Freud - Complete Works (318 page)

  
¹
[‘Mechanization of life’ -
‘some kind of substitution of the artificial for the
natural.’]

  
²
[‘Perhaps we should even carry
simplification further still, go back to our oldest memories, and
trace in the games that amused the child the first sketch of the
combinations which make the grown man laugh . . . Above all, we too
often fail to recognize how much of childishness, so to speak,
there still is in most of our joyful emotions.’]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1799

   And, in fact, if we examine the
relation of the comic to the child we come upon a whole number of
connections which seem promising. Children themselves do not strike
us as in any way comic, though their nature fulfils all the
conditions which, if we compare it with our own nature, yield a
comic difference: the excessive expenditure on movement as well as
the small intellectual expenditure, the domination of the mental
functions by the bodily ones, and other features. A child only
produces a comic effect on us when he conducts himself not as a
child but as a serious adult, and he produces it then in the same
way as other people who disguise themselves. But so long as he
retains his childish nature the perception of him affords us a pure
pleasure, perhaps one that reminds us slightly of the comic. We
call him naïve, in so far as he shows us his lack of
inhibition, and we describe as naïvely comic those of his
utterances which in another person we should have judged
obscenities or jokes.

   On the other hand, children are
without a feeling for the comic. This assertion seems to say no
more than that the comic feeling, like such a number of other
things, only starts at some point in the course of mental
development; and this would be by no means surprising, especially
as it has to be admitted that the feeling already emerges clearly
at an age which has to be counted as part of childhood. But it can
nevertheless be shown that the assertion that children lack the
feeling of the comic contains more than something self-evident. In
the first place, it is easy to see that it could not be otherwise
if our view is correct which derives the comic feeling from a
difference in expenditure that arises in the course of
understanding another person. Let us once again take the comic of
movement as an example. The comparison which provides the
difference runs (stated in conscious formulas): ‘That is how
he does it’ and ‘This is how I should do it, how I did
it’. But a child is without the standard contained in the
second sentence; he understands simply by mimicry: he does it in
just the same way. The child’s upbringing presents him with a
standard: ‘this is how you ought to do it.’ If he now
makes use of this standard in making the comparison, he will easily
conclude: ‘he did not do it right’ and ‘I can do
it better’. In this case he laughs at the other person, he
laughs at him in the feeling of his own superiority. There is
nothing to prevent our deriving this laughter too from a difference
in expenditure; but on the analogy of the cases of laughing at
people that we have come across we may infer that the comic feeling
is not present in a child’s superior laughter. It is a
laughter of pure pleasure. In our own case when we have a clear
judgement of our own superiority, we merely smile instead of
laughing, or, if we laugh, we can nevertheless distinguish this
becoming conscious of our superiority from the comic that makes us
laugh.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1800

   It is probably right to say that
children laugh from pure pleasure in a variety of circumstances
that we feel as ‘comic’ and cannot find the motive for,
whereas a child’s motives are clear and can be stated. For
instance, if someone slips in the street and falls down we laugh
because the impression - we do not know why - is comic. A child
laughs in the same case from a feeling of superiority or from
Schadenfreude
: ‘You’ve fallen down, I
haven’t.’ Certain motives for pleasure in children seem
to be lost to us adults, and instead in the same circumstances we
have the ‘comic’ feeling as a substitute for the lost
one.

   If one might generalize, it would
seem most attractive to place the specific characteristic of the
comic which we are in search of in an awakening of the infantile -
to regard the comic as the regained ‘lost laughter of
childhood’. One could then say: ‘I laugh at a
difference in expenditure between another person and myself, every
time I rediscover the child in him.’ Or, put more exactly,
the complete comparison which leads to the comic would run:
‘That is how he does it - I do it in another way - he does it
as I used to do it as a child.’

   Thus the laughter would always
apply to the comparison between the adult’s ego and the
child’s ego. Even the lack of uniformity in the comic
difference - the fact that what seems to me comic is sometimes a
greater and sometimes a smaller expenditure - would fit in with the
infantile determinant; actually what is comic is invariably on the
infantile side.

   This is not contradicted by the
fact that, when children themselves are the object of the
comparison, they do not give me a comic impression but a purely
pleasurable one; nor is it contradicted because the comparison with
the infantile only produces a comic effect if any other use of the
difference is avoided. For these are matters concerned with the
conditions governing
discharge
. Whatever brings a psychical
process into connection with others operates against the discharge
of the surplus cathexis and puts it to some other use; whatever
isolates a psychical act encourages discharge. A conscious attitude
to children as objects of comparison therefore makes impossible the
discharge that is necessary for comic pleasure. Only when the
cathexis is
preconscious
is there an approximation to an
isolation such as, incidentally, we may ascribe to the mental
processes in children as well. The addition to the comparison
(‘I did it like that as a child too’) from which the
comic effect is derived would thus only come into consideration, as
far as differences of medium magnitude are concerned, if no other
nexus could gain control over the liberated surplus.

   If we pursue our attempt to
discover the essence of the comic in a preconscious link with the
infantile, we must go a step further than Bergson and admit that a
comparison need not, in order to produce the comic, arouse old
childish pleasures and childish play; it will be enough for it to
touch upon childish nature in general, and perhaps even on childish
suffering. Here we shall be parting from Bergson but remaining in
agreement with ourselves if we connect comic pleasure not with
recollected pleasure but once more with a comparison. It may be
that cases of the former kind may coincide with the invariably and
irresistibly comic.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1801

   Let us at this point review the
scheme which we drew up earlier of the various comic possibilities.
We remarked that the comic difference was found either

   (
a
) by a comparison
between another person and oneself, or

   (
b
) by a comparison
entirely within the other person, or

   (
c
) by a comparison
entirely within oneself.

