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JOKES AND THEIR RELATION TO THE UNCONSCIOUS
(1905)
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JOKES AND THEIR RELATION TO THE UNCONSCIOUS
A. ANALYTIC PART
I
INTRODUCTION
Anyone who has at any time had occasion to enquire from the literature of aesthetics and psychology what light can be thrown on the nature of jokes and on the position they occupy will probably have to admit that jokes have not received nearly as much philosophical consideration as they deserve in view of the part they play in our mental life. Only a small number of thinkers can be named who have entered at all deeply into the problems of jokes. Among those who have discussed jokes, however, are such famous names as those of the novelist Jean Paul (Richter) and of the philosophers Theodor Vischer, Kuno Fischer and Theodor Lipps. But even with these writers the subject of jokes lies in the background, while the main interest of their enquiry is turned to the more comprehensive and attractive problem of the comic.
The first impression one derives from the literature is that it is quite impracticable to deal with jokes otherwise than in connection with the comic.
According to Lipps (1898),¹ a joke is ‘something comic which is entirely subjective’ - that is, something comic ‘which we produce, which is attached to action of ours as such, to which we invariably stand in the relation of subject and never of object, not even of voluntary object’ (ibid., 80). This is explained further by a remark to the effect that in general we call a joke ‘any conscious and successful evocation of what is comic, whether the comic of observation or of situation’ (ibid., 78).
¹ It is this book that has given me the courage to undertake this attempt as well as the possibility of doing so.
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Fischer (1889) illustrates the relation of jokes to the comic with the help of caricature, which in his account he places between them. The comic is concerned with the ugly in one of its manifestations: ‘If it is concealed, it must be uncovered in the light of the comic way of looking at things; if it is noticed only a little or scarcely at all, it must be brought forward and made obvious, so that it lies clear and open to the light of day . . . In this way caricature comes about.’ (Ibid., 45.) - ’Our whole spiritual world, the intellectual kingdom of our thoughts and ideas, does not unfold itself before the gaze of external observation, it cannot be directly imagined pictorially and visibly; and yet it too contains its inhibitions, its weaknesses and its deformities - a wealth of ridiculous and comic contrasts. In order to emphasize these and make them accessible to aesthetic consideration, a force is necessary which is able not merely to imagine objects directly but itself to reflect on these images and to clarify them: a force that can illuminate thoughts. The only such force is judgement. A joke is a judgement which produces a comic contrast; it has already played a silent part in caricature, but only in judgement does it attain its peculiar form and the free sphere of its unfolding.’ (Ibid., 49-50.)
It will be seen that the characteristic which distinguishes the joke within the class of the comic is attributed by Lipps to action, to the active behaviour of the subject, but by Fischer to its relation to its object, which he considers is the concealed ugliness of the world of thoughts. It is impossible to test the validity of these definitions of the joke - indeed, they are scarcely intelligible - unless they are considered in the context from which they have been torn. It would therefore be necessary to work through these authors’ accounts of the comic before anything could be learnt from them about jokes. Other passages, however, show us that these same authors are able to describe essential and generally valid characteristics of the joke without any regard to its connection with the comic.
The characterization of jokes which seems best to satisfy Fischer himself is as follows: ‘A joke is a playful judgement.’ (Ibid., 51.) By way of illustration of this, we are given an analogy: ‘just as aesthetic freedom lies in the playful contemplation of things’ (ibid., 50). Elsewhere (ibid., 20) the aesthetic attitude towards an object is characterized by the condition that we do not ask anything of the object, especially no satisfaction of our serious needs, but content ourselves with the enjoyment of contemplating it. The aesthetic attitude is playful in contrast to work. - ‘It might be that from aesthetic freedom there might spring too a sort of judging released from its usual rules and regulations, which, on account of its origin, I will call a "playful judgement", and that in this concept is contained the first determinant, if not the whole formula, that will solve our problem. "Freedom produces jokes and jokes produce freedom", wrote Jean Paul. "Joking is merely playing with ideas."' (Ibid., 24.)
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A favourite definition of joking has long been the ability to find similarity between dissimilar things - that is, hidden similarities. Jean Paul has expressed this thought itself in a joking form: ‘Joking is the disguised priest who weds every couple.’ Vischer carries this further: ‘He likes best to wed couples whose union their relatives frown upon.’ Vischer objects, however, that there are jokes where there is no question of comparing - no question, therefore, of finding a similarity. So he, slightly diverging from Jean Paul, defines joking as the ability to bind into a unity, with surprising rapidity, several ideas which are in fact alien to one another both in their internal content and in the nexus to which they belong. Fischer, again, stresses the fact that in a large number of joking judgements differences rather than similarities are found, and Lipps points out that these definitions relate to joking as an ability possessed by the joker and not to the jokes which he makes.
Other more or less interrelated ideas which have been brought up as defining or describing jokes are: ‘a contrast of ideas’, ‘sense in nonsense’, ‘bewilderment and illumination’.
Definitions such as that of Kraepelin lay stress on contrasting ideas. A joke is ‘the arbitrary connecting or linking, usually by means of a verbal association, of two ideas which in some way contrast with each other’. A critic like Lipps had no difficulty in showing the total inadequacy of this formula; but he does not himself exclude the factor of contrast, but merely displaces it elsewhere. ‘The contrast remains, but it is not some contrast between the ideas attached to the words, but a contrast or contradiction between the meaning and the meaninglessness of the words.’ (Lipps, 1898, 87.) He gives examples to show how this is to be understood. ‘A contrast arises only because . . . we grant its words a meaning which, again, we nevertheless cannot grant them.’ (Ibid., 90.)
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If this last point is developed further, the contrast between ‘sense and nonsense’ becomes significant. ‘What at one moment has seemed to us to have a meaning, we now see is completely meaningless. That is what, in this case, constitutes the comic process . . . A remark seems to us to be a joke, if we attribute a significance to it that has psychological necessity and, as soon as we have done so, deny it again. Various things can be understood by this "significance". We attach sense to a remark and know that logically it cannot have any. We discover truth in it, which nevertheless, according to the laws of experience or our general habits of thought, we cannot find in it. We grant it logical or practical consequences in excess of its true content, only to deny these consequences as soon as we have clearly recognized the nature of the remark. In every instance, the psychological process which the joking remark provokes in us, and on which the feeling of the comic rests, consists in the immediate transition, from this attaching of sense, from this discovering of truth, and from this granting of consequences, to the consciousness or impression of relative nothingness.’ (Ibid., 85.)
However penetrating this discussion may sound the question may be raised here whether the contrast between what has meaning and what is meaningless, on which the feeling of the comic is said to rest, also contributes to defining the concept of the joke in so far as it differs from that of the comic.
The factor of ‘bewilderment and illumination’, too, leads us deep into the problem of the relation of the joke to the comic. Kant says of the comic in general that it has the remarkable characteristic of being able to deceive us only for a moment. Heymans (1896) explains how the effect of a joke comes about through bewilderment being succeeded by illumination. He illustrates his meaning by a brilliant joke of Heine’s, who makes one of his characters, Hirsch-Hyacinth, the poor lottery-agent, boast that the great Baron Rothschild had treated him quite as his equal - quite ‘famillionairely’. Here the word that is the vehicle of the joke appears at first simply to be a wrongly constructed word, something unintelligible, incomprehensible, puzzling. It accordingly bewilders. The comic effect is produced by the solution of this bewilderment, by understanding the word. Lipps (1898, 95) adds to this that this first stage of enlightenment - that the bewildering word means this or that - is followed by a second stage, in which we realize that this meaningless word has bewildered us and has then shown us its true meaning. It is only this second illumination, this discovery that a word which is meaningless by normal linguistic usage has been responsible for the whole thing - this resolution of the problem into nothing - it is only this second illumination that produces the comic effect.
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Whether the one or the other of these two views seems to us to throw more light on the question, the discussion of bewilderment and enlightenment brings us closer to a particular discovery. For if the comic effect of Heine’s ‘famillionairely’ depends on the solution of the apparently meaningless word, the ‘joke’ must no doubt be ascribed to the formation of that word and to the characteristics of the word thus formed.
Another peculiarity of jokes, quite unrelated to what we have just been considering, is recognized by all the authorities as essential to them. ‘Brevity is the body and the soul of wit, it is its very self,’ says Jean Paul (1804, Part II, Paragraph 42), merely modifying what the old chatterbox Polonius says in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (II, 2):
‘Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief.’
In this connection the account given by Lipps (1898, 90) of the brevity of jokes is significant: ‘A joke says what it has to say, not always in few words, but in too few words - that is, in words that are insufficient by strict logic or by common modes of thought and speech. It may even actually say what it has to say by not saying it.’
We have already learnt from the connection of jokes with caricature that they ‘must bring forward something that is concealed or hidden’ (Fischer, 1889, 51). I lay stress on this determinant once more, because it too has more to do with the nature of jokes than with their being part of the comic.
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I am well aware that these scanty extracts from the works of writers upon jokes cannot do them justice. In view of the difficulties standing in the way of my giving an unmistakably correct account of such complicated and subtle trains of thought, I cannot spare curious enquirers the labour of obtaining the information they desire from the original sources. But I am not sure that they will come back fully satisfied. The criteria and characteristics of jokes brought up by these authors and collected above - activity, relation to the content of our thoughts, the characteristic of playful judgement, the coupling of dissimilar things, contrasting ideas, ‘sense in nonsense’, the succession of bewilderment and enlightenment, the bringing forward of what is hidden, and the peculiar brevity of wit - all this, it is true, seems to us at first sight so very much to the point and so easily confirmed by instances that we cannot be in any danger of underrating such views. But they are dijecta membra, which we should like to see combined into an organic whole. When all is said and done, they contribute to our knowledge of jokes no more than would a series of anecdotes to the description of some personality of whom we have a right to ask for a biography. We are entirely without insight into the connection that presumably exists between the separate determinants - what, for instance, the brevity of a joke can have to do with its characteristic of being a playful judgement. We need to be told, further, whether a joke must satisfy all these determinants in order to be a proper joke, or need only satisfy some, and if so which can be replaced by others and which are indispensable. We should also wish to have a grouping and classification of jokes on the basis of the characteristics considered essential. The classification that we find in the literature rests on the one hand on the technical methods employed in them (e.g. punning or play upon words) and on the other hand on the use made of them in speech (e.g. jokes used for the purposes of caricature or of characterization, or joking snubs).
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We should thus find no difficulty in indicating the aims of any new attempt to throw light on jokes. To be able to count on success, we should have either to approach the work from new angles or to endeavour to penetrate further by increased attention and deeper interest. We can resolve that we will at least not fail in this last respect. It is striking with what a small number of instances of jokes recognized as such the authorities are satisfied for the purposes of their enquiries, and how each of them takes the same ones over from his predecessors. We must not shirk the duty of analysing the same instances that have already served the classical authorities on jokes. But it is our intention to turn besides to fresh material so as to obtain a broader foundation for our conclusions. It is natural then that we should choose as the subjects of our investigation examples of jokes by which we ourselves have been most struck in the course of our lives and which have made us laugh the most.
Is the subject of jokes worth so much trouble? There can, I think, be no doubt of it. Leaving on one side the personal motives which make me wish to gain an insight into the problems of jokes and which will come to light in the course of these studies, I can appeal to the fact that there is an intimate connection between all mental happenings - a fact which guarantees that a psychological discovery even in a remote field will be of an unpredictable value in other fields. We may also bear in mind the peculiar and even fascinating charm exercised by jokes in our society. A new joke acts almost like an event of universal interest; it is passed from one person to another like the news of the latest victory. Even men of eminence who have thought it worth while to tell the story of their origins, of the cities and countries they have visited, and of the important people with whom they have associated, are not ashamed in their autobiographies to report their having heard some excellent joke.¹
¹ Von Falke’s Memoirs, 1897.
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II
THE TECHNIQUE OF JOKES
Let us follow up a lead presented to us by chance and consider the first example of a joke that we came across in the preceding chapter.
In the part of his Reisebilder entitled ‘Die Bäder von Lucca’ Heine introduces the delightful figure of the lottery-agent and extractor of corns, Hirsch-Hyacinth of Hamburg, who boasts to the poet of his relations with the wealthy Baron Rothschild, and finally say: ‘And, as true as God shall grant me all good things, Doctor, I sat beside Salomon Rothschild and he treated me quite as his equal - quite famillionairely.’
Heymans and Lipps used this joke (which is admittedly an excellent and most amusing one) to illustrate their view that the comic effect of jokes is derived from ‘bewilderment and illumination’ (see above). We, however, will leave that question on one side and ask another: ‘What is it that makes Hirsch-Hyacinth’s remark into a joke?’ There can be only two possible answers: either the thought expressed in the sentence possesses in itself the character of being a joke or the joke resides in the expression which the thought has been given in the sentence. In whichever of these directions the character of being a joke may lie, we will pursue it further and try to lay hands on it.
A thought can in general be expressed in various linguistic forms - in various words, that is - which can represent it with equal aptness. Hirsch-Hyacinth’s remark presents his thought in a particular form of expression and, as it seems to us, a specially odd form and not the one which is most easily intelligible. Let us try to express the same thought as accurately as possible in other words. Lipps has already done so, and in that way has to some extent explained the poet’s intention. He writes (1898, 87): ‘Heine, as we understand it, means to say that his reception was on familiar terms - of the not uncommon kind, which does not as a rule gain in agreeableness from having a flavour of millionairedom about it.’ We shall not be altering the sense of this if we give it another shape which perhaps fits better into Hirsch-Hyacinth’s speech: ‘Rothschild treated me quite as his equal, quite familiarly that is, so far as a millionaire can.’ ‘A rich man’s condescension’, we should add, ‘always involves something not quite pleasant for whoever experiences it.’¹
¹ We shall return to this same joke later on; and we shall then have occasion to make a correction in the translation of it given by Lipps which our own version has taken as its starting-point. This, however, will not affect the discussion that follows here.
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Whether, now, we keep to the one or the other of the two equally valid texts of the thought, we can see that the question we asked ourselves is already decided. In this example the character of being a joke does not reside in the thought. What Heine has put into Hirsch-Hyacinth’s mouth is a correct and acute observation, an observation of unmistakable bitterness, which is understandable in a poor man faced by such great wealth; but we should not venture to describe it as in the nature of a joke. If anyone is unable in considering the translation to get away from his recollection of the shape given to the thought by the poet, and thus feels that nevertheless the thought in itself is also in the nature of a joke, we can point to a sure criterion of the joking character having been lost in the translation. Hirsch-Hyacinth’s remark made us laugh aloud, whereas its accurate translation by Lipps or our own version of it, though it may please us and make us reflect, cannot possibly raise a laugh.
But if what makes our example a joke is not anything that resides in its thought, we must look for it in the form, in the wording in which it is expressed. We have only to study the peculiarity of its form of expression to grasp what may be termed the verbal or expressive technique of this joke, something which must stand in an intimate relation with the essence of the joke, since, if it is replaced by something else, the character and effect of the joke disappear. Moreover, in attributing so much importance to the verbal form of jokes we are in complete agreement with the authorities. Thus Fischer (1889, 72) writes: ‘It is in the first place its sheer form that makes a judgement into a joke, and we are reminded of a saying of Jean Paul’s which, in a single aphorism, explains and exemplifies this precise characteristic of jokes - "Such is the victorious power of sheer position, whether among warriors or words.”’
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In what, then, does the ‘technique’ of this joke consist? What has happened to the thought, as expressed, for instance, in our version, in order to turn it into a joke that made us laugh so heartily? Two things - as we learn by comparing our version with the poet’s text. First, a considerable abbreviation has occurred. In order to express fully the thought contained in the joke, we were obliged to add to the words ‘R. treated me quite as his equal, quite familiarly’ a postscript which, reduced to its shortest terms, ran ‘that is, so far as a millionaire can’. And even so we felt the need for a further explanatory sentence.¹ The poet puts it far more shortly: ‘R. treated me quite as his equal - quite famillionairely.’ In the joke, the whole limitation added by the second sentence to the first, which reports the familiar treatment, has disappeared.
But not quite without leaving a substitute from which we can reconstruct it. For a second change has also been made. The word ‘familiär [familiarly]’ in the unjoking expression of the thought has been transformed in the text of the joke into ‘famillionär [famillionairly]’; and there can be no doubt that it is precisely on this verbal structure that the joke’s character as a joke and its power to cause a laugh depend. The newly constructed word coincides in its earlier portion with the ‘familiär’ of the first sentence, and in its final syllables with the ‘Millionär ' of the second sentence. It stands, as it were, for the ‘Millionär’ portion of the second sentence and thus for the whole second sentence, and so puts us in a position to infer the second sentence that has been omitted in the text of the joke. It can be described as a ‘composite structure’ made up of the two components ‘familiär’ and ‘Millionär’, and it is tempting to give a diagrammatic picture of the way in which it is derived from those two words:²
F A M I L I Ä R
M I L I O N Ä R
F A M I L I ON Ä R
¹ This is equally true of Lipps’s translation.
² The two words are printed one in Roman and the other in Italic type, and the syllables common to them both are printed in thick type. The second ‘l’, which is scarcely pronounced, could of course be left out of account. It seems probable that the fact of the two words having several syllables in common offered the joke-technique the occasion for constructing the composite word.
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The process which has converted the thought into a joke can then be represented in the following manner, which may at first sight seem fantastic, but nevertheless produces precisely the outcome that is really before us:
‘R. treated me quite familiär,
that is, so far as a Millionär can.’
