are also
‘witty’ in so far as they are abundantly sprinkled with
jokes of every kind, among them some that are genuinely successful
(e.g. of a display by savages: ‘in ceremonial
undress’). But what gives these productions their peculiar
character is not these separate jokes but the almost too abundant
comic of speech which flows through them. ‘Wippchen’
was no doubt originally intended as a satirical figure, a
modification of Gustav Freytag’s ‘Schmock’, one
of those uneducated people who misuse and trade away the
nation’s store of culture; but the author’s enjoyment
of the comic effects achieved in his picture of this character has
evidently pushed the satirical purpose little by little into the
background. Wippchen’s productions are for the most part
‘comic nonsense’. The author has made use of the
pleasurable mood brought about by the piling up of these successes
to introduce (justifiably, it must be said), alongside perfectly
permissible material, all kinds of insipidities which could not be
tolerated on their own account. Wippchen’s nonsense produces
a specific effect on account of a peculiar technique. If one looks
more closely at these ‘jokes’ one is specially struck
by a few kinds which give the whole production its stamp. Wippchen
makes use predominantly of combinations (amalgamations),
modifications of familiar turns of speech and quotations and
replacements of a few commonplace elements in them by more
pretentious and weighty forms of expression. This incidentally is
coming near to the techniques of jokes.
¹
[The same German word
‘
Witz
’ is used here for both ‘wit’
and ‘joke’.]
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1790
Here, for instance, are some
amalgamations (taken from the preface and the first pages of the
whole series):
‘Turkey has money
wie
Heu am Meere
.’ This is made up of the two expressions:
‘Money
wie Heu
’ and ‘Money
wie Sand am
Meer
'.¹
Or, ‘I am no more than a
column stripped of its leaves,² which bears witness to its
vanished glory’ - condensed from ‘a tree stripped of
its leaves’ and ‘a column
which . . . etc.’
Or, ‘Where is the thread of
Ariadne which will lead me from the Scylla of this Augean
stable?’ to which three Greek legends have each contributed
an element.
The modifications and
substitutions can be summarized without much difficulty. Their
nature can be seen from the following examples, which are
characteristic of Wippchen and behind which we have a glimpse of
another, more current and usually more commonplace wording, which
has been reduced to a
cliché
:
‘
Mier Papier und Tinte
höher zu hängen
.’ We use the phrase
‘
einem den Brotkorb höher hängen
'
metaphorically for ‘to put someone in more difficult
circumstances’. So why should not the metaphor be extended to
other material?
¹
[These are two common expressions in
German, equivalent to ‘money like dirt’ or
‘oceans of money’.]
²
[‘
Eine entlaubte
Säule
’ - an echo of ‘
Eine entleibte
Seele
’, ‘a disembodied spirit’.]
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1791
‘Battles in which the
Russians sometimes draw the shorter and sometimes the
longer.’ Only the first of these expressions [‘
den
Kürzeren ziehen
’, ‘draw the shorter’] is
in common use; but in view of its derivation there would be no
absurdity in bringing the second into use as well.
‘While I was still young,
Pegasus stirred within me.’ If we put back ‘the
poet’ instead of ‘Pegasus’ we find an
autobiographical
cliché
well-worn by frequent use. It
is true that ‘Pegasus’ is not a suitable substitute for
‘the poet’, but it has a conceptual relation with it
and is a high-sounding word.
‘Thus I lived through the
thorny shoes of childhood.’ A simile instead of a simple
statement. ‘
Die Kinderschuhe austreten
’
[‘to wear out the shoes of childhood’, ‘to leave
the nursery behind’] is one of the images connected with the
concept of childhood.
From the profusion of
Wippchen’s other productions some can be stressed as pure
examples of the comic. For instance, as a comic disappointment:
‘For hours the fight fluctuated, until at last it remained
undecided.’ Or, as a comic unmasking (of ignorance):
‘Clio, the Medusa of History.’ Or quotations such as:
‘
Habent sua fata morgana
.’¹ But our
interest is more aroused by the amalgamations and modifications,
because they repeat familiar joke-techniques. We may, for instance,
compare with the modifications such jokes as ‘he has a great
future behind him’, or ‘
er hat ein Ideal vor dem
Kopf
’, or Lichtenberg’s modification joke
‘new spas cure well’, and so on. Are Wippchen’s
productions which have the same technique now to be called jokes?
or how do they differ from these?
¹
[
Habent sua fata libelli
(books have
their destinies)' is a Latin saying attributed to Terence.
‘
Fata Morgana
’ is the Italian name for a
particular kind of mirage seen in the Straits of Messina: from
Morgan le Fey (fairy), King Arthur’s sister.]
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1792
It is not difficult to answer.
