Freud - Complete Works (319 page)

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

 
1804

   Humour is the most easily
satisfied among the species of the comic. It completes its course
within a single person; another person’s participation adds
nothing new to it. I can keep to myself the enjoyment of the
humorous pleasure that has arisen in me, without feeling obliged to
communicate it. It is not easy to say what happens in a person when
humorous pleasure is generated; but we can obtain some insight if
we examine the cases in which humour is communicated or sympathized
with, cases in which, by an understanding of the humorous person,
we arrive at the same pleasure as his. The crudest case of humour -
what is known as
Galgenhumor
  - may be instructive in
this connection. A rogue who was being led out to execution on a
Monday remarked: ‘Well, this week’s beginning
nicely.’ This is actually a joke, since the remark is quite
apt in itself, but on the other hand, is misplaced in a nonsensical
way, since for the man himself there would be no further events
that week. But humour is concerned in the
making
of such a
joke - that is, in disregarding what it is that distinguishes the
beginning of this week from others, in denying the distinction
which might give rise to motives for quite special emotions. The
case was the same when the rogue on his way to execution asked for
a scarf for his bare throat so as not to catch cold - an otherwise
laudable precaution but one which, in view of what lay in store so
shortly for the neck, was remarkably superfluous and unimportant.
It must be confessed that there is something like magnanimity in
this
blague
, in the man’s tenacious hold upon his
customary self and his disregard of what might overthrow that self
and drive it to despair. This kind of grandeur of humour appears
unmistakably in cases in which our admiration is not inhibited by
the circumstances of the humorous person.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1805

   In Victor Hugo’s
Hernani
, the bandit who has become involved in a conspiracy
against his King, Charles I of Spain (the Emperor Charles V), has
fallen into the hands of this powerful enemy. He foresees that,
convicted of high treason, it is his fate to lose his head. But
this fore-knowledge does not prevent his letting himself be known
as a Hereditary Grandee of Spain and declaring that he has no
intention of renouncing any of the privileges that are his due. A
Grandee of Spain might cover his head in the presence of his royal
master. Very well, then:

                                                               
. . . . Nos têtes ont le droit

                                                               
De tomber couvertes devant de toi.
¹

This is humour on the grand scale, and if when
we hear it we do not laugh, that is because our admiration covers
the humorous pleasure. In the case of the rogue who refuses to
catch cold on the way to execution we laugh heartily. The situation
that ought to drive the criminal to despair might rouse intense
pity in us; but that pity is inhibited because we understand that
he, who is more closely concerned, makes nothing of the situation.
As a result of this understanding, the expenditure on the pity,
which was already prepared, becomes unutilizable and we laugh it
off. We are, as it were, infected by the rogue’s indifference
- though we notice that it has cost him a great expenditure of
psychical work.

   An economy of pity is one of the
most frequent sources of humorous pleasure. Mark Twain’s
humour usually works with his mechanism. In an account of his
brother’s life, for instance, he tells us how he was at one
time employed on a great road-making enterprise. The premature
explosion of a mine blew him up into the air and he came down again
far away from the place where he had been working. We are bound to
have feelings of sympathy for the victim of the accident and would
like to ask whether he was injured by it. But when the story goes
on to say that his brother had a half-day’s wages deducted
for being ‘absent from his place of employment’ we are
entirely distracted from our pity and become almost as hard-hearted
as the contractor and almost as indifferent to possible damage to
the brother’s health. On another occasion Mark Twain presents
us with his family tree, which he traces back to one of
Columbus’s fellow-voyagers. He then describes this
ancestor’s character and how his baggage consisted entirely
of a number of pieces of washing each of which had a different
laundry-mark - here we cannot help laughing at the cost of an
economy of the feelings of piety into which we were prepared to
enter at the beginning of this family history. The mechanism of the
humorous pleasure is not interfered with by our knowledge that this
pedigree is a fictitious one and that the fiction serves the
satirical purpose of exposing the embellishments in similar
accounts by other people: it is as independent of the condition
that it must be real as in the case of making things comic. In yet
another story, Mark Twain describes how his brother constructed a
subterranean dwelling, into which he brought a bed, a table and a
lamp and which he roofed over with a large piece of sailcloth with
a hole in the middle. At night, however, after the hut was
finished, a cow that was being driven home fell through the opening
of the roof on to the table and put out the lamp. His brother
patiently helped to get the beast out and put the establishment to
rights again. Next night the same interruption was repeated and his
brother behaved as before. And so it was every following night.
Repetition makes the story comic, but Mark Twain ends it by
reporting that on the forty-sixth night, when the cow fell through
again, his brother finally remarked: ‘The thing’s
beginning to get monotonous.’ At this our humorous pleasure
cannot be kept back, for what we had long expected to hear was that
this obstinate set of misfortunes would make his brother
angry
. And indeed the small contributions of humour that we
produce ourselves are as a rule made at the cost of anger - instead
of getting angry.²

  
¹
[‘Our heads have the right to fall
before you covered.’]

  
²
The grandiose humorous effect of a figure
like that of the fat knight Sir John Falstaff rests on an economy
in contempt and indignation. We recognize him as an undeserving
gormandizer and swindler, but our condenmation is disarmed by a
whole number of factors. We can see that he knows himself as well
as we do; he impresses us by his wit, and, besides this, his
physical misproportion has the effect of encouraging us to take a
comic view of him instead of a serious one, as though the demands
of morality and honour must rebound from so fat a stomach. His
doings are on the whole harmless, and are almost excused by the
comic baseness of the people he cheats. We admit that the poor
fellow has a right to try to live and enjoy himself like anyone
else, and we almost pity him because in the chief situations we
find him a plaything in the hands of someone far his superior. So
we cannot feel angry with him and we add all that we economize in
indignation with him to the comic pleasure which he affords us
apart from this. Sir John’s own humour arises in fact from
the superiority of an ego which neither his physical nor his moral
defects can rob of its cheerfulness and assurance.