Let us now imagine that a compressing force is brought to bear on these sentences and that for some reason the second is the less resistant one. It is thereupon made to disappear, while its most important constituent, the word ‘Millionär’, which has succeeded in rebelling against being suppressed, is, as it were, pushed up against the first sentence, and fused with the element of that sentence which is so much like it - ‘familiär’. And the chance possibility, which thus arises, of saving the essential part of the second sentence actually favours the dissolution of its other, less important, constituents. The joke is thus generated:
‘R. treated me quite famili on är.’
/ \
(mili) (är)
If we leave out of account any such compressing force, which indeed is unknown to us, the process by which the joke is formed - that is, the joke-technique - in this instance might be described as ‘condensation accompanied by the formation of a substitute’; and in the present example the formation of the substitute consists in the making of a ‘composite word’. This composite word ‘famillionär’, which is unintelligible in itself but is immediately understood in its context and recognized as being full of meaning, is the vehicle of the joke’s laughter compelling effect - the mechanism of which, however, is not made in any way clearer by our discovery of the joke-technique. In what way can a linguistic process of condensation, accompanied by the formation of a substitute by means of a composite word, give us pleasure and make us laugh? This is evidently a different problem, whose treatment we may postpone till we have found a way of approaching it. For the present we will keep to the technique of jokes.
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Our expectation that the technique of jokes cannot be a matter of indifference from the point of view of discovering their essence leads us at once to enquire whether there are other examples of jokes constructed like Heine’s ‘famillionär’. There are not very many of them, but nevertheless enough to make up a small group which are characterized by the formation of composite words. Heine himself has derived a second joke from the word ‘Millionär’ - copying from himself, as it were. In Chapter XIV of his ‘Ideen’ he speaks of a ‘Millionarr’, which is an obvious combination of ‘Millionär’ and ‘Narr’¹ and, just as in the first example, brings out a suppressed subsidiary thought.
Here are some other examples I have come upon. - There is a certain fountain [Brunnen] in Berlin, the erection of which brought the Chief Burgomaster Forckenbeck into much disfavour. The Berliners call it the ‘Forckenbecken’, and there is certainly a joke in this description, even though it was necessary to replace the word ‘Brunnen’ by its obsolete equivalent ‘Becken’ in order to combine it into a whole with the name of the Burgomaster. - The voice of Europe once made the cruel joke of changing a potentate’s name from Leopold to Cleopold, on account of the relations he had at one time with a lady with the first name of Cleo. This undoubted product of condensation keeps alive an annoying allusion at the cost of a single letter. - Proper names in general fall easy victims to this kind of treatment by the joke-technique. There were in Vienna two brothers named Salinger, one of whom was a Börsensensal. This provided a handle for calling him ‘Sensalinger’, while his brother, to distinguish him, was given the unflattering name of ‘Scheusalinger’² This was convenient, and certainly a joke; I cannot say whether it was justified. But jokes do not as a rule enquire much into that.
¹ [The German for ‘fool’.]
² [‘Scheusal’ means ‘monstrous creature’.]
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I have been told the following condensation joke. A young man who had hitherto led a gay life abroad paid a call, after a considerable absence, on a friend living here. The latter was surprised to see an Ehering [wedding-ring] on his visitor’s hand, ‘What?’ he exclaimed, ‘are you married?’ ‘Yes’, was the reply, ‘Trauring but true.’¹ The joke is an excellent one. The word ‘Trauring’ combines both components: ‘Ehering’ changed into ‘Trauring’ and the sentence ‘traurig, aber wahr [sad but true]’. The effect of the joke is not interfered with by the fact that here the composite word is not, like ‘famillionär’, an unintelligible and otherwise non-existent structure, but one which coincides entirely with one of the two elements represented.
In the course of conversation I myself once unintentionally provided the material for a joke that is once again quite analogous to ‘famillionär’. I was talking to a lady about the great services that had been rendered by a man of science who I considered had been unjustly neglected. ‘Why,’ she said, ‘the man deserves a monument.’ ‘Perhaps he will get one some day,’ I replied, ‘but momentan he has very little success.’ ‘Monument’ and ‘momentan’ are opposites. The lady proceeded to unite them: ‘Well, let us wish him a monumentan² success.’
¹ [‘Traurig’ would have meant ‘sad’. ‘Trauring’ is a synonym for ‘Ehering.’]
² [A non-existing word. ‘Monumental’ (as in English) would have been expected.]
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I owe a few examples in foreign languages, which show the same mechanism of condensation as our ‘famillionär’, to an excellent discussion of the same subject in English by A. A. Brill (1911).
The English author De Quincey, Brill tells us, somewhere remarked that old people are inclined to fall into their ‘anecdotage’. This word is a fusion of the partly overlapping words
ANECDOTE
and DOTAGE.
In an anonymous short story Brill once found the Christmas season described as ‘the alcoholidays’ - a similar fusing of
ALCOHOL
and HOLIDAYS.
After Flaubert had published his celebrated novel Salammbô, the scene of which is laid in ancient Carthage, Sainte-Beuve laughed at it, on account of its elaboration of detail, as being ‘Carthaginoiserie’;
CARTHAGINOIS
CHINOISERIE.
But the best example of a joke of this group originated from one of the leading men in Austria, who, after important scientific and public work, now fills one of the highest offices in the State. I have ventured to make use of the jokes which are ascribed to him, and all of which in fact bear the same impress, as material for these researches,¹ above all because it would have been hard to find any better.
Herr N.’s attention was drawn one day to the figure of a writer who had become well-known from a series of undeniably boring essays which he had contributed to a Vienna daily paper. All of these essays dealt with small episodes in the relations of the first Napoleon with Austria. The author had red hair. As soon as Herr N. heard his name mentioned he asked: ‘Is not that the roter Fadian² that runs through the story of the Napoleonids?’
¹ Have I the right to do so? At least I have not obtained my knowledge of these jokes through an indiscretion. They are generally known in this city (Vienna) and are to be found in everyone’s mouth. A number of them have been given publicity by Eduard Hanslick in the Neue Freie Presse and in his autobiography. As regards the others, I must offer my apologies for any possible distortions, which, in the case of oral tradition, are scarcely to be avoided.
² [‘Roter’ means ‘red’, ‘scarlet’. ‘Fadian’ means ‘dull fellow’. The termination ‘-ian’ is occasionally added to an adjective, giving the somewhat contemptuous sense of ‘fellow’. Thus ‘grob’ means ‘coarse’, ‘Grobian’ means ‘coarse fellow: ‘dumm’ means ‘stupid’, ‘Dummian’ means ‘stupid fellow’. The adjective ‘fade’ or ‘fad’ means (like its French equivalent) ‘insipid’, ‘dull’. Finally, ‘Faden’ means ‘thread’.]
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In order to discover the technique of this joke, we must apply to it the process of reduction which gets rid of the joke by changing the mode of expression and instead introducing the original complete meaning, which can be inferred with certainty from a good joke. Herr N.’s joke about the ‘roter Fadian’ proceeds from two components - a depreciatory judgement upon the writer and a recollection of the famous simile with which Goethe introduces the extracts ‘From Ottilie’s Diary’ in the Wahlverwandtschaften.¹ The ill-tempered criticism may have run: ‘So this is the person who is for ever and ever writing nothing but boring stories about Napoleon in Austria!’ Now this remark is not in the least a joke. Nor is Goethe’s pretty analogy a joke, and it is certainly not calculated to make us laugh. It is only when the two are brought into connection with each other and submitted to the peculiar process of condensation and fusion that a joke emerges - and a joke of the first order.²
¹ ‘We hear of a peculiar practice in the English Navy. Every rope in the king’s fleet, from the strongest to the weakest, is woven in such a way that a roter Faden [scarlet thread] runs through its whole length. It cannot be extracted without undoing the whole rope, and it proves that even the smallest piece is crown property. In just the same way a thread of affection and dependence runs through Ottilie’s diary, binding it all together and characterizing the whole of it.’ Goethe, Sophienausgabe, 20, 212.)
² I need hardly point out how little this observation, which can invariably be made, fits in with the assertion that a joke is a playful judgement.
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The linking of the disparaging judgement upon the boring historian with the pretty analogy in the Wahlverwandtschaften must have taken place (for reasons which I cannot yet make intelligible) in a less simple manner than in many similar cases. I shall try to represent what was probably the actual course of events by the following construction. First, the element of the constant recurrence of the same theme in the stories may have awoken a faint recollection in Herr N. of the familiar passage in the Wahlverwandtschaften, which is as a rule wrongly quoted: ‘it runs like a roter Faden [scarlet thread].’ The ‘roter Faden’ of the analogy now exercised a modifying influence of the expression of the first sentence, as a result of the chance circumstance that the person insulted was also rot [red] - that is to say had red hair. It may then have run: ‘So it is that red person who writes the boring stories about Napoleon!’ And now the process began which brought about the condensation of the two pieces. Under its pressure, which had found its first fulcrum in the sameness of the element ‘rot’, the ‘boring’ was assimilated to the ‘Faden [thread]’ and was changed into ‘fad [dull]’; after this the two components were able to fuse together into the actual text of the joke, in which, in this case, the quotation has an almost greater share than the derogatory judgement, which was undoubtedly present alone to begin with.
‘So it is that red person who writes this fade stuff about N[apoleon].
The red Faden that runs through everything.’
—————————————————————————————————-
‘Is not that the red Fadian that runs through the story of the N[apoleonids]?’
In a later chapter I shall add a justification, but also a correction, to this account, when I come to analyse this joke from points of view other than purely formal ones. But whatever else about it may be in doubt, there can be no question that a condensation has taken place. The result of the condensation is, on the one hand, once again a considerable abbreviation; but on the other hand, instead of the formation of a striking composite word, there is an interpenetration of the constituents of the two components. It is true that ‘roter Faden’ would be capable of existing as a mere term of abuse; but in our instance it is certainly a product of condensation.
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If at this point a reader should become indignant at a method of approach which threatens to ruin his enjoyment of jokes without being able to throw any light on the source of that enjoyment, I would beg him to be patient for the moment. At present we are only dealing with the technique of jokes; and the investigation even of this promises results, if we pursue it sufficiently far.
The analysis of the last example has prepared us to find that, if we meet with the process of condensation in still other examples, the substitute for what is suppressed may be not a composite structure, but some other alteration of the form of expression. We can learn what this other form of substitute may be from another of Herr N.’s jokes.
‘I drove with him tête-à-bête.’ Nothing can be easier than the reduction of this joke. Clearly it can only mean: ‘I drove with X tête-à-tête, and X is a stupid ass.’
Neither of these sentences is a joke. They could be put together: ‘I drove with that stupid ass X tête-à-tête’, and that is not a joke either. The joke only arises if the ‘stupid ass’ is left out, and, as a substitute for it, the ‘t’ in one ‘tête’ is turned into a ‘b’. With this slight modification the suppressed ‘ass’ has nevertheless once more found expression. The technique of this group of jokes can be described as ‘condensation accompanied by slight modification’, and it may be suspected that the slighter the modification the better will be the joke.
The technique of another joke is similar, though not without its complication. In the course of a conversation about someone in whom there was much to praise, but much to find fault with, Herr N. remarked: ‘Yes, vanity is one of his four Achilles heels.’¹ In this case the slight modification consists in the fact that, instead of the one Achilles heel which the hero himself must have possessed, four are here in question. Four heels - but only an ass has four heels. Thus the two thoughts that are condensed in the joke ran: ‘Apart from his vanity, Y is an eminent man; all the same I don’t like him - he’s an ass rather than a man.’²
¹ [Footnote added 1912:] It seems that this joke was applied earlier by Heine to Alfred de Musset.
² One of the complications in the technique of this example lies in the fact that the modification by which the omitted insult is replaced must be described as an allusion to the latter, since it only leads to it by a process of inference. For another factor that complicates the technique here, see below.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1632
I happened to hear another similar, but much simpler, joke in statu nascendi in a family circle. Of two brothers at school, one was an excellent and the other a most indifferent scholar. Now it happened once that the exemplary boy too came to grief at school; and their mother referred to this while expressing her concern that it might mean the beginning of a lasting deterioration. The boy who had hitherto been overshadowed by his brother readily grasped the opportunity. ‘Yes’, he said, ‘Karl’s going backwards on all fours.’
The modification here consists in a short addition to the assurance that he too was of the opinion that the other boy was going backwards. But this modification represented and replaced a passionate plea on his own behalf: ‘You mustn’t think he’s so much cleverer than I am simply because he’s more successful at school. After all he’s only a stupid ass - that’s to say, much stupider than I am.’
Another, very well-known joke of Herr N.’s offers a neat example of condensation with slight modification. He remarked of a personage in public life: ‘he has a great future behind him.’ The man to whom this joke referred was comparatively young, and he had seemed destined by his birth, education and personal qualities to succeed in the future to the leadership of a great political party and to enter the government at its head. But times changed; the party became inadmissible as a government, and it could be foreseen that the man who had been predestined to be its leader would come to nothing as well. The shortest reduced version by which this joke could be replaced would run: ‘The man has had a great future before him, but he has it no longer.’ Instead of the ‘had’ and the second clause, there was merely the small change made in the principal clause of replacing ‘before’ by its contrary, ‘behind’.¹
¹ There is another factor operating in the technique of this joke which I reserve for later discussion. It concerns the actual nature of the modification (representation by the opposite or by something absurd). There is nothing to prevent the joke-technique from simultaneously employing several methods; but these we can only get to know one by one.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1633
Herr N. made use of almost the same modification in the case of a gentleman who became Minister for Agriculture with the sole qualification of being himself a farmer. Public opinion had occasion to recognize that he was the least gifted holder of the office that there had ever been. When he had resigned his office and retired to his farming interests, Herr N. said of him, ‘Like Cincinnatus, he has gone back to his place before the plough.’
The Roman, however, who had also been called away to office from the plough, returned to his place behind the plough. What went before the plough, both then and to-day, was only - an ox.¹
Karl Kraus was responsible for another successful condensation with slight modification. He wrote of a certain yellow-press journalist that he had travelled to one of the Balkan States by ‘Orienterpresszug’.² There is no doubt that this word combines two others: ‘Orientexpresszug [Orient Express]’ and ‘Erpressung [blackmail]’. Owing to the context, the element ‘Erpressung’ emerges only as a modification of the ‘Orientexpresszug’ - a word called for by the verb [‘travelled’]. This joke, which presents itself in the guise of a misprint, has yet another claim on our interest.
This series of examples could easily be further increased; but I do not think we require any fresh instances to enable us to grasp clearly the characteristics of the technique in this second group - condensation with modification. If we compare the second group with the first, whose technique consisted in condensation with the formation of composite words, we shall easily see that the difference between them is not an essential one and that the transitions between them are fluid. Both the formation of composite words and modification can be subsumed under the concept of the formation of substitutes; and, if we care to, we can also describe the formation of a composite word as a modification of the basic word by a second element.
¹ [‘Ochs’ in German has much the same meaning as ‘ass’ in English.]
² [A non-existent word.]
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1634
But here we may make a first stop and ask ourselves with what factor known to us from the literature of the subject this first finding of ours coincides, wholly or in part. Evidently with the factor of brevity, which Jean Paul describes as ‘the soul of wit’ (p. 1619 above). But brevity does not in itself constitute a joke, or otherwise every laconic remark would be one. The joke’s brevity must be of a particular kind. It will be recalled that Lipps has tried to describe this particular brevity of jokes more precisely (p. 1619). Here our investigation contributes something and shows that the brevity of jokes is often the outcome of a particular process which has left behind in the wording of the joke a second trace - the formation of a substitute. By making use of the procedure of reduction, which seeks to undo the peculiar process of condensation, we also find, however, that the joke depends entirely on its verbal expression as established by the process of condensation. Our whole interest now turns, of course, to this strange process, which has hitherto scarcely been examined. Nor can we in the least understand how all that is valuable in a joke, the yield of pleasure that the joke brings us, can originate from that process.
Are processes similar to those which we have described here as the technique of jokes known already in any other field of mental events? They are - in a single field, and an apparently very remote one. In 1900 I published a book which, as its title (The Interpretation of Dreams) indicates, attempted to throw light on what is puzzling in dreams and to establish them as derivatives of our normal mental functioning. I found occasion there to contrast the manifest, and often strange, content of the dream with the latent, but perfectly logical, dream-thoughts from which the dream is derived; and I entered into an investigation of the processes which make the dream out of the latent dream-thoughts, as well as of the psychical forces which are involved in that transformation. To the totality of these transforming processes I gave the name of the ‘dream-work’; and I have described as a part of this dream-work a process of condensation which shows the greatest similarity to the one found in the technique of jokes - which, like it, leads to abbreviation, and creates substitute-formations of the same character. Everyone will be familiar, from a recollection of his own dreams, with the composite structures both of people and of things which emerge in dreams. Indeed, dreams even construct them out of words, and they can then be dissected in analysis. (For instance, ‘Autodidasker’ = ‘Autodidakt’ + ‘Lasker’.) On other occasions - much more often, in fact - what the work of condensation in dreams produces is not composite structures but pictures which exactly resemble one thing or one person except for an addition or alteration derived from another source - modifications, that is, just like those in Herr N.’s jokes. We cannot doubt that in both cases we are faced by the same psychical process, which we may recognize from its identical results. Such a far-reaching analogy between the technique of jokes and the dream-work will undoubtedly increase our interest in the former and raise an expectation in us that a comparison between jokes and dreams may help to throw light on jokes. But we will refrain from entering upon this task, for we must reflect that so far we have investigated the technique of only a very small number of jokes, so that we cannot tell whether the analogy by which we are proposing to be guided will in fact hold good. We will therefore turn away from the comparison with dreams and go back to the technique of jokes, though at this point we shall, as it were, be leaving a loose end to our enquiry, which at some later stage we may perhaps pick up once more.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1635
The first thing that we want to learn is whether the process of condensation with substitute-formation is to be discovered in every joke, and can therefore be regarded as a universal characteristic of the technique of jokes.