In the first of these cases the other person
would appear to me as a child; in the second he would reduce
himself to a child; and in the third I should discover the child in
myself.

   The first case would include the
comic of movement and form, of mental functioning and of character.
The corresponding infantile factors would be the urge to movement
and the child’s inferior mental and moral development. So
that, for instance, a stupid person would be comic to me in so far
as he reminded me of a lazy child and a bad person in so far as he
reminded me of a naughty child. There could only be a question of a
childish pleasure lost to adults in the single instance in which
the child’s own joy in movement was concerned.

   The second case, in which the
comic depends entirely on ‘empathy’, includes the most
numerous possibilities - the comic of situation, of exaggeration
(caricature), of mimicry, of degradation and of unmasking. This is
the case in which the introduction of the infantile point of view
proves most useful. For the comic of situation is mostly based on
embarrassments, in which we rediscover the child’s
helplessness. The worst of the embarrassments, the interference by
the peremptory demands of natural needs with other functions,
corresponds to the child’s incomplete control over his bodily
functions. Where the comic of situation operates by means of
repetitions, it is based on the child’s peculiar pleasure in
constant repetition (of questions or of being told stories) which
make him a nuisance to the adult. Exaggeration, which still gives
pleasure to adults in so far as it can find justification with
their critical faculty, is connected with the child’s
peculiar lack of a sense of proportion, his ignorance of all
quantitative relations, which he comes to know later than
qualitative ones. The use of moderation and restraint, even in the
case of permitted impulses, is a late fruit of education and is
acquired by the mutual inhibition of mental activities brought
together in a combination. Where such combinations are weakened, as
in the unconscious of dreams or in the mono-ideism of
psychoneuroses, the child’s lack of moderation
re-emerges.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1802

   We found relatively great
difficulties in understanding the comic of mimicry so long as we
left the infantile factor out of account. But mimicry is the
child’s best art and the driving motive of most of his games.
A child’s ambition aims far less at excelling among his
equals than at mimicking the grown-ups. The relation of children to
adults is also the basis of the comic of degradation, which
corresponds to the condescension shown by adults in their attitude
to the life of children. There is little that gives children
greater pleasure than when a grown-up lets himself down to their
level, renounces his oppressive superiority and plays with them as
an equal. This relief, which gives the child pure pleasure, becomes
in adults, in the form of degradation, a means of making things
comic and a source of comic pleasure. As regards unmasking, we know
that it goes back to degradation.

   We come up against the most
difficulties in finding the infantile basis of the third case, the
comic of expectation, which no doubt explains why those authorities
who have put this case first in their discussion of the comic have
found no occasion for taking account of the infantile factor in the
comic. The comic of expectation is no doubt the remotest in
children; the capacity to grasp it is the latest to appear. In most
of the instances which seem comic to an adult a child would
probably feel only disappointment. We might, however, take the
child’s power of blissful expectation and credulity as a
basis for understanding how we appear to ourselves comic ‘as
a child’ when we meet with a comic disappointment.

   What we have said would seem to
suggest a certain probability for a translation of the comic
feeling that might run; ‘Those things are comic which are not
proper for an adult.’ Nevertheless I do not feel bold enough,
in virtue of my whole attitude to the problem of the comic, to
defend this last assertion with as much seriousness as my earlier
ones. I am unable to decide whether degradation to being a child is
only a special case of comic degradation, or whether everything
comic is based fundamentally on degradation to being a
child.¹

  
¹
The fact that comic pleasure has its source
in the ‘quantitative contrast’ of a comparison between
small and large, which after all also expresses the essential
relation between a child and an adult - this would certainly be a
strange coincidence if the comic had no other connection with the
infantile.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1803

   An enquiry which deals with the
comic, however cursorily, would be seriously incomplete if it did
not find room for at least a few remarks about
humour
. The
essential kinship between the two is so little open to doubt that
an attempt at explaining the comic is bound to make at least some
contribution to an understanding of humour. However much that is
pertinent and impressive may have been brought forward in the
appreciation of humour (which, itself one of the highest psychical
achievements, enjoys the particular favour of thinkers), yet we
cannot evade an attempt at giving expression to its nature by an
approach to the formulas for jokes and for the comic.

   We have seen that the release of
distressing affects is the greatest obstacle to the emergence of
the comic. As soon as the aimless movement does damage, or the
stupidity leads to mischief, or the disappointment causes pain, the
possibility of a comic effect is at an end. This is true, at all
events, for a person who cannot ward off such unpleasure, who is
himself its victim or is obliged to have a share in it; whereas a
person who is not concerned shows by his demeanour that the
situation involved contains everything that is required for a comic
effect. Now humour is a means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the
distressing affects that interfere with it; it acts as a substitute
for the generation of these affects, it puts itself in their place.
The conditions for its appearance are given if there is a situation
in which, according to our usual habits, we should be tempted to
release a distressing affect and if motives then operate upon us
which suppress that affect
in statu nascendi
. In the cases
that have just been mentioned the person who is the victim of the
injury, pain, and so on, might obtain
humorous
pleasure,
while the unconcerned person laughs from
comic
pleasure. The
pleasure of humour, if this is so, comes about - we cannot say
otherwise - at the cost of a release of affect that does not occur:
it arises from
an economy in the expenditure of affect
.