   The
ingenious knight Don Quixote de la Mancha is, on the contrary, a
figure who possesses no humour himself but who with his seriousness
offers us a pleasure which could be called humorous, though its
mechanism shows an important divergence from that of humour. Don
Quixote is originally a purely comic figure, a big child; the
phantasies from his books of chivalry have gone to his head. It is
well known that to begin with the author intended nothing else of
him and that his creation gradually grew far beyond its
creator’s first intentions. But after the author had equipped
this ridiculous figure with the deepest wisdom and the noblest
purposes and had made him into the symbolic representative of an
idealism which believes in the realization of its aims and takes
duties seriously and takes promises literally, this figure ceased
to have a comic effect. Just as in other cases humorous pleasure
arises from the prevention of an emotion, so it does here from the
interference with comic pleasure. But it is clear that these
examples have already carried us a long way from the simple cases
of humour.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1806

   The species of humour are
extraordinarily variegated according to the nature of the emotion
which is economized in favour of the humour: pity, anger, pain,
tenderness, and so on. Their number seems to remain uncompleted
because the kingdom of humour is constantly being enlarged whenever
an artist or writer succeeds in submitting some hitherto
unconquered emotions to the control of humour, in making them, by
devices like those in the examples we have given, into sources of
humorous pleasure. The artists in
Simplicissismus
, for
instance, have had astonishing results in achieving humour at the
cost of horror and disgust. The forms in which humour is manifested
are, moreover, determined by two peculiarities which are connected
with the conditions under which it is generated. Humour may, in the
first place, appear merged with a joke or some other species of the
comic; in that case its task is to get rid of a possibility
implicit in the situation that an affect may be generated which
would interfere with the pleasurable outcome. In the second place,
it may stop this generating of an affect entirely or only
partially; this last is actually the commoner case since it is
easier to bring about, and it produces the various forms of
‘broken’¹ humour - the humour that smiles through
tears. It withdraws a part of its energy from the affect and in
exchange gives it a tinge of humour.

   The humorous pleasure derived
from sympathy originates, as can be seen from the examples above,
from a peculiar technique comparable to displacement, by means of
which the release of affect that is already in preparation is
disappointed and the cathexis diverted on to something else, often
on to something of secondary importance. But this does not help us
at all to understand the process by which the displacement away
from the generating of affect takes place in the humorous person
himself. We can see that the receiver imitates the creator of the
humour in his mental processes, but this tells us nothing of the
forces which make the process possible in the latter.

  
¹
A term which is used in quite another sense
in Vischer’s aesthetics.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1807

   We can only say that if someone
succeeds, for instance, in disregarding a painful affect by
reflecting on the greatness of the interests of the world as
compared with his own smallness, we do not regard this as an
achievement of humour but of philosophical thought, and if we put
ourselves into his train of thought, we obtain no yield of
pleasure. Humorous displacement is thus just as impossible under
the glare of conscious attention as is comic comparison; like the
latter, it is tied to the condition of remaining preconscious or
automatic.

   We can gain some information
about humorous displacement if we look at it in the light of a
defensive process. Defensive processes are the psychical
correlative of the flight reflex and perform the task of preventing
the generation of unpleasure from internal sources. In fulfilling
this task they serve mental events as an automatic regulation,
which in the end, incidentally, turns out to be detrimental and has
to be subjected to conscious thinking. I have indicated one
particular form of this defence, repression that has failed, as the
operative mechanism for the development of psychoneuroses. Humour
can be regarded as the highest of these defensive processes. It
scorns to withdraw the ideational content bearing the distressing
affect from conscious attention as repression does, and thus
surmounts the automatism of defence. It brings this about by
finding a means of withdrawing the energy from the release of
unpleasure that is already in preparation and of transforming it,
by discharge, into pleasure. It is even conceivable that once again
it may be a connection with the infantile that puts the means for
achieving this at its disposal. Only in childhood have there been
distressing affects at which the adult would smile to-day - just as
he laughs, as a humorist, at his present distressing affects. The
exaltation of his ego, to which the humorous displacement bears
witness, and of which the translation would no doubt be ‘I am
too big (too fine) to be distressed by these things’, might
well be derived from his comparing his present ego with his
childish one. This view is to some extent supported by the part
played by the infantile in neurotic processes of repression.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1808

   On the whole humour is closer to
the comic than to jokes. It shares with the former its psychical
localization in the preconscious whereas jokes, as we have had to
suppose, are formed as a compromise between the unconscious and the
preconscious. On the other hand humour does not participate in a
peculiar characteristic common to jokes and the comic, on which we
have perhaps not yet laid sufficient stress. It is a necessary
condition for generating the comic that we should be obliged,
simultaneously or in rapid succession
, to apply to one and
the same act of ideation two different ideational methods, between
which the ‘comparison’ is then made and the comic
difference emerges. Differences in expenditure of this kind arise
between that belongs to someone else and to oneself, between what
is as usual and what has been changed, between what is expected and
what happens.¹ In the case of jokes, the difference between
two simultaneous methods of viewing things, which operate with a
different expenditure, applies to the process in the person who
hears the joke. One of these two views, following the hints
contained in the joke, passes along the path of thought through the
unconscious; the other stays on the surface and views the joke like
any other wording that has emerged from the preconscious and become
conscious. We should perhaps be justified in representing the
pleasure from a joke that is heard as being derived from the
difference between these two methods of viewing it.² Here we
are saying of jokes what we described as their possessing a Janus
head, while the relation between jokes and the comic had still to
be cleared up.³