Here I recall a joke which has remained in my memory owing to the special circumstances in which I heard it. One of the great teachers of my young days, whom we thought incapable of appreciating a joke and from whom we had never heard a joke of his own, came into the Institute one day laughing, and, more readily than usual, explained to us what it was that had caused his cheerful mood. ‘I have just read an excellent joke’, he said. ‘A young man was introduced into a Paris salon, who was a relative of the great Jean-Jacques Rousseau and bore his name. Moreover he was red-haired. But he behaved so awkwardly that the hostess remarked critically to the gentleman who had introduced him: "Vous m’avez fait connaître un jeune homme roux et sot, mais non pas un Rousseau."'¹ And he laughed again.
By the nomenclature of the authorities this would be classed as a ‘Klangwitz’,² and one of an inferior sort, with a play upon a proper name - not unlike the joke, for instance, in the Capuchin monk’s sermon in Wallensteins Lager, which, as is well known, is modelled on the style of Abraham a Santa Clara:
Lässt sich nennen den Wallenstein,
ja freilich ist er uns allen ein Stein
des Anstosses und Ärgernisses.³
But what is the technique of this joke? We see at once that the characteristic that we may have hoped to be able to prove was a universal one is absent on the very first fresh occasion. There is no omission here, and scarcely an abbreviation. The lady herself says straight out in the joke almost everything that we can attribute to her thoughts. ‘You had raised my expectations about a relative of Jean-Jacques Rousseau - perhaps a spiritual relative - and here he is: a red-haired silly young man, a roux et sot.’ It is true that I have been able to make an interpolation; but this attempt at a reduction has not got rid of the joke. It remains, and is attached to the identity of sound of the words
ROSSEAU
—————
ROUX SOT
It thus proved that condensation with substitute-formation has no share in the production of this joke.
¹ [‘You have made me acquainted with a young man who is roux (red-haired) and sot (silly), but not a Rousseau.’ ‘Roux-sot’ would be pronounced exactly like ‘Rousseau’.]
² [‘Sound-joke.’]
³ [Literally: ‘He gets himself called Wallenstein, and indeed he is for allen (all) of us a Stein (stone) of offence and trouble.’] - Nevertheless, as a result of another factor, this joke deserves to be more highly thought of. But this can only be indicated later on.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1636
What besides? Fresh attempts at reduction can teach me that the joke remains resistant until the name ‘Rousseau’ is replaced by another. If, for instance, I put ‘Racine’ instead of it, the lady’s criticism, which remains just as possible as before, loses every trace of being a joke. I now know where I have to look for the technique of this joke, though I may still hesitate over formulating it. I will try this: the technique of the joke lies in the fact that one and the same word - the name - appears in it used in two ways, once as a whole, and again cut up into its separate syllables like a charade.
I can bring up a few examples which have an identical technique.
An Italian lady is said to have revenged herself for a tactless remark of the first Napoleon’s with a joke having this same technique of the double use of a word. At a court ball, he said to her, pointing to her fellow countrymen: ‘Tutti gli Italiani danzano si male.’ To which she made the quick repartee: ‘Non tutti, ma buona parte.’¹ (Brill, 1911.)
Once when the Antigone was produced in Berlin, the critics complained that the production was lacking in the proper character of antiquity. Berlin wit made the criticism its own in the following words: ‘Antik? Oh, nee.’² (Vischer, 1846-57, 1, 429, and Fischer, 1889.)
An analogous dividing-up joke is at home in medical circles. If one enquires from a youthful patient whether he has ever had anything to do with masturbation, the answer is sure to be: ‘O na, nie!’³
¹ [‘All Italians dance so badly!’ ‘Not all, but buona parte (a good part)' - the original, Italian version of Napoleon’s surname.]
² [‘Antique? Oh, no.’ The words, in Berlin dialect, approximate in pronunciation to ‘Antigone’.]
³ [‘Oh, no, never!’ ‘Onanie (onanism)' is the common German word for ‘masturbation’.]
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1637
In all three of these examples, which should suffice for this species, we see the same joke-technique: in each of them a name is used twice, once as a whole and again divided up into its separate syllables, which, when they are thus separated, give another sense.¹
The multiple use of the same word, once as a whole and again in the syllables into which it falls, is the first instance we have come across of a technique differing from that of condensation. But the profusion of examples that have met us must convince us after a little reflection that the newly-discovered technique can scarcely be limited to this one method. There are a number of possible ways - how many it is as yet quite impossible to guess - in which the same word or the same verbal material can be put to multiple uses in one sentence. Are all these possibilities to be regarded as technical methods of making jokes? It seems to be so. And the examples of jokes which follow will prove it.
¹ The goodness of these jokes depends on the fact that another technical method of a far higher order is simultaneously brought into use (see below). - At this point I may also draw attention to a connection between jokes and riddles. The philosopher Brentano composed a kind of riddle in which a small number of syllables had to be guessed which when they were put together into words gave a different sense according as they were grouped in one way or another. For instance: ‘. . . liess mich das Platanenblatt ahnen’ [‘the plane-tree leaf (Platanenblatt) led me to think (ahnen)', where ‘Platanen’ and ‘blatt ahnen’ sound almost the same]. Or: ‘wie du dem Inder hast verschrieben, in der Hast verschrieben’ [‘when you wrote a prescription for the Indian, in your haste you made a slip of the pen’, where ‘Inder hast (have to the Indian)' and ‘in der hast (in your haste)' sound the same.]
The syllables to be guessed were inserted into the appropriate place in the sentence under the disguise of the repeated sound ‘dal’. [Thus the English example would be stated: ‘he said he would daldaldaldal daldaldaldal.’] A colleague of the philosopher’s took a witty revenge on him when he heard of the elderly man’s engagement. He asked: ‘Daldaldal daldaldal?’ - ‘Brentano brennt-a-no?’ [‘Brentano - does he still burn?’]
What is the difference between these daldal riddles and the jokes in the text above? In the former the technique is given as a precondition and the wording has to be guessed; while in the jokes the wording is given and the technique is disguised.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1638
In the first place, one can take the same verbal material and merely make some alteration in its arrangement. The slighter the alteration - the more one has the impression of something different being said in the same words - the better is the joke technically.
‘Mr. and Mrs. X live in fairly grand style. Some people think that the husband has earned a lot and so has been able to lay by a bit [sich etwas zurückgelegt]; others again think that the wife has lain back a bit [sich etwas zurückgelegt] and so has been able to earn a lot.’¹
A really diabolically ingenious joke! And achieved with such an economy of means! ‘Earned a lot - lay by a bit [sich etwas zurückgelegt]; lain back a bit [sich etwas zurückgelegt] - earned a lot.’ It is merely the inversion of these two phrases that distinguishes what is said about the husband from what is hinted about the wife. Here again, by the way, this is not the whole technique of the joke.²
A wide field of play lies open to the technique of jokes if we extend the ‘multiple use of the same material’ to cover cases in which the word (or words) in which the joke resides may occur once unaltered but the second time with a slight modification. Here, for instance, is another of Herr N.’s jokes:
He heard a gentleman who was himself born a Jew make a spiteful remark about the Jewish character. ‘Herr Hofrat’, he said, ‘your antesemitism was well-known to me; your anti-semitism is new to me.’
Here only a single letter is altered, whose modification could scarcely be noticed in careless speech. The example reminds us of Herr N.’s other modification jokes (on p. 1631 ff.), but the difference is that here there is no condensation; everything that has to be said is said in the joke itself: ‘I know that earlier you were yourself a Jew; so I am surprised that you should speak ill of Jews.’
¹ Daniel Spitzer, 1912, 1, 280.
² [Footnote added 1912:] This is also true of the excellent joke reported by Brill from Oliver Wendell Holmes: ‘Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.’ Here there is promise of an antithesis but it does not materialize. The second part of the sentence cancels the antithesis. Incidentally, this is a good instance of the untranslatability of jokes with this technique.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1639
An admirable example of a modification joke of this kind is the well-known cry: ‘Traduttore - Traditore!’¹ The similarity, amounting almost to identity, of the two words represents most impressively the necessity which forces a translator into crimes against his original.²
The variety of possible slight modifications in such jokes is so great that none of them exactly resembles another.
Here is a joke that is said to have been made during an examination in jurisprudence. The candidate had to translate a passage in the Corpus Juris: ‘"Labeo ait" . . . I fall, says he.’ ‘You fail, say I’, replied the examiner, and the examination was at an end. Anyone who mistakes the name of the great jurist for a verbal form, and moreover one wrongly recalled, no doubt deserves nothing better. But the technique of the joke lies in the fact that almost the same words which proved the ignorance of the candidate were used to pronounce his punishment by the examiner. The joke is, moreover, an example of ‘ready repartee’, the technique of which, as we shall see, does not differ greatly from what we are illustrating here.
Words are a plastic material with which one can do all kinds of things. There are words which, when used in certain connections, have lost their original full meaning, but which regain it in other connections. A joke of Lichtenberg’s carefully singles out circumstances in which the watered-down words are bound to regain their full meaning:
‘"How are you getting along?"³ the blind man asked the lame man. "As you see", the lame man replied to the blind man.’
There are, too, words in German that can be taken, according as they are ‘full’ or ‘empty’, in a different sense, and, indeed, in more than one. For there can be two different derivatives from the same stem, one of which has developed into a word with a full meaning and the other into a watered-down final syllable or suffix, both of which, however, are pronounced exactly the same. The identity of sound between a full word and a watered-down syllable may also be a chance one. In both cases the joke-technique can take advantage of the conditions thus prevailing in the linguistic material.
¹ [‘Translator - traitor!’]
² [Footnote added 1912:] Brill quotes a quite analogous modification joke: Amantes amentes (lovers are fools).
³ [‘Wie geht’s?’ Literally, ‘how do you walk?’]
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1640
A joke, for instance, which is attributed to Schleiermacher, is of importance to us as being an almost pure example of these technical methods: ‘Eifersucht [jealousy] is a Leidenschaft [passion] which mit Eifer sucht [with eagerness seeks] what Leiden schafft [causes pain].’
This is undeniably in the nature of a joke, though not particularly effective as one. A quantity of factors are absent here which might mislead us in analysing other jokes so long as we examined each of those factors separately. The thought expressed in the wording is worthless; the definition it gives of jealousy is in any case thoroughly unsatisfactory. There is not a trace of ‘sense in nonsense’, of ‘hidden meaning’ or of ‘bewilderment and illumination’. No efforts will reveal a ‘contrast of ideas’: a contrast between the words and what they mean can be found only with great difficulty. There is no sign of abbreviation; on the contrary, the wording gives an impression of prolixity. And yet it is a joke, and even a very perfect one. At the same time, its only striking characteristic is the one in the absence of which the joke disappears: the fact that here the same words are put to multiple uses. We can then choose whether to include this joke in the sub-class of those in which words are used first as a whole and then divided up (e.g. Rousseau or Antigone) or in the other sub-class in which the multiplicity is produced by the full or the watered-down meaning of the verbal constituents. Apart from this, only one other factor deserves notice from the point of view of the technique of jokes. We find here an unusual state of things established: a kind of ‘unification’ has taken place, since ‘Eifersucht [jealousy]’ is defined by means of its own name - by means of itself, as it were. This, as we shall see, is also a technique of jokes. These two factors, therefore, must in themselves be sufficient to give a remark the character of a joke.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1641
If now we enter still further into the variety of forms of the ‘multiple use’ of the same word, we suddenly notice that we have before us examples of ‘double meaning’ or ‘play upon words’ - forms which have long been generally known and recognized as a technique of jokes. Why have we taken the trouble to discover afresh what we might have gathered from the most superficial essay on jokes? To begin with, we can only plead in our own justification that we have nevertheless brought out another aspect of the same phenomenon of linguistic expression. What is supposed by the authorities to show the character of jokes as a kind of ‘play’ has been classified by us under the heading of ‘multiple use’.
The further cases of multiple use, which can also be brought together under the title of ‘double meaning’ as a new, third group, can easily be divided into sub-classes, which, it is true, cannot be separated from one another by essential distinctions any more than can the third group as a whole from the second. We find:
(a) Cases of the double meaning of a name and of a thing denoted by it. For instance: ‘Discharge thyself of our company, Pistol!‘ (Shakespeare.)
‘More Hof than Freiung ' said a witty Viennese about a number of pretty girls who had been admired for many years but had never found a husband. ‘Hof’ and ‘Freiung’ are the names of two neighbouring squares in the centre of Vienna.
‘Vile Macbeth does not rule here in Hamburg: the ruler here is Banko.’ (Heine.)
Where the name cannot be used (we should perhaps say ‘misused’) unaltered, a double meaning can be got out of it by one of the slight modifications we are familiar with:
‘Why’, it was asked, in times that are now past, ‘have the French rejected Lohengrin?’ ‘On Elsa’s (Elsass [Alsace]) account.’
(b) Double meaning arising from the literal and metaphorical meanings of a word. This is one of the most fertile sources for the technique of jokes. I will quote only one example:
A medical friend well-known for his jokes once said to Arthur Schnitzler the dramatist: ‘I’m not surprised that you’ve become a great writer. After all your father held a mirror up to his contemporaries.’ The mirror which was handled by the dramatist’s father, the famous Dr. Schnitzler, was the laryngoscope. A well-known remark of Hamlet’s tells us that the purpose of a play, and so also of the dramatist who creates it, is ‘to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.’ (III, 2.)
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1642
(c) Double meaning proper, or play upon words. This may be described as the ideal case of ‘multiple use’. Here no violence is done to the word; it is not cut up into its separate syllables, it does not need to be subjected to any modification, it does not have to be transferred from the sphere it belongs to (the sphere of proper names, for instance) to another one. Exactly as it is and as it stands in the sentence, it is able, thanks to certain favourable circumstances, to express two different meanings.
Examples of this are at our disposal in plenty:
One of Napoleon III’s first acts when he assumed power was to seize the property of the House of Orleans. This excellent play upon words was current at the time: ‘C’est le premier vol de l’aigle.’ [‘It is the eagle’s first vol.’] ‘Vol’ means ‘flight’ but also ‘theft’. (Quoted by Fischer, 1889.)
Louis XV wanted to test the wit of one of his courtiers, of whose talent he had been told. At the first opportunity he commanded the gentleman to make a joke of which he, the king, should be the ‘sujet '. The courtier at once made the clever reply: ‘Le roi n’est pas sujet.’ [‘The King is not a subject.’]
A doctor, as he came away from a lady’s bedside, said to her husband with a shake of his head: ‘I don’t like her looks.’ ‘I’ve not liked her looks for a long time’, the husband hastened to agree.
The doctor was of course referring to the lady’s condition; but he expressed his anxiety about the patient in words which the husband could interpret as a confirmation of his own marital aversion.
Heine said of a satirical comedy: ‘This satire would not have been so biting if its author had had more to bite.’ This joke is more an example of metaphorical and literal double meaning than of a play upon words proper. But what is to be gained by drawing a sharp distinction here?
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1643
Another good example of play upon words is told by the authorities (Heymans and Lipps) in a form which makes it unintelligible. Not long ago I came upon the correct version and setting of the anecdote in a collection of jokes which has not proved of much use apart from this.¹
‘One day Saphir and Rothschild met each other. After they had chatted for a little while, Saphir said: "Listen, Rothschild, my funds have got low, you might lend me a hundred ducats." "Oh well!", said Rothschild, "that’ll suit me all right - but only on condition that you make a joke." "That’ll suit me all right too", replied Saphir. "Good. Then come to my office tomorrow." Saphir appeared punctually. "Ah!", said Rothschild, when he saw him come in, "Sie kommen um Ihre 100 Dukaten." "No", answered Saphir, "Sie kommen um Ihre 100 Dukaten because I shan’t dream of paying you back before the Day of Judgement.’²
¹ Hermann, 1904.
² [‘Sie kommen um . . .’ may mean equally ‘You are coming about’ or ‘You are losing’.] -’"Saphir", so Heymans tells us, "was asked by a rich creditor whom he had come to visit: ‘Sie kommen wohl um die 300 Gulden? [No doubt you’ve come about the 300 florins?]’ and he replied: ‘Nein, Sie kommen um die 300 Gulden [No, you’re going to lose the 300 florins].’ In giving this answer he was expressing his meaning in a perfectly correct and by no means unusual form." That is in fact the case. Saphir’s answer, considered in itself, is in perfect order. We understand, too, what he means to say - namely that he has no intention of paying his debt. Rut Saphir makes use of the same words that had previously been used by his creditor. We therefore cannot avoid also taking them in the sense in which they had been used by the latter. And in that case Saphir’s answer no longer has any meaning whatever. The creditor is not "coming" at all. Nor can he be coming "about the 300 florins" - that is, he cannot be coming to bring 300 florins. Moreover, as a creditor, it is not his business to bring but to demand. Since Saphir’s words are in this way recognized as being at once sense and nonsense, a comic situation arises.’ (Lipps, 1898, 97.)