Let us recall that jokes present a double face to their hearer,
force him to adopt two different views of them. In a nonsense joke,
like the ones last mentioned, the one view, which only takes the
wording into account, regards it as nonsense; the other view,
following the hints that are given, passes through the
hearer’s unconscious and finds an excellent sense in it. In
Wippchen’s joke-like productions one face of the joke is
blank, as though it were rudimentary: a Janus head but with only
one face developed on it. If we allow the technique to lure us into
the unconscious, we come upon nothing. The amalgamations lead us to
no instance in which the two things that are amalgamated really
yield a new meaning; if we attempt an analysis, they fall
completely apart. The modifications and substitutions lead, as they
do in jokes, to a usual and familiar wording; but the modification
or substitution itself tells us nothing fresh and as a rule,
indeed, nothing possible or serviceable. So that only the one view
of these ‘jokes’ is left over - that they are nonsense.
We can merely decide whether we choose to call such productions,
which have freed themselves from one of the most essential
characteristics of jokes, ‘bad’ jokes or not jokes at
all.
Rudimentary jokes of this kind
undoubtedly produce a comic effect, which we can account for in
more than one way. Either the comic arises from the uncovering of
the modes of thought of the unconscious, as in cases we considered
earlier, or the pleasure comes from the comparison with a complete
joke. Nothing prevents our supposing that both these ways of
generating comic pleasure converge here. It is not impossible that
here the inadequacy of support from a joke is precisely what makes
the nonsense into comic nonsense.
For there are other easily
intelligible cases in which inadequacy of this kind as compared
with what ought to be effected makes the nonsense irresistibly
comic. The counterpart of jokes - riddles - can perhaps offer us
better examples of this than jokes themselves. For instance, here
is a ‘facetious question’: ‘What is it that hangs
on the wall and that one can dry one’s hands on?’ It
would be a stupid riddle if the answer were ‘a
hand-towel’. But that answer is rejected. - ‘No, a
herring.’ - ‘But for heaven’s sake’, comes
the infuriated protest ‘a herring doesn’t hang on the
wall.’ - ‘You
can
hang it up there.’ -
‘But who in the world is going to dry his hands on a
herring?’ - ‘Well’, is the soothing reply,
‘you don’t
have
to.’ This explanation,
given by means of two typical displacements, shows how far this
question falls short of a genuine riddle; and on account of its
absolute inadequacy it strikes us as being - instead of simply
nonsensically stupid - irresistibly comic. In this way, by failing
to comply with essential conditions, jokes, riddles, and other
things, which do not produce comic pleasure in themselves, are made
into sources of comic pleasure.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1793
There is still less difficulty in
understanding the case of the
involuntary
comic of speech,
which we can find realized as often as we please in, for instance,
the poems of Friederike Kempner (1891):
Against Vivisection
Ein unbekanntes Band der Seelen kettet
Den Menschen an das arme Tier.
Das Tier hat einen Willen - ergo Seele -
Wenn auch 'ne kleinere als wir.
¹
Or a conversation between a loving married
couple:
The Contrast
‘Wie glücklich bin ich’, ruft sie
leise,
‘Auch ich’, sagt lauter ihr Gemahl,
‘Es macht mich deine Art und Weise
Sehr stolz auf meine gute Wahl!’
²
There is nothing here to make us
think of jokes. But there is no doubt that it is the inadequacy of
these ‘poems’ that makes them comic - the quite
extraordinary clumsiness of their expression, which is linked with
the tritest or most journalistic turns of phrase, the simple-minded
limitation of their thought, the absence of any trace of poetic
matter or form. In spite of all this, however, it is not obvious
why we find Kempner’s poems comic. We find many similar
products nothing but shockingly bad; they do not make us laugh but
annoy us. But it is precisely the greatness of the distance that
separates them from what we expect of a poem that imposes the comic
view on us; if this difference struck us as smaller we should be
more inclined to criticize than to laugh. Furthermore, the comic
effect of Kempner’s poems is assured by a subsidiary
circumstance - the authoress’s unmistakably good intentions
and a peculiar sincerity of feeling which disarms our ridicule or
our annoyance and which we sense behind her helpless phrases.
Here we are reminded of a problem
whose consideration we have postponed. Difference in expenditure is
undoubtedly the basic determining condition of comic pleasure; but
observation shows that this difference does not invariably give
rise to pleasure. What further conditions must be present or what
disturbances must be kept back, in order that comic pleasure may
actually arise from the difference in expenditure? Before we turn
to answering this question, we will conclude this discussion with a
clear assertion that the comic of speech does not coincide with
jokes, and that jokes must therefore be something other than the
comic of speech.
¹
[ Between mankind and poor dumb beasts
there stretches
A
chain of souls impossible to see.