The version which I have given in full in the text above for the sake of clarity shows that the technique of the joke is far simpler than Lipps supposes. Saphir does not come to bring the 300 florins but to fetch them from the rich man. Accordingly the discussions of ‘sense and nonsense’ in this joke become irrelevant.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1644
‘What do these statues vorstellen [represent or put forward]?’ asked a stranger to Berlin of a native Berliner, looking at a row of monuments in a public square. ‘Oh, well,’ was the reply: ‘either their right leg or their left leg.’
‘At this moment I cannot recall all the students’ names, and of the professors there are some who still have no name at all.’ (Heine, Harzreise.)
We shall be giving ourselves practice, perhaps, in diagnostic differentiation if at this point we insert another well-known joke about professors. ’The distinction between Professors Ordinary [ordentlich] and Professors Extraordinary [ausserordentlich] is that the ordinary ones do nothing extraordinary and the extraordinary ones do nothing properly [ordentlich].’ This, of course, is a play on the two meanings of the words ‘ordentlich’ and ‘ausserordentlich’: viz. on the one hand ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the ‘ordo (the Establishment)' and on the other hand ‘efficient’ and ‘outstanding’. But the conformity between this joke and some others we have already met reminds us that here the ‘multiple use’ is far more noticeable than the ‘double meaning’. All through the sentence we hear nothing but a constantly recurring ‘ordentlich’, sometimes in that form and sometimes modified in a negative sense. (Cf. p. 1639.) Moreover, the feat is again achieved here of defining a concept by means of its own wording (cf. the example of ‘Eifersucht’, p. 1640), or, more precisely, of defining (even if only negatively) two correlative concepts by means of one another, which produces an ingenious interlacement. Finally, the aspect of ‘unification’ can also be stressed here - the eliciting of a more intimate connection between the elements of the statement than one would have had a right to expect from their nature.
‘The beadle¹ Sch[äfer] greeted me quite as a colleague, for he too is a writer, and has often mentioned me in his half-yearly writings; and apart from that, he has often cited ²) me, and if he did not find me at home he was always kind enough to write the citation in chalk on my study door.’ (Heine, Harzreise.)
¹ [A university officer (at Göttingen) in charge of undergraduate discipline.]
² [For breaches of discipline.]
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1645
Daniel Spitzer, in Wiener Spaziergänge, produced a laconic biographical description, which is certainly also a good joke, of a social type which flourished at the time of the outbreak of speculation: ‘Iron front - iron cash-box - Iron Crown.’ (This last was an order which carried noble rank with it.) A striking example of ‘unification’ - everything, as it were, made of iron! The various, but not very markedly contrasting, meanings of the epithet ‘iron’ make these ‘multiple uses’ possible.
Another example of a play upon words may make the transition to a fresh sub-species of the technique of double meaning easier. The joking medical colleague already mentioned above (on p. 1640) was responsible for this joke at the time of the Dreyfus case: ‘This girl reminds me of Dreyfus. The army doesn’t believe in her innocence.’
The word ‘innocence’, on the double meaning of which the joke is constructed, has in the one context its usual meaning, with ‘fault’ or ‘crime’ as its opposite; but in the other context it has a sexual meaning, of which the opposite is ‘sexual experience’. Now there are a very large number of similar examples of double meaning, in all of which the effect of the joke depends quite specially on the sexual meaning. For this group we may reserve the name of ‘double entendre [Zweideutigkeit]’.
An excellent example of a double entendre of this kind is Spitzer’s joke which has already been recorded on p. 1639: ‘Some people think that the husband has earned a lot and so has been able to lay by a bit [sich etwas zurückgelegt]; others again think that the wife has lain back a bit [sich etwas zurückgelegt] and so has been able to earn a lot.’
But if we compare this example of double meaning accompanied by double entendre with other examples, a distinction becomes evident which is not without its interest from the point of view of technique. In the ‘innocence’ joke, the one meaning of the word was just as obvious as the other; it would really be hard to decide whether its sexual or non-sexual meaning was the more usual and familiar. But it is otherwise with Spitzer’: example. In this the commonplace meaning of the words ‘sich etwas zurückgelegt’ is by far the more prominent, whereas their sexual meaning is, as it were, covered and hidden and might even escape the notice of an unsuspecting person altogether. By way of a sharp contrast let us take another example of double meaning, in which no attempt is made at thus concealing the sexual meaning: for instance, Heine’s description of the character of a complaisant lady: ‘She could abschlagen¹ nothing except her own water.’ This sounds like a piece of obscenity and hardly gives the impression of a joke.² This peculiarity, however, where in a case of double meaning the two meanings are not equally obvious, can also occur in jokes with no sexual reference - whether because one meaning is more usual than the other or because it is brought to the front by a connection with the other parts of the sentence. (Cf., for instance, ‘C’est le premier vol de l’aigle’.) I propose to describe all these as ‘double meaning with an allusion.’
¹ [‘To refuse’; vulgarly ‘to urinate’.]
² Cf. on this Fischer (1889, 86). He gives the name of ‘Zweideutigkeit’, which I have applied differently in the text, to jokes with a double meaning in which the two meanings are not equally prominent but in which one lies behind the other. Nomenclature of this kind is a matter of convention; linguistic usage has arrived at no firm decision.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1646
We have already made the acquaintance of such a large number of different joke-techniques that I fear there is some danger of losing our grasp of them. Let us therefore try to summarize them:
I. Condensation:
(a) with formation of composite word,
(b) with modification.
II. Multiple use of the same material:
(c) as a whole and in parts,
(d) in a different order,
(e) with slight modification,
(f) of the same words full and empty.
III. Double meaning:
(g) Meaning as a name and as a thing,
(h) metaphorical and literal meanings,
(i) double meaning proper (play upon words),
(j) double entendre,
(k) double meaning with an allusion.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1647
This variety and number of techniques has a confusing effect. It might make us feel annoyed at having devoted ourselves to a consideration of the technical methods of jokes, and might make us suspect that after all we have exaggerated their importance as a means for discovering the essential nature of jokes. If only this convenient suspicion were not contradicted by the one incontestable fact that the joke invariably disappears as soon as we eliminate the operation of these techniques from its form of expression! So, in spite of everything, we are led to look for the unity in this multiplicity. It ought to be possible to bring all these techniques under a single heading. As we have already said, it is not difficult to unite the second and third groups. Double meaning (play upon words) is indeed only the ideal case of the multiple use of the same material. Of these the latter is evidently the more inclusive concept. The examples of dividing up, of re-arrangement of the same material and of multiple use with slight modification (c, d and e) might - though only with some difficulty - be brought under the concept of double meaning. But what is there in common between the technique of the first group (condensation with substitute formation) and that of the two others (multiple use of the same material)?
Well, something very simple and obvious, I should have thought. The multiple use of the same material is, after all, only a special case of condensation; play upon words is nothing other than a condensation without substitute-formation; condensation remains the wider category. All these techniques are dominated by a tendency to compression, or rather to saving. It all seems to be a question of economy. In Hamlet’s words: ‘Thrift, thrift, Horatio!’
Let us test this economy on the different examples. ‘C’est le premier vol de l’aigle.’ It is the eagle’s first flight. Yes, but it is a thieving flight. Luckily for the existence of this joke, ‘vol ' means not only ‘flight’ but ‘theft’ as well. Has no condensation and economy been made? Most certainly. There has been a saving of the whole of the second thought and it has been dropped without leaving a substitute. The double meaning of the word ‘vol ' has made such a substitute unnecessary; or it would be equally true to say that the word ‘vol ' contains the substitute for the suppressed thought without any addition of change having to be made to the first one. That is the advantage of a double meaning.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1648
Another example: ‘Iron front - iron cash-box - Iron Crown’. What an extraordinary saving compared with an expression of the same thought in which ‘iron’ finds no place: ‘With the help of the necessary boldness and lack of conscience it is not difficult to amass a large fortune, and for such services a title will of course be a suitable reward.’
Condensation, and therefore economy, is indeed quite unmistakably present in these examples. But it should be present in every example. Where is the economy hidden in such jokes as ‘Rousseau - roux et sot’ or ‘Antigone - antik? oh nee’, in which we first noticed the absence of condensation and which were our principal motive for putting forward the technique of the repeated use of the same material? It is true that here we should not find that condensation would meet the case; but if instead of it we take the more inclusive concept of economy, we can manage without difficulty. It is easy to point out what we save in the case of Rousseau, Antigone, etc. We save having to express a criticism or give shape to a judgement; both are already there in the name itself. In the example of ‘Leidenschaft - Eifersucht [passion-jealousy]’ we save ourselves the trouble of laboriously constructing a definition: ‘Eifersucht, Leidenschaft - ‘Eifer sucht [‘eagerness seeks’], ‘Leidenschafft’ [‘causes pain’]. We have only to add the linking words and there we have our definition ready made. The case is similar in all the other examples that have so far been analysed. Where there is least saving, as in Saphir’s play upon words ‘Sie kommen um Ihre 100 Dukaten’, there is at any rate a saving of the necessity for framing a new wording for the reply; the wording of the question is sufficient for the answer. The saving is not much, but in it the joke lies. The multiple use of the same words for question and answer is certainly an ‘economy’. Like Hamlet’s view of the rapid sequence of his father’s death and his mother’s marriage:
The funeral baked-meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1649
But before we accept the ‘tendency to economy’ as the most general characteristic of the technique of jokes and ask such questions as where it comes from, what it signifies and how the joke’s yield of pleasure arises from it, we must find space for a doubt which has a right to be heard. It may be that every joke technique shows the tendency to save something in expression: but the relation is not reversible. Not every economy of expression, not every abbreviation, is on that account a joke as well. We reached this point once before, when we were still hoping to find the process of condensation in every joke, and raised the justifiable objection that a laconic remark is not enough to constitute a joke. There must therefore be some peculiar kind of abbreviation and economy on which the characteristic of being a joke depends; and until we know the nature of that peculiarity our discovery of the common element in the techniques of jokes brings us no nearer to a solution of our problem. And let us, further, have the courage to admit that the economies made by the joke-technique do not greatly impress us. They may remind us, perhaps, of the way in which some housewives economize when they spend time and money on a journey to a distant market because vegetables are to be had there a few farthings cheaper. What does a joke save by its technique? The putting together of a few new words, which would mostly have emerged without any trouble. Instead of that, it has to take the trouble to search out the one word which covers the two thoughts. Indeed, it must often first transform one of the thoughts into an unusual form which will provide a basis for its combination with the second thought. Would it not have been simpler, easier, and, in fact, more economical to have expressed the two thoughts as they happened to come, even if this involved no common form of expression? Is not the economy in words uttered more than balanced by the expenditure on intellectual effort? And who saves by that? Who gains by it?
We can evade these doubts provisionally if we transpose them to another place. Have we really already discovered all the kinds of joke-technique? It will certainly be more prudent to collect fresh examples and subject them to analysis.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1650
We have in fact not yet considered a large - perhaps the most numerous - group of jokes, influenced, perhaps, by the contempt with which they are regarded. They are the kind which are generally known as ‘Kalauer’ (‘calembourgs’) [‘puns’] and which pass as the lowest form of verbal joke, probably because they are the ‘cheapest’ - can be made with the least trouble. And they do in fact make the least demand on the technique of expression, just as the play upon words proper makes the highest. While in the latter the two meanings should find their expression in identically the same word, which on that account is usually said only once, it is enough for a pun if the two words expressing the two meanings recall each other by some vague similarity, whether they have a general similarity of structure or a rhyming assonance, or whether they share the same first few letters, and so on. A quantity of examples like this of what are not very appropriately described as ‘Klangwitze [sound-jokes]’ occur in the Capuchin monk’s sermon in Wallensteins Lager:
Kümmert sich mehr um den Krug als den Krieg,
Wetzt lieber den Schnabel als den Sabel
. . . . . . . .
Frisst den Ochsen lieber als den Oxenstirn’,
. . . . . . . .
Der Rheinstrom ist worden zu einem Peinstrom,
Die Klöster sind ausgenommene Nester,
Die Bistümer sind verwandelt in Wüsttümer.
. . . . . . . .
Und alle die gesegneten deutschen Länder
Sind verkehrt worden in Elender.¹
¹ [Literally:-
He cares more for the bottle than the battle,
Would rather whet his nose than his sword
. . . . . . . .
Would rather eat oxen than Oxenstirn’,
. . . . . . . .
The Rhine stream has become a pain stream,
The monastries are robbed bird’s nests,
The bishoprics are transformed into desertrics.
. . . . . . . .
And all the blessed German lands
Have been turned into wretched places.]
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1651
Jokes are particularly apt to change one of the vowels in a word. Thus Hevesi (1888, 87) writes of an anti-Imperial Italian poet who was nevertheless obliged later to eulogize a German emperor in hexameters: ‘Since he could not exterminate the Cäsaren [Caesars], he at least eliminated the Cäsuren [caesuras].
Out of the profusion of puns at our disposal, it will perhaps be of special interest to bring up a really bad example, of which Heine is guilty. Having for a long time represented himself to his lady as an ‘Indian prince’, he throws off the mask and confesses: ‘Madame, I have deceived you . . . I have no more ever been in Kalkutta [Calcutta] than the Kalkuttenbraten [roast Calcutta fowl] that I ate for luncheon yesterday.’ The mistake in this joke clearly lies in the fact that the two similar words in it are not merely similar but actually identical. The bird which he had eaten roast is so called, because it comes, or is supposed to come, from the same Calcutta.
Fischer (1889, 78) has devoted much attention to these forms of joke, and tries to distinguish them sharply from ‘play upon words’. ‘A pun is a bad play upon words, since it plays upon the word not as a word but as a sound.’ The play upon words, however, ‘passes from the sound of the word to the word ‘itself.’ On the other hand, he classes such jokes as famillionär, Antigone (antik? oh nee), etc. among the ‘sound jokes’. I see no necessity for following him in this. In a play upon words, in our view, the word is also only a sound-image, to which one meaning or another is attached. But here, too, linguistic usage makes no sharp distinctions; and if it treats ‘puns’ with contempt and ‘play upon words’ with a certain respect, these judgements of value seem to be determined by considerations other than technical ones. It is worth while paying attention to the kind of jokes that are told one as ‘puns’. There are some people who, when they are in high spirits, can for considerable periods of time, answer every remark addressed to them with a pun. One of my friends, who is a model of discretion where his serious achievements in science are concerned, is apt to boast of this ability. When on one occasion he was holding the company breathless in this way and admiration was expressed for his staying power: ‘Yes’, he said ‘I am lying here auf der Ka-Lauer.’² And when he was finally begged to stop, he agreed to on condition that he was appointed ‘Poeta Ka-laureatus’. Both of these, however, are excellent jokes of condensation with formation of composite words. (‘I am lying here auf der Lauer for making Kalauer [puns].’)
In any case we can already gather from the disputes about the delimitation of puns and play upon words that the former will not be able to help us to discover a completely new joke technique. If, in the case of puns, we give up the claim for the use of the same material in more than one sense, nevertheless the accent falls on rediscovering what is familiar, on the correspondence between the two words that make up the pun; and consequently puns merely form a sub-species of the group which reaches its peak in the play upon words proper.
¹ ‘Ideen’, Chapter V.
² [‘Kalauer’ = ‘pun’. ‘Auf der Lauer’ = ‘on the look-out’.]
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1652
But there really are jokes whose technique resists almost any attempt to connect it with the groups that have so far been considered.
‘The story is told of Heine that he was in a Paris salon one evening conversing with the dramatist Soulié, when there came into the room one of those financial kings of Paris whom people compare with Midas - and not merely on account of their wealth. He was soon surrounded by a crowd who treated him with the greatest deference. "Look there!" Soulié remarked to Heine, "Look at the way the nineteenth century is worshipping the Golden Calf!" With a glance at the object of so much admiration, Heine replied, as though by way of correction: "Oh, he must be older than that by now!"' (Fischer, 1889, 82-3.)
Where shall we look for the technique of this excellent joke? In a play upon words, thinks Fischer: ‘Thus, for instance, the words "Golden Calf" can mean both Mammon and idolatry. In the one case the gold is the main thing and in the other the statue of the animal; it may also serve to characterize, in not precisely flattering terms, someone who has a great deal of money and very little sense.’ (Loc. cit.) If we make the experiment of removing the expression ‘Golden Calf’, we certainly get rid of the joke at the same time. We make Soulié say: ‘Look there! Look at the way the people are crowding round the stupid fellow simply because he’s rich!’ This is no longer a joke and Heine’s reply is also made impossible.
But we must recall that what we are concerned with is not Soulié’s simile - which is a possible joke - but Heine’s reply, which is certainly a much better one. That being so, we have no right to touch the phrase about the Golden Calf: it remains as the precondition of Heine’s mot and our reduction must be directed only to the latter. If we expand the words ‘Oh, he must be older than that by now!’ we can only replace them by something like: ‘Oh, he’s not a calf any longer; he’s a full-grown ox!’ Thus what was necessary for Heine’s joke was that he should no longer take the ‘Golden Calf’ in a metaphorical but in a personal sense and should apply it to the rich man himself. It may even be that this double meaning was already present in Soulié’s remark.
But just a moment! It looks now as though this reduction has not done away with Heine’s joke completely, but on the contrary has left its essence untouched. The position now is that Soulié says: ‘Look there! Look at the way the nineteenth century is worshipping the Golden Calf!’ and Heine replies: ‘Oh, he’s not a calf any longer; he’s an ox already!’ And in this reduced version it is still a joke. But no other reduction of Heine’s mot is possible.
It is a pity that this fine example involves such complicated technical conditions. We can arrive at no clarification of it. So we will leave it and look for another one in which we seem to detect an internal kinship with its predecessor.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1653
It is one of the ‘bath jokes’ which treat of the Galician Jews’ aversion to baths. For we do not insist upon a patent of nobility from our examples. We make no enquiries about their origin but only about their efficiency - whether they are capable of making us laugh and whether they deserve our theoretical interest. And both these two requirements are best fulfilled precisely by Jewish jokes.
‘Two Jews met in the neighbourhood of the bath-house. "Have you taken a bath?" asked one of them. "What?" asked the other in return, "is there one missing?"'
If one laughs at a joke really heartily, one is not in precisely the best mood for investigating its technique. Hence some difficulties arise over making one’s way into these analyses. ‘It was a comical misunderstanding’, we are inclined to say. Yes but what is the technique of the joke? Clearly the use of the word ‘take’ in two meanings. For one of the speakers ‘take’ was the colourless auxiliary; for the other it was the verb with its sense unwatered down. Thus it is a case of the same word used ‘full’ and ‘empty’ (Group II (f)). If we replace the expression ‘taken a bath’ by the equivalent and simpler ‘bathed’, the joke vanishes. The reply no longer fits. Thus the joke is once again attached to the form of expression ‘taken a bath’.
That is so. But nevertheless it seems as though in this case too the reduction has been applied at the wrong point. The joke lies not in the question but in the answer - the second question: ‘What? is there one missing?’ And this answer cannot be robbed of being a joke by any extension or modification, so long as its sense is not interfered with. We have an impression, too, that in the second Jew’s reply the disregarding of the bath is more important than the misunderstanding of the word ‘take’. But here once more we cannot see our way clearly, and we will look for a third example.
It is again a Jewish joke; but this time it is only the setting that is Jewish, the core belongs to humanity in general. No doubt this example too has its unwanted complications, but fortunately they are not the same ones that have so far prevented us from seeing clearly.
‘An impoverished individual borrowed 25 florins from a prosperous acquaintance, with many asseverations of his necessitous circumstances. The very same day his benefactor met him again in a restaurant with a plate of salmon mayonnaise in front of him. The benefactor reproached him: "What? You borrow money from me and then order yourself salmon mayonnaise? Is that what you’ve used my money for?" "I don’t understand you", replied the object of the attack; "if I haven’t any money I can’t eat salmon mayonnaise, and if I have some money I mustn’t eat salmon mayonnaise. Well, then, when am I to eat salmon mayonnaise?"'
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1654
Here at last no more trace of a double meaning is to be found. Nor can the repetition of ‘salmon mayonnaise’ contain the joke’s technique, for it is not ‘multiple use’ of the same material but a real repetition of identical material called for by the subject-matter of the anecdote. We may for a time be quite baffled by this analysis and may even think of taking refuge in denying that the anecdote - though it made us laugh - possesses the character of a joke.
What more is there deserving of comment in the impoverished person’s reply? That it has been very markedly given the form of a logical argument. But quite unjustifiably, for the reply is in fact illogical. The man defends himself for having spent the money lent to him on a delicacy and asks, with an appearance of reason, when he is to eat salmon. But that is not the correct answer. His benefactor is not reproaching him with treating himself to salmon precisely on the day on which he borrowed the money; he is reminding him that in his circumstances he has no right to think of such delicacies at all. The impoverished bon vivant disregards this only possible meaning of the reproach, and answers another question as though he had misunderstood the reproach.
Can it be that the technique of this joke lies precisely in this diverting of the reply from the meaning of the reproach? If so, a similar change of standpoint, a similar shifting of the psychical emphasis, may perhaps be traceable in the two earlier examples, which we felt were akin to this one.
And, lo and behold! this suggestion is an easy success and in fact reveals the technique of those examples. Soulié pointed out to Heine that society in the nineteenth century worshipped the ‘Golden Calf’ just as did the Jews in the Wilderness. An appropriate answer by Heine might have been ‘Yes, such is human nature; thousands of years have made no change in it’ or something similar by way of assent. But Heine diverted his answer from the thought suggested to him and made no reply to it at all. He made use of the double meaning of which the phrase ‘Golden Calf’ is capable to branch off along a side-track. He caught hold of one component of the phrase, ‘Calf’, and replied, as though the emphasis in Soulié’s remark had been upon it: ‘Oh, he’s not a calf any longer’ . . etc.¹
¹ Heine’s answer combines two joke-techniques: a diversion combined with an allusion. He did not say straight out: ‘He’s an ox.’
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1655
The diversion in the bath-joke is even plainer. This example calls for a graphic presentation:
The first Jew asks: ‘Have you taken a bath?’ The emphasis is on the element ‘bath’.
The second replies as though the question had been: ‘Have you taken a bath?’
This shifting of the emphasis is only made possible by the wording ‘taken a bath’. If it had run ‘have you bathed?’ no displacement would have been possible. The non-joking answer would then have been: ‘Bathed? What d’you mean? I don’t know what that is.’ But the technique of the joke lies in the displacement of the accent from ‘bath’ to ‘taken’.¹
Let us go back to the ‘Salmon Mayonnaise’, since it is the most straightforward example. What is new in it deserves our attention in various directions. First we must give a name to the technique brought to light in it. I propose to describe it as ‘displacement’, since its essence lies in the diversion of the train of thought, the displacement of the psychical emphasis on to a topic other than the opening one. Our next task is to enquire into the relation between the technique of displacement and the form of expression of the joke. Our example (‘Salmon Mayonnaise’) shows us that a displacement joke is to a high degree independent of verbal expression. It depends not on words but on the train of thought. No replacement of the words will enable us to get rid of it so long as the sense of the answer is retained. Reduction is only possible if we change the train of thought and make the gourmet reply directly to the reproach which he has evaded in the version represented in the joke. The reduced version would then run: ‘I can’t deny myself what tastes good to me, and it’s a matter of indifference to me where I get the money from to pay for it. There you have the explanation of why I’m eating salmon mayonnaise on the very day you’ve lent me the money.’ But that would not be a joke; it would be a piece of cynicism.
¹ The word ‘take [nehmen]’ is very well adapted to form a basis for play upon words owing to the variety of ways in which it can be used. I will give a plain example, as a contrast to the displacement jokes reported above: ‘A well-known stock-exchange speculator and bank-director was walking with a friend along the Ringstrasse. As they went past a cafe he remarked: "Let’s go inside and take something!" His friend held him back: "But, Herr Hofrat, the place is full of people!" ‘
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1656
It is instructive to compare this joke with another that is very close to it in meaning:
‘A man who had taken to drink supported himself by tutoring in a small town. His vice gradually became known, however, and as a result he lost most of his pupils. A friend was commissioned to urge him to mend his ways. "Look, you could get the best tutoring in the town if you would give up drinking. So do give it up!" "Who do you think you are?" was the indignant reply. "I do tutoring so that I can drink. Am I to give up drinking so that I can get tutoring?"'
This joke gives the same appearance of being logical that we saw in the ‘Salmon Mayonnaise’; but it is not a displacement joke. The reply was a direct one. The cynicism which was concealed in the former joke is openly admitted in this one: ‘Drinking is the most important thing for me.’ Actually the technique of this joke is extremely scanty and cannot explain its effectiveness. It consists simply in the rearrangement of the same material or, more precisely, in the reversal of the relation of means and ends between drinking and doing or getting tutoring. As soon as my reduction ceases to emphasize this factor in its form of expression, the joke fades; for instance: ‘What a senseless suggestion! The important thing for me is the drinking, not the tutoring. After all, tutoring is only a means to enable me to go on drinking.’ So the joke did in fact depend on its form of expression.
In the bath-joke the dependence of the joke on its wording (‘Have you taken a bath?’) is unmistakable, and a change in it involves the disappearance of the joke. For in this case the technique is a more complicated one - a combination of double meaning (sub-species f) and displacement. The wording of the question admits a double meaning, and the joke is produced by the answer disregarding the meaning intended by the questioner and catching on to the subsidiary meaning. We are accordingly in a position to find a reduction which allows the double meaning of the wording to persist and yet destroys the joke; we can do this merely by undoing the displacement:
‘Have you taken a bath?’ - ‘What do you think I’ve taken? A bath? What’s that?’ But this is no longer a joke, but a malicious or facetious exaggeration.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1657
A precisely similar part is played by the double meaning in Heine’s joke about the ‘Golden Calf’. It enables the answer to make a diversion from the suggested train of thought (which is effected in the ‘Salmon Mayonnaise’ joke without any such assistance from the wording). In the reduction Souliés remark and Heine’s reply would perhaps run: ‘The way in which the people here are crowding round the man simply because he’s rich reminds one vividly of the worship of the Golden Calf.’ And Heine: ‘That he should be honoured in this way because of his wealth doesn’t strike me as the worst of it. In what you say you’re not putting enough stress on the fact that because of his wealth people forgive him his stupidity.’ In this way the double meaning would be retained but the displacement joke would be destroyed.
But at this point we must be prepared to meet an objection which will assert that these fine distinctions are seeking to tear apart what belongs together. Does not every double meaning give occasion for a displacement - for a diversion of the train of thought from one meaning to the other? And are we prepared, then, to allow ‘double meaning’ and ‘displacement’ to be set up as representatives of two quite different types of joke-technique? Well, it is true that this relation between double meaning and displacement does exist, but it has nothing to do with our distinguishing the different joke-techniques. In the case of double meaning a joke contains nothing other than a word capable of multiple interpretation, which allows the hearer to find the transition from one thought to another - a transition which, stretching a point, might be equated with a displacement. In the case of a displacement joke, however, the joke it self contains a train of thought in which a displacement of this kind has been accomplished. Here the displacement is part of the work which has created the joke; it is not part of the work necessary for understanding it. If this distinction is not clear to us, we have an unfailing means of bringing it tangibly before our eyes in our attempts at reduction. But there is one merit which we will not deny to this objection. It draws our attention to the necessity of not confusing the psychical processes involved in the construction of the joke (the ‘joke-work’) with the psychical processes involved in taking in the joke (the work of understanding). Our present enquiry is only concerned with the former.¹
¹ For the latter, see later chapters of this book. - A few further words of explanation are perhaps not unnecessary here. Displacement habitually takes place between a remark and a reply which pursues the train of thought in a direction other than that in which it was started by the original remark. The justification for distinguishing displacement from double meaning is most convincingly shown by the examples in which the two are combined - where, that is, the wording of the remark admits of a double meaning which is not intended by the speaker, but which points the way for the reply to make a displacement. (See the examples.)
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1658
Are there other examples of the displacement technique? They are not easy to find. A straightforward instance is afforded by the following joke, which moreover is not characterized by the appearance of logic which was so much overstressed in our model case:
‘A horse-dealer was recommending a saddle-horse to a customer. "If you take this horse and get on it at four in the morning you’ll be at Pressburg by half-past six." - "What should I be doing in Pressburg at half-past six in the morning?"'
Here the displacement leaps to the eye. The dealer obviously mentions the early hour of arriving at the provincial town simply in order to demonstrate the horse’s capacity by an example. The customer disregards the animal’s capacity, which he does not question, and merely enters into the data of the example that has been chosen. The reduction of this joke is accordingly easy to give.
Greater difficulties are presented by another example the technique of which is most obscure, but which can nevertheless be solved as double meaning combined with displacement. The joke describes the prevarication of a ‘Schadchen’ (a Jewish marriage-broker), and is thus one of a group with which we shall often be concerned.
‘The Schadchen had assured the suitor that the girl’s father was no longer living. After the betrothal it emerged that the father was still alive and was serving a prison sentence. The suitor protested to the Schadchen, who replied: "Well, what did I tell you? You surely don’t call that living?"'
The double meaning lies in the word ‘living’, and the displacement consists in the Schadchen shifting the meaning of the word from its ordinary sense, as a contrast to ‘dead’, to the sense which it has in the phrase ‘that’s not living’. In doing so he explains his former pronouncement retrospectively as having had a double meaning, though any such multiple meaning was decidedly remote in this particular case. So far the technique would seem similar to that in the ‘Golden Calf’ joke and the bath-joke. But here there is another factor to be considered which by its prominence interferes with our understanding of the technique. It might be described as a ‘characterizing’ joke: it seeks by an example to illustrate a marriage-broker’s characteristic mixture of mendacious impudence and readiness of repartee. We shall find that this is only the outer shell, the façade, of the joke; its meaning - that is to say, its purpose - is something different. And we must postpone the attempt at a reduction of it.¹
After these complicated examples, which have been so hard to analyse, it will be with satisfaction that we are able to turn once more to an example which can be recognized as a perfectly straightforward and transparent sample of a displacement joke:
‘A Schnorrer [someone who is reluctant to part with his own money] approached a wealthy baron with a request for the grant of some assistance for his journey to Ostend. The doctors, he said, had recommended him sea-bathing to restore his health. "Very well", said the rich man, "I’II give you something towards it. But must you go precisely to Ostend, which is the most expensive of all sea-bathing resorts?" - "Herr Baron", was the reproachful reply, "I consider nothing too expensive for my health."' This is no doubt a correct point of view, but not correct for a petitioner. The answer is given from the point of view of a rich man. The Schnorrer behaves as though it was his own money that he was to sacrifice for his health, as though the money and the health were the concern of the same person.
¹ See Chapter III below.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1659
Let us start once more from that highly instructive example ‘Salmon Mayonnaise’. It, too, presented us with a façade, in which a striking parade of logical thinking was exhibited; and we learnt from analysing it that this logic was used to conceal a piece of faulty reasoning - namely, a displacement of the train of thought. This may serve to remind us, if only by means of a contrasting connection, of other jokes which, quite the other way, undisguisedly exhibit a piece of nonsense or stupidity. We shall be curious to learn what may be the technique of such jokes.
I will begin with the most forcible and at the same time the plainest example of the whole group. Once again it is a Jewish joke:
‘Itzig had been declared fit for service in the artillery. He was clearly an intelligent lad, but intractable and without any interest in the service. One of his superior officers, who was friendlily disposed to him, took him on one side and said to him: "Itzig, you’re no use to us. I’II give you a piece of advice: buy yourself a cannon and make yourself independent!"'
This advice, which may raise a hearty laugh, is obvious nonsense. Cannons are not to be bought and an individual cannot make himself independent as a military unit - set himself up in business, as it were. But it is impossible to doubt for a moment that the advice is not mere nonsense but joking nonsense - an excellent joke. How then is the nonsense turned into a joke?
Not much reflection is needed. We can infer from the authorities’ comments indicated above in the introduction that there is sense behind joking nonsense such as this, and that it is this sense that makes the nonsense into a joke. The sense in our example is easy to find. The officer who gives Artilleryman Itzig this nonsensical advice is only making himself out stupid to show Itzig how stupidly he himself is be having. He is copying Itzig: ‘I’II give you some advice that’s as stupid as you are.’ He enters into Itzig’s stupidity and makes it clear to him by taking it as the basis of a suggestion which would fit in with Itzig’s wishes: if Itzig possessed a cannon of his own and carried out military duties on his own account, how useful his intelligence and ambition would be to him! In what good order he would keep his cannon and how familiar he would make himself with its mechanism so as to meet the competition of the other possessors of cannons!
I will interrupt the analysis of this example, to point out the same sense in nonsense in a shorter and simpler, though less glaring, case of a nonsensical joke:
‘Never to be born would be the best thing for mortal men.’ ‘But’, adds the philosophical comment in Fliegende Blätter, ‘this happens to scarcely one person in a hundred thousand.’
This modern addition to an ancient saw is an evident piece of nonsense, made sillier by the ostensibly cautious ‘scarcely’. But the addition is attached to the original statement as an indisputably correct limitation, and is thus able to open our eyes to the fact that this solemnly accepted piece of wisdom is itself not much better than a piece of nonsense. Anyone who is not born is not a mortal man at all, and there is no good and no best for him. Thus the nonsense in the joke serves to uncover and demonstrate another piece of nonsense, just as in the example of Artilleryman Itzig.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1660
And here I can add a third instance, which, from its content, would scarcely deserve the lengthy description that it requires, but which once again exemplifies with special clarity the use of nonsense in a joke to demonstrate another piece of nonsense.
‘A man who was obliged to go on a journey confided his daughter to a friend with the request that he should watch over her virtue during his absence. Some months later he returned, and found that she was pregnant. As was natural, he reproached his friend, who, however, seemed unable to explain the misfortune. "Well", asked the father at last, "where did she sleep?" - "In the room with my son." - "But how could you let her sleep in the same room as your son after I’d begged you so to look after her?" - "After all there was a screen between them. Your daughter’s bed was on one side and my son’s bed on the other, with the screen between them." - "And suppose he walked round the screen?" - "Yes, there is that", replied the other thoughtfully; "it might have happened like that."'
We can arrive with the greatest ease at the reduction of this joke, whose qualities have otherwise little to recommend it. It would obviously run: ‘You have no right to reproach me. How could you be so stupid as to leave your daughter in a house where she is bound to live in the constant company of a young man? How would it be possible for an outsider to answer for a girl’s virtue in such circumstances?’ Here, then, the friend’s apparent stupidity is only a reflection of the father’s stupidity. The reduction has disposed of the stupidity in the joke and at the same time of the joke itself. The element ‘stupidity’ itself has not been got rid of: it is to be found at another point in the context of the sentence after it has been reduced to its original meaning.
We can now attempt a reduction of the joke about the cannon. The officer should have said: ‘Itzig, I know you’re an intelligent man of business. But I assure you it is very stupid of you if you can’t see that it is impossible to behave in the army in the same way as in business life, where each person acts for himself and against the others. In military life subordination and co-operation are the rule.’
The technique of the nonsensical jokes which we have so far considered really consists, therefore, in presenting something that is stupid and nonsensical, the sense of which lies in the revelation and demonstration of something else that is stupid and nonsensical.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1661
Has this use of absurdity in joke technique always the same significance? Here is one more example which gives an affirmative reply:
‘When on one occasion Phocion was applauded after making a speech, he turned to his friends and asked: "What have I said that’s stupid, then?"'
The question sounds absurd. But we see its meaning at once: ‘What have I said, then, that can have pleased these stupid people so much? I ought to feel ashamed of the applause. If what I said has pleased stupid people, it cannot itself have been very sensible.’
Other examples, however, can teach us that absurdity is very often used in joke-technique without serving the purpose of demonstrating another piece of nonsense:
‘A well-known University teacher, who was in the habit of peppering his unattractive special subject with numerous jokes, was congratulated on the birth of his youngest child, who was granted to him when he had already reached an advanced age. "Yes", he replied to his well-wishers, "it is remarkable what human hands can accomplish.’ - This answer seems quite specially nonsensical and out of place. Children, after all, are regarded as a blessing of God, quite in contrast to human handiwork. But it soon occurs to us that after all the answer has a meaning and, at that, an obscene one. There is no question here of the happy father making himself out stupid in order to show that something or someone else is stupid. The apparently senseless answer makes a surprising, a bewildering impression on us, as the authorities would say. As we have seen they attribute the whole effect of jokes like this to an alternation between ‘bewilderment and illumination’. We shall try later to form a judgement on this; for the moment we must be content to stress the fact that the technique of this joke lies in its presentation of something bewildering and nonsensical.
A joke of Lichtenberg’s takes a quite special place among these ‘stupid’ jokes:
‘He wondered how it is that cats have two holes cut in their skin precisely at the place where their eyes are.’ To wonder about something that is in fact only the statement of an identity is undoubtedly a piece of stupidity. It reminds one of Michelet’s exclamation¹ which was meant to be taken seriously, and which to the best of my recollection runs: ‘How beautifully Nature has arranged it that as soon as a child comes into the world it finds a mother ready to take care of it!’ Michelet’s pronouncement is a real piece of stupidity, but Lichtenberg’s is a joke which makes use of stupidity for some purpose and behind which something lies. But what? For the moment, we must admit, no answer can be given.
¹ La Femme
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1662
We have now already found from two groups of examples that the joke-work makes use of deviations from normal thinking - of displacement and absurdity - as technical methods for producing a joking form of expression. It is no doubt justifiable to expect that other kinds of faulty reasoning may find a similar use. And it is in fact possible to produce a few examples of the sort:
‘A gentleman entered a pastry-cook’s shop and ordered a cake; but he soon brought it back and asked for a glass of liqueur instead. He drank it and began to leave without having paid. The proprietor detained him. "What do you want?" asked the customer. - "You’ve not paid for the liqueur." - "But I gave you the cake in exchange for it." - "You didn’t pay for that either." - "But I hadn’t eaten it."'
This anecdote too has an appearance of logic about it, which, as we already know, is a suitable façade for a piece of faulty reasoning. The mistake evidently lies in the crafty customer’s constructing a connection which did not exist between the giving back of the cake and the taking of the liqueur in its place. The episode in fact fell into two processes, which were independent of each other so far as the vendor was concerned and were substitutes for each other only from the point of view of the purchaser’s intention. First he took the cake and gave it back, and therefore owed nothing for it; then he took the liqueur, and for it he owed payment. We might say that the customer used the relation ‘in exchange for’ with a double meaning. But it would be more correct to say that by means of a double meaning he constructed a connection which was not in reality valid.¹
¹ [Footnote added 1912:] A similar nonsensical technique appears if a joke seeks to maintain a connection which seems to be excluded by the special conditions implied in its content. Such, for instance, is Lichtenberg’s knife without a blade which has no handle. So, too, the joke repeated by Von Falke: ‘Is this the place where the Duke of Wellington spoke those words?’ - ‘Yes, it is the place; but he never spoke the words.’
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1663
This is an opportunity for making a not unimportant admission. We are engaged in investigating the technique of jokes as shown in examples; and we should therefore be certain that the examples we have chosen are really genuine jokes. It is the case, however, that in a number of instances we are in doubt whether the particular example ought to be called a joke or not. We have no criterion at our disposal before our investigation has given us one. Linguistic usage is untrustworthy and itself needs to have its justification examined. In coming to our decision we can base ourselves on nothing but a certain ‘feeling’, which we may interpret as meaning that the decision is made in our judgement in accordance with particular criteria that are not yet accessible to our knowledge. In the case of our last example we must feel a doubt whether it should be represented as a joke, or perhaps as a ‘sophistical’ joke, or simply as a piece of sophistry. For the fact is that we do not yet know in what the characteristic of being a joke resides.
On the other hand, the next example, which exhibits a type of faulty reasoning that may be said to be complementary to the former instance, is an undoubted joke. It is once again a story of a marriage-broker:
‘The Schadchen was defending the girl he had proposed against the young man’s protests. "I don’t care for the mother-in-law", said the latter. "She’s a disagreeable, stupid person." - "But after all you’re not marrying the mother-in-law. What you want is her daughter." - "Yes, but she’s not young any longer, and she’s not precisely a beauty." - "No matter. If she’s neither young nor beautiful she’ll be all the more faithful to you."- "And she hasn’t much money." - "Who’s talking about money? Are you marrying money then? After all it’s a wife that you want." - "But she’s got a hunchback too." - "Well, what do you want? Isn’t she to have a single fault?"'
What was really in question, then, was an unbeautiful girl, no longer young, with a scanty dowry and an unpleasant mother, who was moreover the victim of a serious deformity - not very inviting conditions for contracting a marriage. The marriage broker was able, in the case of each one of these defects, to point out how it would be possible to come to terms with it. He was then able to claim that the inexcusable hunch back was the single defect that every individual must be allowed to possess. Once more there is the appearance of logic which is characteristic of a piece of sophistry and which is intended to conceal the faulty reasoning. Clearly the girl had a number of defects - several that might be overlooked and one that it was impossible to disregard; she was unmarriageable. The broker behaved as though each separate defect was got rid of by his evasions, whereas in fact each one of them left a certain amount of depreciation behind which had to be added to the next one. He insisted on treating each defect in isolation and refused to add them up into a total.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1664
The same omission is the core of another piece of sophistry which has been much laughed over, but whose right to be called a joke might be doubted:
‘A. borrowed a copper kettle from B. and after he had returned it was sued by B. because the kettle now had a big hole in it which made it unusable. His defence was: "First, I never borrowed a kettle from B. at all; secondly, the kettle had a hole in it already when I got it from him; and thirdly, I gave him back the kettle undamaged."' Each one of these defences is valid in itself, but taken together they exclude one another. A. was treating in isolation what had to be regarded as a connected whole, just as the marriage-broker treated the girl’s defects. We might also say: ‘A. has put an "and" where only an "either-or" is possible.’
We find another piece of sophistry in the following marriage broker story:
‘The would-be bridegroom complained that the bride had one leg shorter than the other and limped. The Schadchen contradicted him: "You’re wrong. Suppose you marry a woman with healthy, straight limbs! What do you gain from it? You never have a day’s security that she won’t fall down, break a leg and afterwards be lame all her life. And think of the suffering then, the agitation, and the doctor’s bill! But if you take this one, that can’t happen to you. Here you have a fait accompli.’
The appearance of logic is very thin in this case, and no one will be ready to prefer an already ‘accomplished misfortune’ to one that is merely a possibility. The fault in this train of thought can be more easily shown in another example - a story which I cannot entirely divest of its dialect:
‘In the temple at Cracow the Great Rabbi N. was sitting and praying with his disciples. Suddenly he uttered a cry, and, in reply to his disciples’ anxious enquiries, exclaimed: "At this very moment the Great Rabbi L. has died in Lemberg." The community put on mourning for the dead man. In the course of the next few days people arriving from Lemberg were asked how the Rabbi had died and what had been wrong with him; but they knew nothing about it, and had left him in the best of health. At last it was established with certainty that the Rabbi L. in Lemberg had not died at the moment at which the Rabbi N. had observed his death by telepathy, since he was still alive. A stranger took the opportunity of jeering at one of the Cracow Rabbi’s disciples about this occurrence: "Your Rabbi made a great fool of himself that time, when he saw the Rabbi L. die in Lemberg. The man’s alive to this day." "That makes no difference", replied the disciple. "Whatever you may say, the Kück¹ from Cracow to Lemberg was a magnificent one."'
The faulty reasoning common to the last two examples is here undisguisedly admitted. The value of phantasy is exalted unduly in comparison with reality; a possibility is almost equated with an actual event. The distant look across the stretch of country separating Cracow and Lemberg would have been an impressive telepathic achievement if it had produced something that was true. But the disciple was not concerned with that. It might after all have possibly happened that the Rabbi in Lemberg had died at the moment at which the Cracow Rabbi announced his death; and the disciple displaced the emphasis from the condition subject to which the teacher’s achievement deserved admiration on to an unconditional admiration of the achievement. ‘In magnis rebus voluisse sat est’ ² expresses a similar point of view. Just as in this example reality is disregarded in favour of possibility, so in the former one the marriage-broker suggests to the would-be bridegroom that the possibility of a woman being made lame by an accident should be regarded as something far more important than the question of whether she is really lame or not.
¹ [A Yiddish word] from the German ‘gucken [to look or peep]’: ‘look’, ‘distant look’.
² [‘In great things it is enough to have wished.’]
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1665
This group of ‘sophistical’ pieces of faulty reasoning is resembled by another interesting group in which the faulty reasoning can be described as ‘automatic’. It may be due to no more than a whim of chance that all the examples that I shall bring forward of this new group are once more Schadchen stories:
‘A Schadchen had brought an assistant with him to the discussion about the proposed bride, to bear out what he had to say. "She is straight as a pine-tree", said the Schadchen. - "As a pine-tree", repeated the echo. - "And she has eyes that ought to be seen!" - "What eyes she has!" confirmed the echo.- "And she is better educated than anyone!" - "What an education!" - "It’s true there’s one thing", admitted the broker, "she has a small hump." - "And what a hump!" the echo confirmed once more.’ The other stories are analogous, but have more sense.
‘The bridegroom was most disagreeably surprised when the bride was introduced to him, and drew the broker on one side and whispered his remonstrances: "Why have you brought me here?" he asked reproachfully. "She’s ugly and old, she squints and has bad teeth and bleary eyes . . ." - "You needn’t lower your voice", interrupted the broker, "she’s deaf as well."'
‘The bridegroom was paying his first visit to the bride’s house in the company of the broker, and while they were waiting in the salon for the family to appear, the broker drew attention to a cupboard with glass doors in which the finest set of silver plate was exhibited. "There! Look at that! You can see from these things how rich these people are." - "But", asked the suspicious young man, "mightn’t it be possible that these fine things were only collected for the occasion - that they were borrowed to give an impression of wealth?" - "What an idea!" answered the broker protestingly. "Who do you think would lend these people anything?"'
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1666
The same thing happens in all three cases. A person who has reacted in the same way several times in succession repeats this mode of expression on the next occasion, when it is unsuitable and defeats his own intentions. He neglects to adapt himself to the needs of the situation, by giving way to the automatic action of habit. Thus, in the first story the assistant forgets that he was brought along in order to prejudice the would-be bridegroom in favour of the proposed bride. And since to begin with he has performed his task and underlined the bride’s advantages by repeating each one as it is brought forward, he goes on to underline her timidly admitted hump, which he should have minimized. The broker in the second story is so much fascinated by the enumeration of the bride’s defects and infirmities that he completes the list out of his own knowledge, though that was certainly not his business or purpose. In the third story, finally, he allows himself to be so much carried away by his eagerness to convince the young man of the family’s wealth that, in order to establish one confirmatory point, he brings up something that is bound to upset all his efforts. In every case automatic action triumphs over the expedient modification of thought and expression.
This is easy to see; but it is bound to have a confusing effect when we notice that these three stories have as much right to be called ‘comic’ as we had to produce them as ‘jokes’. The uncovering of psychical automatism is one of the techniques of the comic, just as is any kind of revelation or self-betrayal. We suddenly find ourselves faced at this point with the problem of the relation of jokes to the comic which we intended to evade. (See the introduction.) Are these stories perhaps only ‘comic’ and not ‘jokes’? Is the comic operating here by the same methods as jokes do? And, once again, what constitutes the peculiar characteristics of jokes?
We must keep to our view that the technique of this last group of jokes that we have examined lies in nothing else than in bringing forward ‘faulty reasoning’. But we are obliged to admit that their examination has so far led us more into obscurity than understanding. Nevertheless we do not abandon our expectation that a more complete knowledge of the techniques of jokes will lead us to a result which can serve as a starting point for further discoveries.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1667
The next examples of jokes, with which we shall pursue our enquiry, offer an easier task. Their technique, in particular, reminds us of what we already know.
First, here is a joke of Lichtenberg’s:
‘January is the month in which we offer our dear friends wishes, and the rest are the months in which they are not fulfilled.’
Since these jokes are to be described as refined rather than strong, and work by methods that are unobtrusive, we will begin by presenting a number of them in order to intensify their effect:
‘Human life falls into two halves. In the first half we wish the second one would come; and in the second we wish the first one were back.’
‘Experience consists in experiencing what we do not wish to experience.’
(Both these last two are from Fischer, 1889.)
These examples cannot fail to remind us of a group with which we have already dealt and which is distinguished by the ‘multiple use of the same material’. The last example in particular will raise the question of why we did not include it in that group instead of introducing it here in a fresh connection. ‘Experience’ is once again described in its own terms, just as ‘jealousy’ was earlier (p. 1640). I should not be inclined to dispute this classification very seriously. But as regards the other two examples (which are of a similar nature), I think another factor is more striking and more important than the multiple use of the same words, in which in this case there is nothing that fringes on double meaning. I should like in particular to stress the fact that here new and unexpected unities are set up, relations of ideas to one another, definitions made mutually or by reference to a common third element. I should like to name this process ‘unification’. It is clearly analogous to condensation by compression into the same words. Thus the two halves of human life are described by a mutual relation discovered to exist between them: in the first we wish the second would come and in the second we wish the first were back. Speaking more precisely, two very similar mutual relations have been chosen for representation. To the similarity of the relations there corresponds a similarity of the words, which may indeed remind us of the multiple use of the same material: ‘wish . . . would come’ - ‘wish . . . back’. In Lichtenberg’s joke January and the months contrasted with it are characterized by a (once again, modified) relation to a third element; these are the good wishes, which are received in the first month and not fulfilled in the remaining ones. Here the distinction from the multiple use of the same material (which approximates to double meaning) is very clear.¹
¹ In order to give a better description of ‘unification’ than the examples above allow of, I will make use of something I have already mentioned - namely the peculiar negative relation that holds between jokes and riddles, according to which the one conceals what the other exhibits. Many of the riddles with the production of which G. T. Fechner, the philosopher, passed his time when he was blind, are characterized by a high degree of unification, which lends them a special charm. Take, for instance, as a neat example, Riddle No. 203 (Dr. Mises’ Rätselbüchlein, 4th edition, enlarged, N.D.):
Die beiden ersten finden ihre Ruhestätte
Im Paar der andern, und das Ganze macht ihr Bette.
[My two first (Toten, the dead) find their resting-place in my two last (Gräber, graves), and my whole (Totengräber, grave-digger) makes their bed.]
We are told nothing about the two pairs of syllables that have to be guessed except a relation that holds between them, and about the whole we are only told its relation to the first pair.
The following are two examples of description by relation to the same or a slightly modified third element:
Die erste Silb’hat Zähn’ und Haare,
Die zweite Zähne in den Haaren,
Wer auf den Zähnen nicht hat Haare,
Vom Ganzen kaufe keine Waren. No. 170.
[The first syllable has teeth and hair (Ross, horse), the second has teeth in the hair (Kamm, comb). No one who has not hair on his teeth (i.e. who is not able to look after his interests) should buy goods from the whole (Rosskamm, horse-dealer).]
Die erste Silbe frisst,
Die andere Silbe isst,
Die dritte wird gefressen,
Das Ganze wird gegessen. No. 168.
[The first syllable gobbles (Sau, sow), the second syllable eats (Er, he), the third is gobbled (Kraut, weeds), the whole is eaten (Sauerkraut).]
The most perfect instance of unification is to be found in a riddle of Schleiermacher’s, which cannot be denied the character of a joke:
Von der letzten umschlungen
Schwebt das vollendete Ganze
Zu den zwei ersten empor.
[Entwined by my last (Strick, rope), my completed whole (Galgenstrick, rogue) swings to the top of my two first (Galgen, gallows).]
The great majority of all such riddles lack unification. That is to say, the clue by which one syllable is to be guessed is quite independent of those that point to the second or third, as well as of the indication which is to lead to the separate discovery of the whole.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1668
Here is a neat example of a unification joke which needs no explanation:
‘The French poet J. B. Rousseau wrote an Ode to Posterity. Voltaire was not of opinion that the poem merited survival, and jokingly remarked: "This poem will not reach its destination."' (Fischer, 1889.)
This last example draws attention to the fact that it is essentially unification that lies at the bottom of jokes that can be described as ‘ready repartees’. For repartee consists in the defence going to meet the aggression, in ‘turning the tables on someone’ or ‘paying someone back in his own coin’ - that is, in establishing an unexpected unity between attack and counter-attack. For instance:
‘An innkeeper had a whitlow on his finger and the baker said to him: "You must have got that by putting your finger in your beer." "It wasn’t that", replied the innkeeper, "I got a piece of your bread under my nail."' (From Überhorst (1900, 2).)
‘Serenissimus was making a tour through his provinces and noticed a man in the crowd who bore a striking resemblance to his own exalted person. He beckoned to him and asked: "Was your mother at one time in service in the Palace?"- "No, your Highness," was the reply, "but my father was."'
‘Duke Charles of Württemberg happened on one of his rides to come upon a dyer who was engaged on his job. Pointing to the grey horse he was riding, the Duke called out: "Can you dye him blue?" "Yes, of course, your Highness," came the answer, "if he can stand boiling."'
In this excellent tu quoque, in which a nonsensical question is met by an equally impossible condition, there is another technical factor at work which would have been absent if the dyer had answered: ‘No, your Highness. I’m afraid the horse wouldn’t stand boiling.’
Unification has another, quite specially interesting technical instrument at its disposal: stringing things together with the conjunction ‘and’. If things are strung together in this way it implies that they are connected: we cannot help understanding it so. For instance, when Heine, speaking of the city of Göttingen in the Harzreise, remarks: ‘Speaking generally, the inhabitants of Göttingen are divided into students, professors, philistines and donkeys’, we take this grouping in precisely the sense which Heine emphasizes in an addition to the sentence: ‘and these four classes are anything but sharply divided.’ Or, again, when he speaks of the school in which he had to put up with ‘so much Latin, caning and Geography’, this series, which is made even more transparent by the position of the ‘caning’ between the two educational subjects, tells us that the unmistakable view taken by the schoolboys of the caning certainly extended to Latin and Geography was well.
Among the examples given by Lipps of ‘joking enumeration’ (‘co-ordination’), we find the following lines quoted as being closely akin to Heine’s ‘students, professors, philistines and donkeys’:
Mit einer Gabel und mit Müh’
Zos ihn die Mutter aus der Brüh.
[With a fork and much to-do
His mother dragged him from the stew.]
It is as though (Lipps comments), the Müh [trouble, to-do] were an instrument like the fork. We have a feeling, however, that these lines, though they are very comic, are far from being a joke, while Heine’s list undoubtedly is one. We may perhaps recall these examples later, when we need no longer evade the problem of the relation between the comic and jokes.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1669
We observed in the example of the Duke and the dyer that it would remain a joke by unification if the dyer had replied: ‘No, I’m afraid the horse wouldn’t stand boiling.’ But his actual reply was: ‘ Yes, your Highness, if he can stand boiling.’ The replacement of the really appropriate ‘no’ by a ‘yes’ constitutes a new technical method of joking, the employment of which we will pursue in some other examples.
A joke similar to the one we have just mentioned (also quoted by Fischer) is simpler:
‘Frederick the Great heard of a preacher in Silesia who had the reputation of being in contact with spirits. He sent for the man and received him with the question "You can conjure up spirits?" The reply was: "At your Majesty’s command. But they don’t come."' It is quite obvious here that the method used in the joke lay in nothing else than the replacing of the only possible answer ‘no’ by its opposite. In order to carry out the replacement, it was necessary to add a ‘but’ to the ‘yes’; so that ‘yes’ and ‘but’ are equivalent in sense to ‘no’.
This ‘representation by the opposite’, as we shall call it, serves the joke-work in various forms. In the next two examples it appears almost pure:
‘This lady resembles the Venus of Milo in many respects: she, too, is extraordinarily old, like her she has no teeth, and there are white patches on the yellowish surface of her body.’ (Heine.)
Here we have a representation of ugliness through resemblances to what is most beautiful. It is true that these resemblances can only exist in qualities that are expressed in terms with a double meaning or in unimportant details. This latter feature applies to our second example - ‘The Great Spirit’, by Lichtenberg:
‘He united in himself the characteristics of the greatest men. He carried his head askew like Alexander; he always had to wear a toupet like Caesar; he could drink coffee like Leibnitz; and once he was properly settled in his armchair, he forgot eating and drinking like Newton, and had to be woken up like him; he wore his wig like Dr. Johnson, and he always left a breeches-button undone like Cervantes.’
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1670
Von Falke (1897, 271) brought home a particularly good example of representation by the opposite from a journey to Ireland, an example in which no use whatever is made of words with a double meaning. The scene was a wax-work show (as it might be, Madame Tussaud’s). A guide was conducting a company of old and young visitors from figure to figure and commenting on them: ‘This is the Duke of Wellington and his horse’, he explained. Whereupon a young lady asked: ‘Which is the Duke of Wellington and which is his horse?’ ‘Just as you like, my pretty child,’ was the reply. ‘You pays your money and you takes your choice.’
The reduction of this Irish joke would be: ‘Shameless the things these wax-work people dare to offer the public! One can’t distinguish between the horse and its rider! (Facetious exaggeration.) And that’s what one pays one’s money for!’ This indignant exclamation is then dramatized, based on a small occurrence. In place of the public in general an individual lady appears and the figure of the rider is particularized: he must be the Duke of Wellington, who is so extremely popular in Ireland. But the shamelessness of the proprietor or guide, who takes money out of people’s pockets and offers them no thing in return, is represented by the opposite - by a speech in which he boasts himself a conscientious man of business, who has nothing more closely at heart than regard for the rights which the public has acquired by its payment. And now we can see that the technique of this joke is not quite a simple one. In so far as it enables the swindler to insist on his conscientiousness it is a case of representation by the opposite; but in so far as it effects this on an occasion on which something quite different is demanded of him - so that he replies with business like respectability where what we expect of him is the identification of the figures - it is an instance of displacement. The technique of the joke lies in a combination of the two methods.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1671
No great distance separates this example from a small group which might be described as ‘overstatement’ jokes. In these the ‘yes’ which would be in place in the reduction is replaced by a ‘no’, which, however, on account of its content, has the force of an intensified ‘yes’, and vice versa. A denial is a substitute for an overstated confirmation. Thus, for instance, in Lessing’s epigram:¹
Die gute Galathee! Man sagt, sie schwärz’ ihr Haar;
Da doch ihr Haar schon schwarz, als sie es kaufte, war.
[Good Galathea blacks her hair, ‘tis thought;
And yet her hair was black when it was bought.]
Or Lichtenberg’s malicious defence of philosophy:
‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy’, said Prince Hamlet contemptuously. Lichtenberg knew that this condemnation is not nearly severe enough, for it does not take into account all the objections that can be made to philosophy. He therefore added what was missing: ‘But there is much, too, in philosophy that is not to be found in heaven or earth.’ His addition, it is true, emphasizes the way in which philosophy compensates us for the insufficiency for which Hamlet censures it. But this compensation implies another and still greater reproach.
Two Jewish jokes, though they are of a coarse type, are even clearer, since they are free from any trace of displacement:
‘Two Jews were discussing baths. "I have a bath every year", said one of them, "whether I need one or not."'
It is obvious that this boastful insistence on his cleanliness only serves to convict him of uncleanliness.
‘A Jew noticed the remains of some food in another one’s beard. "I can tell you what you had to eat yesterday." - "Well, tell me." - "Lentils, then." - "Wrong: the day before yesterday! "'
The following example is an excellent ‘overstatement’ joke, which can easily be traced back to representation by the opposite:
‘The King condescended to visit a surgical clinic and came on the professor as he was carrying out the amputation of a leg. He accompanied all its stages with loud expressions of his royal satisfaction: "Bravo! bravo! my dear Professor!" When the operation was finished, the professor approached him and asked him with a deep bow: "Is it your Majesty’s command that I should remove the other leg too?" ‘
¹ Modelled on one in the Greek Anthology.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1672
The professor’s thoughts during the royal applause could certainly not have been expressed unaltered: ‘This makes it look as though I were taking off the poor fellows bad leg by royal command and only for the royal satisfaction. After all I really have other reasons for the operation.’ But he then goes to the King and says: ‘I have no reasons for carrying out an operation other than your Majesty’s command. The applause you honoured me with has made me so happy that I only await your Majesty’s orders to amputate the sound limb too.’ In this way he succeeds in making himself understood by saying the opposite of what he thinks but must keep to himself. This opposite is an overstatement that cannot be believed.
As these examples show, representation by the opposite is an instrument of joke-technique that is used frequently and works powerfully. But there is something else that we should not overlook: namely that this technique is by no means peculiar to jokes. When Mark Antony, after he has made a long speech in the Forum and has reversed the emotional attitude of his audience round Caesar’s corpse, finally exclaims once more:
‘For Brutus is an honourable man . . .’
he knows that the people will now shout back to him the true sense of his words:
‘They were traitors: honourable men!’
Or when Simplicissimus describes a collection of incredible pieces of brutality and cynicism as the expressions of ‘men of feeling’, this too is a representation by the opposite. But we call this ‘irony’ and no longer a joke. The only technique that characterizes irony is representation by the opposite. Moreover we read and hear of ‘ironical jokes’. So it can no longer be doubted that technique alone is insufficient to characterize the nature of jokes. Something further is needed which we have not yet discovered. But on the other hand it remains an uncontradicted fact that if we undo the technique of a joke it disappears. For the time being we may find difficulty in thinking how these two fixed points that we have arrived at in explaining jokes can be reconciled.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1673
If representation by the opposite is one of the technical methods of jokes, we can expect that jokes may also make use of its contrary - representation by something similar or akin. A further pursuit of our enquiry will in fact show us that this is the technique of a fresh and particularly comprehensive group of conceptual jokes. We shall describe the peculiarity of this technique far more appropriately if, instead of representation by something ‘akin’, we say by something ‘correlated’ or ‘connected’. We will take our start, in fact, with this latter characteristic and illustrate it at once by an example.
Here is an American anecdote: ‘Two not particularly scrupulous business men had succeeded, by dint of a series of highly risky enterprises, in amassing a large fortune, and they were now making efforts to push their way into good society. One method, which struck them as a likely one, was to have their portraits painted by the most celebrated and highly paid artist in the city, whose pictures had an immense reputation. The precious canvases were shown for the first time at a large evening party, and the two hosts themselves led the most influential connoisseur and art critic up to the wall upon which the portraits were hanging side by side, to extract his admiring judgement on them. He studied the works for a long time, and then, shaking his head, as though there was something he had missed, pointed to the gap between the pictures and asked quietly: "But where’s the Saviour?"' (I.e. ‘I don’t see the picture of the Saviour’.)
The meaning of this remark is clear. It is once again a question of the representation of something that cannot be expressed directly. How does this ‘indirect representation’ come about? Starting from the representation in the joke, we trace the path backwards through a series of easily established associations and inferences.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1674
We can guess from the question ‘Where’s the Saviour: Where’s the picture of the Saviour?’ that the sight of the two pictures had reminded the speaker of a similar sight, familiar to him, as to us, which however, included an element that was missing here - the picture of the Saviour between two other pictures. There is only one such situation: Christ hanging between the two thieves. The missing element is brought into prominence by the joke. The similarity lies in the pictures, hanging to the right and left of the Saviour, which the joke passes over; it can only consist in the fact that the pictures hanging on the walls are pictures of thieves. What the critic wanted to say but could not say was: ‘You are a couple of rascals’ or, in greater detail: ‘What do I care about your pictures? You are a couple of rascals - I know that!’ And he did in fact end by saying it by means of a few associations and inferences, using the method which we speak of as an ‘allusion’.
We at once recall where we have already come across allusion - in connection, namely, with double meaning. When two meanings are expressed in one word and one of them is so much more frequent and usual that it occurs to us at once, while the second is more out of the way and therefore less prominent, we proposed to speak of this as ‘double meaning with an allusion’. In a whole number of the examples we have already examined we remarked that the technique was not a simple one, and we now perceive that the ‘allusion’ was the complicating factor in them. (See, for instance, the inversion joke about the wife who has lain back a bit and so has been able to earn a lot or the nonsensical joke about the man who replied to congratulations on the birth of his youngest child by saying that it was remarkable what human hands could accomplish.)
In the American anecdote we now have before us an allusion without any double meaning, and we see that its characteristic is replacement by something linked to it in a conceptual connection. It may easily be guessed that the utilizable connection can be of more than one kind. In order not to lose ourselves in a maze of detail, we will discuss only the most marked variants and these only in a few examples.
The connection used for the replacement may be merely a resemblance in sound, so that this sub-species becomes analogous to puns among verbal jokes. Here, however, it is not the resemblance in sound between two words, but between whole sentences, characteristic phrases, and so on.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1675
For instance, Lichtenberg coined the saying: ‘New spas cure well’, which at once reminds us of the proverb: ‘New brooms sweep clean.’ The two phrases share the first one and a half words and the last word, as well as the whole structure of the sentence.¹ And there is no doubt that the sentence came into the witty philosopher’s head as an imitation of the familiar proverb. Thus Lichtenberg’s saying becomes an allusion to the proverb. By means of this allusion something is suggested that is not said straight out - namely that something else is responsible for the effects produced by spas besides the unvarying characteristics of thermal springs.
A similar technical solution applies to another jest [Scherz] or joke [Witz] of Lichtenberg’s: ‘A girl scarcely twelve Moden old.’ This sounds like ‘twelve Monden [moons]’, i.e. months, and may originally have been a slip of the pen for the latter, which is a permissible expression in poetry. But it also makes good sense to use the changing fashion instead of the changing moon as a method of determining a woman’s age.
The connection may also consist in similarity except for a ‘slight modification’. So that this technique, too, is parallel to a verbal technique. Both species of joke make almost the same impression, but they can be better distinguished from each other if we consider the processes of the joke-work.
Here is an example of a verbal joke or pun of this kind: Marie Wilt was a great singer, famous, however, for the compass not only of her voice. She suffered the humiliation of having the title of a play based on Jules Verne’s well-known novel used as an allusion to her misshapen figure: ‘Round the Wilt in 80 Days’.²
Or: ‘Every fathom a queen’, a modification of Shakespeare’s familiar ‘Every inch a king’. The allusion to this quotation was made with reference to an aristocratic and over-life-size lady. No very serious objection could really be made if anyone were to prefer to include this joke among the ‘condensations accompanied by modifications as substitute’. (See ‘tête-à-bête’, p. 1631.)
¹ [In the German the first syllables of ‘spas (Bäder)' and ‘brooms (Besen)' sound alike; and in the German proverb the last word is ‘well (gut)'.]
² [The German for ‘world’ is ‘Welt '.]
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1676
A friend said of someone who had lofty views but was obstinate in the pursuit of his aims: ‘Er hat ein Ideal vor dem Kopf.’ The current phrase is: ‘Ein Brett vor dem Kopf haben’. The modification alludes to this phrase and makes use of its meaning for its own purposes. Here, once more, the technique might be described as ‘condensation with modification’.
It is almost impossible to distinguish between ‘allusion by means of modification’ and ‘condensation with substitution’, if the modification is limited to a change of letters. For instance: ‘Dichteritis’¹ This allusion to the scourge of ‘Diphteritis ' represents authorship by unqualified persons as another public danger.
Negative particles make very neat allusions possible at the cost of slight alterations:
‘My fellow-unbeliever Spinoza’, says Heine. ‘We, by the ungrace of God, day-labourers, serfs, negroes, villeins . . .’ is how Lichtenberg begins a manifesto (which he carries no further) made by these unfortunates - who certainly have more right to this title than kings and princes have to its unmodified form.
Finally, another kind of allusion consists in ‘omission’, which may be compared to condensation without the formation of a substitute. Actually, in every allusion something is omitted, viz. the train of thought leading to the allusion. It only depends on whether the more obvious thing is the gap in the wording of the allusion or the substitute which partly fills the gap. Thus a series of examples would lead us back from blatant omission to allusion proper.
¹ [A non-existent word, which might be translated ‘authoritis’ - from ‘Dichter (an author)'.]
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1677
Omission without a substitute is shown in the following example: There is a witty and pugnacious journalist in Vienna, whose biting invective has repeatedly led to his being physically maltreated by the subjects of his attacks. On one occasion, when a fresh misdeed on the part of one of his habitual opponents was being discussed, somebody exclaimed: ‘If X hears of this, he’ll get his ears boxed again.’ The technique of this joke includes, in the first place, bewilderment at its apparent nonsense, since we cannot see how getting one’s ears boxed can be an immediate consequence of having heard something. The absurdity of the remark disappears if we insert in the gap: ‘he’ll write such a scathing article upon the man that . . . etc.’ Allusion by means of omission, combined with nonsense, are accordingly the technical methods used in this joke.
‘He praises himself so much that the price of fumigating candles is going up.’ (Heine.) This gap is easy to fill. What is omitted has been replaced by an inference, which then leads back to what has been omitted, in the form of an allusion: ‘self-praise stinks.’
And now once again two Jews outside the bath-house:
One of them sighed: ‘Another year gone by already!’
These examples leave us in no doubt that here the omission forms part of the allusion.
There is still quite a marked gap to be seen in our next example, though it is a genuine and correct allusive joke. After an artists’ carnival in Vienna a jest-book was circulated, in which, among others, the following highly remarkable epigram appeared:
‘A wife is like an umbrella. Sooner or later one takes a cab.’
An umbrella is not enough protection against rain. The ‘sooner or later’ can only mean ‘if it rains hard’, and a cab is a public vehicle. But since we are only concerned here with the form of the analogy, we will postpone the closer examination of this joke to a later moment.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1678
Heine’s ‘Bäder von Lucca’ contains a regular wasp’s next of the most stinging allusions and makes the most ingenious use of this form of joke for polemical purposes (against Count Platen). Long before the reader can suspect what is afoot, there are foreshadowings of a particular theme, peculiarly ill-adapted for direct representation, by allusions to material of the most varied kind, - for instance, in Hirsch-Hyacinth’s verbal contortions: ‘You are too stout and I am too thin; you have a good deal of imagination and I have all the more business sense; I am a practicus and you are a diarrheticus; in short you are my complete antipodex.’ - ‘Venus Urinia’ - ‘the stout Gudel von Dreckwall’ of Hamburg, and so on. In what follows, the events described by the author take a turn which seems at first merely to display his mischievous spirit but soon reveals its symbolic relation to his polemical purpose and at the same time shows itself as allusive. Eventually the attack on Platen bursts out, and thenceforward allusions to the theme (with which we have already been made acquainted) of the Count’s love for men gushes out and overflows in every sentence of Heine’s attack on his opponent’s talents and character. For instance:
‘Even though the Muses do not favour him, he has the Genius of Speech in his power, or rather he knows how to do violence to him. For he does not possess the free love of that Genius, he must unceasingly pursue this young man, too, and he knows how to capture only the outer forms, which, despite their lovely curves never speak nobly.’
‘He is like the ostrich, which believes he is well hidden if he sticks his head in the sand, so that only his behind can be seen. Our exalted bird would have done better to hide his behind in the sand and show us his head.’
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1679
Allusion is perhaps the commonest and most easily manageable method of joking and is at the bottom of the majority of short-lived jokes which we are accustomed to weaving into our conversations and which will not bear being uprooted from their original soil and kept in isolation. But it precisely reminds us once more of the fact that had begun to puzzle us in our consideration of the technique of jokes. An allusion in itself does not constitute a joke; there are correctly constructed allusions which have no claim to such a character. Only allusions that possess that character can be described as jokes. So that the criterion of jokes, which we have pursued into their technique, eludes us there once again.
I have occasionally described allusion as ‘indirect representation’; and we may now observe that the various species of allusion, together with representation by the opposite and other techniques that have still to be mentioned, may be united into a single large group, for which ‘indirect representation’ would be the most comprehensive name. ‘Faulty reasoning’, ‘unification’, ‘indirect representation’ - these, then, are the headings under which we can classify those techniques of conceptual jokes which we have come to know.
If we examine our material further, we seem to recognize a fresh sub-species of indirect representation which can be precisely characterized but of which few examples can be adduced. This is representation by something small or very small - which performs the task of giving full expression to a whole characteristic by means of a tiny detail. This group can be brought under the classification of ‘allusion’, if we bear in mind that this smallness is related to what has to be represented, and can be seen to proceed from it. For instance:
‘A Galician Jew was travelling in a train. He had made himself really comfortable, had unbuttoned his coat and put his feet up on the seat. Just then a gentleman in modern dress entered the compartment. The Jew promptly pulled himself together and took up a proper pose. The stranger fingered through the pages of a notebook, made some calculations, reflected for a moment and then suddenly asked the Jew: "Excuse me, when is Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement)?" "Oho!", said the Jew, and put his feet up on the seat again before answering.’
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1680
It cannot be denied that this representation by something small is related to the ‘tendency to economy’ which we were left with as the last common element after our investigation of verbal technique.
Here is a very similar example:
‘The doctor, who had been asked to look after the Baroness at her confinement, pronounced that the moment had not come, and suggested to the Baron that in the meantime they should have a game of cards in the next room. After a while a cry of pain from the Baroness struck the ears of the two men: "Ah, mon Dieu, que je souffre!" Her husband sprang up, but the doctor signed to him to sit down: "It’s nothing. Let’s go on with the game!" A little later there were again sounds from the pregnant woman: "Mein Gott, mein Gott, what terrible pains!" - "Aren’t you going in, Professor?" asked the Baron. - "No, no. It’s not time yet." - At last there came from next door an unmistakable cry of "Aa-ee, aa-ee, aa-ee!" The doctor threw down his cards and exclaimed: "Now it’s time."'
This successful joke demonstrates two things from the example of the way in which the cries of pain uttered by an aristocratic lady in child-birth changed their character little by little. It shows how pain causes primitive nature to break through all the layers of education, and how an important decision can be properly made to depend on an apparently trivial phenomenon.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1681
There is another kind of indirect representation used by jokes, namely the ‘analogy’. We have kept it back so long because the consideration of it comes up against new difficulties, or makes particularly evident difficulties that we have already come up against in other connections. We have already admitted that in some of the examples we have examined we have not been able to banish a doubt as to whether they ought to be regarded as jokes at all; and in this uncertainty we have recognized that the foundations of our enquiry have been seriously shaken. But I am aware of this uncertainty in no other material more strongly or more frequently than in jokes of analogy. There is a feeling - and this is probably true of a large number of other people under the same conditions - which tells me ‘this is a joke, I can pronounce this to be a joke’ even before the hidden essential nature of jokes has been discovered. This feeling leaves me in the lurch most often in the case of joking analogies. If to begin with I unhesitatingly pronounce an analogy to be a joke, a moment later I seem to notice that the enjoyment it gives me is of a quality different from what I am accustomed to derive from a joke. And the circumstance that joking analogies are very seldom able to provoke the explosive laugh which signalizes a good joke makes it impossible for me to resolve the doubt in my usual way - by limiting myself to the best and most effective examples of a species.
It is easy to demonstrate that there are remarkably fine and effective examples of analogies that do not in the least strike us as being jokes. The fine analogy between the tenderness in Ottilie’s diary and the scarlet thread of the English navy (p. 1629 n.) is one such. And I cannot refrain from quoting in the same sense another one, which I am never tired of admiring and the effect of which I have not grown out of. It is the analogy with which Ferdinand Lassalle ended one of his celebrated speeches for the defence (‘Science and the Workers’): ‘Upon a man such as I have shown you this one to be, who has devoted his life to the watchword "Science and the Workers", being convicted, if it were his lot, would make no more impression than would the bursting of a retort upon a chemist deep in his scientific experiments. As soon as the interruption is past, with a slight frown over the rebelliousness of his material, he will quietly pursue his researches and his labours.’
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1682
A rich selection of apt and joking analogies are to be found among Lichtenberg’s writings (the second volume of the Göttingen edition of 1853), and it is from there that I shall take the material for our investigation.
‘It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing someone’s beard.’
No doubt that seems to be a joke; but on closer examination we, notice that the joking effect does not arise from the analogy itself but from a subsidiary characteristic. ‘The torch of truth’ is not a new analogy but one that has been common for a very long time and has become reduced to a cliché - as always happens when an analogy is lucky and accepted into linguistic usage. Though we scarcely notice the analogy any longer in the phrase ‘the torch of truth’, it is suddenly given back its full original force by Lichtenberg, since an addition is now made to the analogy and a consequence is drawn from it. But we are already familiar with a process like this of giving its full meaning to a watered-down expression as a technique of joking. It finds a place in the multiple use of the same material (p. 1639 f.). It might quite well be that the joking impression produced by Lichtenberg’s remark arises only from its dependence on this joke-technique.
The same judgement may certainly apply as well to another joking analogy by the same author:
‘To be sure, the man was not a great light [Licht], but a great candlestick [Leuchter] . . . He was a Professor of Philosophy.’
To describe a man of learning as a great light, a lumen mondi, has long ceased to be an effective analogy, whether or not it originally had an effect as a joke. But the analogy is refreshed, it is given back its full force, if a modification is derived from it and a second, new, analogy is thus obtained from it. The way in which this second analogy comes about seems to be what determines the joke, not the two analogies themselves. This would be an instance of the same joke-technique as in the example of the torch.
The following example seems to have the character of a joke for another reason, but one that must be judged similarly:
‘Reviews seem to me to be a kind of childish illness to which new-born books are more or less liable. There are examples of the healthiest dying of it; and the weakest often get through it. Some escape it altogether. Attempts have often been made to guard against it by the amulets of preface and dedication, or even to inoculate against it by judgements of one’s own. But this does not always help.’
The comparison of reviews to a childish illness is founded in the first instance on the fact of being exposed to them shortly after first seeing the light of day. I cannot venture to decide whether up to this point the comparison has the character of a joke. But it is then carried further: it turns out that the subsequent fate of new books can be represented within the framework of the same analogy or through related analogies. A prolongation like this of an analogy is undoubtedly in the nature of a joke, but we already know what technique it has to thank for this - it is a case of unification, the making of an unsuspected connection. The character of the unification is not altered by the fact that here it consists in making an addition to a previous analogy.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1683
In another group of analogies one is tempted to shift what is undoubtedly an impression that has the character of a joke on to another factor, which once again has in itself nothing to do with the nature of the analogy. These are analogies which contain a striking juxtaposition, often a combination that sounds absurd, or which are replaced by something of the sort as the outcome of the analogy. The majority of the Lichtenberg examples belong to this group.
‘It is a pity that one cannot see the learned entrails of authors so as to discover what they have eaten.’ The ‘learned’ entrails is a bewildering and indeed absurd epithet, which is only explained by the analogy. What if the impression of its being a joke were due entirely to the bewildering character of the juxtaposition? If so, it would correspond to a method of joking with which we are quite familiar - ‘representation by absurdity’
Lichtenberg has used the same analogy between the ingestion of reading and instructive matter and the ingestion of physical nourishment for another joke:
‘He thought very highly of learning at home, and was therefore entirely in favour of learned stall-feeding.’
Other analogies by the same author exhibit the same absurd, or at least remarkable, assignment of epithets, which, as we now begin to see, are the true vehicles of the joke:
‘That is the weather side of my moral constitution; I can stand things there quite well.’
‘Everyone has his moral backside, which he does not show except in case of need and which he covers as long as possible with the breeches of respectability.’
‘Moral backside’ - the assignment of this remarkable epithet is the outcome of an analogy. But in addition, the analogy is continued further with an actual play upon words - ‘need’ - and a second even more unusual juxtaposition (‘the breeches of respectability’), which is perhaps a joke in itself; for the breeches, since they are the breeches of respectability, themselves, as it were, become a joke. We need not be surprised, then, if the whole gives us the impression of being an analogy that is a very good joke. We begin to notice that we are inclined, quite generally, where a characteristic attaches only to a part of a whole, to extend it in our estimation to the whole itself. The ‘breeches of respectability’, incidentally, recall some similarly bewildering lines of Heine’s:
. . . Bis mir endlich,
endlich alle Knopfe rissen
an der Hose der Geduld.¹
There can be no doubt that these last two analogies have a characteristic that we do not find in every good (that is to say, in every apt) analogy. They are to a great degree ‘debasing’, as we might put it. They juxtapose something of a high category, something abstract (in these instances, ‘respectability’ and ‘patience’), with something of a very concrete and even low kind (‘breeches’). We shall have to consider in another connection whether this peculiarity has anything to do with the joke. Here we will try to analyse another example in which this disparaging characteristic is quite specially plain. Weinberl, the clerk in Nestroy’s farce Einen Jux will er sich machen [He wants to have a spree], pictures to himself how one day, when he is a respectable old business man, he will remember the days of his youth: ‘When the ice in front of the warehouse of memory has been hacked up like this in a friendly talk’, he says, ‘when the arched doorway of old times has been unlocked again and the showcase of the imagination is fully stocked with goods from the past. . . .’ These are, to be sure, analogies between abstract and very commonplace concrete things; but the joke depends - whether entirely or in part - on the fact that a clerk is making use of analogies taken from the domain of his everyday activities. But the bringing of these abstractions into connection with the ordinary things with which his life is normally filled is an act of unification.
¹ [ . . . Till at last,
at last every button bursts
on my breeches of patience.]
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1684
Let us return to the Lichtenberg analogies:
‘The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds [= points of the compass] and might be given names in a similar way: for instance, "bread-bread fame" or "fame-fame-bread". As is so often the case with Lichtenberg’s jokes, the impression of something apt, witty and shrewd is so prominent that our judgement upon the nature of what constitutes the joke is misled by it. If some amount of joke is admixed with the admirable meaning in a remark of this kind, we are probably led into declaring that the whole thing is an excellent joke. I should like, rather, to hazard the statement that everything in it that is really in the nature of a joke arises from our surprise at the strange combination ‘bread bread-fame’. As a joke, therefore, it would be a ‘representation by absurdity’.
A strange juxtaposition or the attribution of an absurd epithet can stand by itself as the outcome of an analogy:
‘A zweischläfrige woman.’ ‘An einschläfriger church-pew.’¹ (Both by Lichtenberg.) Behind both these there is an analogy with a bed; in both of them, besides the ‘bewilderment’ the technical factor of ‘allusion’ is in operation - an allusion in one case to the sleepy effects of sermons and in the other to the inexhaustible topic of sexual relations.
So far we have found that whenever an analogy strikes us as being in the nature of a joke it owes this impression to the admixture of one of the joke-techniques that are familiar to us. But a few other examples seem at last to provide evidence that an analogy can in itself be a joke.
This is how Lichtenberg describes certain odes:
‘They are in poetry what Jakob Böhme’s immortal works are in prose - a kind of picnic, in which the author provides the words and the reader the sense.’
‘When he philosophizes, he throws as a rule an agreeable moonlight over things, which pleases in general but shows no single thing clearly.’
¹ [These two German words - meaning literally ‘that can sleep two’ and ‘that can sleep one’ - are ordinarily applied to beds, i.e. ‘double’ and ‘single’. Einschläfrig, however, can also mean ‘soporific’.]
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1685
Or here is Heine:
‘Her face resembled a palimpsest, on which, beneath the fresh black monastic manuscript of the text of a Church Father there lurk the half-obliterated lines of an ancient Greek love poem.’
Or let us take the lengthy analogy, with a highly degrading purpose, in the ‘Bäder von Lucca’
‘A catholic cleric behaves rather like a clerk with a post in a large business house. The Church, the big firm, of which the Pope is head, gives him a fixed job and, in return, a fixed salary. He works lazily, as everyone does who is not working for his own profit, who has numerous colleagues and can easily escape notice in the bustle of a large concern. All he has at heart is the credit of the house and still more its maintenance, since if it should go bankrupt he would lose his livelihood. A protestant cleric, on the other hand, is in every case his own principal and carries on the business of religion for his own profit. He does not, like his catholic fellow-traders, carry on a wholesale business but only retail. And since he must himself manage it alone, he cannot be lazy. He must advertise his articles of faith, he must depreciate his competitors’ articles, and, genuine retailer that he is, he stands in his retail shop, full of business envy of all the great houses, and particularly of the great house in Rome, which pays the wages of so many thousands of book-keepers and packers and has its factories in all four quarters of the globe.’
In the face of this and many other examples, we can no longer dispute the fact that an analogy can in itself possess the characteristic of being a joke, without this impression being accounted for by a complication with one of the familiar joke techniques. But, that being so, we are completely at a loss to see what it is that determines the joking characteristic of analogies, since that characteristic certainly does not reside in analogy as a form of expression of thought or in the operation of making a comparison. All we can do is to include analogy among the species of ‘indirect representation’ used by the joke-technique and we must leave unresolved the problem which we have met with much more clearly in the case of analogies than in the methods of joking that we came across earlier. No doubt, moreover, there must be some special reason why the decision whether something is a joke or not offers greater difficulties in analogies than in other forms of expression.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1686
This gap in our understanding gives us no grounds, however, for complaining that this first investigation has been without results. In view of the intimate connection which we must be prepared to attribute to the different characteristics of jokes, it would be imprudent to expect that we could completely explain one side of the problem before we have so much as cast a glance at the others. We shall no doubt have now to attack the problem from another direction.
Can we feel sure that none of the possible techniques of jokes has escaped our investigation? Of course not. But a continued examination of fresh material can convince us that we have got to know the commonest and most important technical methods of the joke-work - at all events as much as is required for forming a judgement on the nature of that psychical process. So far we have not arrived at any such judgement; but on the other hand we are now in possession of an important indication of the direction from which we may expect to receive further light upon the problem. The interesting processes of condensation accompanied by the formation of a substitute, which we have recognized as the core of the technique of verbal jokes, point towards the formation of dreams, in the mechanism of which the same psychical processes have been discovered. This is equally true, however, of the techniques of conceptual jokes - displacement, faulty reasoning, absurdity, indirect representation, representation by the opposite - which re-appear one and all in the technique of the dream-work. Displacement is responsible for the puzzling appearance of dreams, which prevents our recognizing that they are a continuation of our waking life. The use of absurdity and nonsense in dreams has cost them the dignity of being regarded as psychical products and has led the authorities to suppose that a disintegration of the mental activities and a cessation of criticism, morality and logic are necessary conditions of the formation of dreams. Representation by the opposite is so common in dreams that even the popular books of dream-interpretation, which are on a completely wrong tack, are in the habit of taking it into account. Indirect representation - the replacement of a dream-thought by an allusion, by something small, a symbolism akin to analogy - is precisely what distinguishes the mode of expression of dreams from that of our waking life.¹ So far-reaching an agreement between the methods of the joke-work and those of the dream-work can scarcely be a matter of chance. To demonstrate this agreement in detail and to examine its basis will be one of our later tasks.
¹ Cf. Chapter VI (‘The Dream-Work’) of my Interpretation of Dreams.