Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1762
VII
JOKES AND THE SPECIES OF THE COMIC
We have approached the problems of the comic in an unusual way. It seemed to us that jokes, which are ordinarily regarded as a sub-species of the comic, offer enough peculiarities to be attacked directly; thus we have avoided their relation to the more inclusive category of the comic so long as that was possible, though we have not failed to pick out en passant a few hints that might throw light on the comic. We have had no difficulty in discovering that socially the comic behaves differently from jokes. It can be content with two persons: a first who finds what is comic and a second in whom it is found. The third person, to whom the comic thing is told, intensifies the comic process but adds nothing new to it. In a joke this third person is indispensable for the completion of the pleasure-producing process; but on the other hand the second person may be absent, except where a tendentious, aggressive joke is concerned. A joke is made, the comic is found - and first and foremost in people, only by a subsequent transference in things, situations, and so on, as well. As regards jokes, we know that the sources of the pleasure that is to be fostered lie in the subject himself and not in outside people. We have seen, too, that jokes can sometimes re-open sources of the comic which have become inaccessible, and that the comic often serves as a façade for a joke and replaces the fore-pleasure which has otherwise to be produced by the familiar technique (p. 1739). None of this precisely suggests that the relations between jokes and the comic are very simple. On the other hand, the problems of the comic have proved so complicated and all the efforts of the philosophers at solving them have been so unsuccessful that we cannot hold out any prospect that we shall be able to master them in a sudden onslaught, as it were, by approaching them from the direction of jokes. Moreover, for our investigation of jokes we brought with us an instrument of which no one else had hitherto made use - a knowledge of the dream-work. We have no similar advantage at our command to help us to understand the comic, and we must therefore expect that we shall discover no more about the nature of the comic than what we have already found in jokes, in so far as they form part of the comic and possess in their own nature certain of its features unchanged or merely modified.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1763
The type of the comic which stands nearest to jokes is the naïve. Like the comic in general, the naïve is ‘found’ and not, like a joke, ‘made’. Indeed, the naïve cannot be made at all, whereas alongside the pure comic we have to take into account the case in which something is made comic - an evocation of the comic. The naïve must arise, without our taking any part in it, in the remarks and actions of other people, who stand in the position of the second person in the comic or in jokes. The naïve occurs if someone completely disregards an inhibition because it is not present in him - if, therefore, he appears to overcome it without any effort. It is a condition for the naïve’s producing its effect that we should know that the person concerned does not possess the inhibition; otherwise we call him not naïve but impudent. We do not laugh at him but are indignant at him. The effect produced by the naïve is irresistible, and seems simple to understand. An inhibitory expenditure which we usually make suddenly becomes unutilizable owing to our hearing the naïve remark, and it is discharged by laughter. There is no need here for the attention to be distracted, probably because the lifting of the inhibition occurs directly and not through the intermediary of an operation that has been provoked. In this we are behaving like the third person in a joke, who is presented with the economy in inhibition without any effort on his own part.
In view of the insight we have gained into the genesis of inhibitions from following the course of development from play to jokes, it will not surprise us to find that the naïve occurs far the most often in children, and is then carried over to uneducated adults, whom we may regard as childish so far as their intellectual development is concerned. Naive remarks are, of course, better suited for comparison with jokes than naïve actions, since remarks and not actions are the usual form in which jokes are expressed. It is illuminating to find that naïve remarks like those made by children may also be described as ‘naïve jokes’. The conformity between jokes and naïveté, as well as the reasons for their dissimilarity, will be made clearer to us by a few examples.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1764
A three-and-a-half-year-old girl gave this warning to her brother: ‘I say, don’t eat so much of that pudding or you’ll get ill and have to have some "Bubizin".’ ‘"Bubizin"?’ asked her mother, ‘What’s that?’ ‘When I was ill’, answered the child in self-justification, ‘I had to have some Medizin.’ The child thought that what the doctor prescribed was called ‘Mädi-zin’ when it was for a ‘Mädi’ [little girl] and concluded that if it was for a ‘Bubi’ [little boy] it would be called ‘Bubi-zin’. This is constructed like a verbal joke working with the technique of similarity of sound, and indeed it might have occurred as a real joke, in which case we should have greeted it, half-unwillingly, with a smile. As an example of naïveté it strikes us as quite excellent and it raises a laugh. What is it that makes the difference here between a joke and something naïve? Evidently not the wording or the technique, which would be the same for both possibilities, but a factor, rather, which at first sight seems quite remote from both of them. It is merely a question of whether we assume that the speaker has intended to make a joke or whether we suppose that he - the child - has tried in good faith to draw a serious conclusion on the basis of his uncorrected ignorance. Only the latter case is one of naïveté. Here for the first time our attention is drawn to the other person putting himself into the psychical process that occurs in the person who produces the remark.
This view will be confirmed if we examine another example. A brother and sister - a twelve-year-old girl and a ten-year-old boy - were performing a drama composed by themselves before an audience of uncles and aunts. The scene represented a hut by the sea-shore. In the first act the two author-actors, a poor fisherman and his honest wife, are complaining about the hard times and their small earnings. The husband decides to cross the wide seas in his boat to seek his fortune elsewhere, and, after tender farewells between the two of them, the curtain falls. The second act takes place a few years later. The fisherman has returned a wealthy man with a big bag of money; and he tells his wife, who awaits his arrival outside the hut, what good fortune he has met with in foreign lands. His wife interrupts him proudly: ‘I too have not been idle.’ And thereupon she opens the door of the hut and reveals to his eyes twelve large dolls lying asleep on the floor. . . . At this point in the drama the actors were interrupted by a storm of laughter from the audience, which they were unable to understand. They stared disconcerted at their fond relatives, who had behaved properly till then and had listened with eager attention. The laughter is explained on the supposition that the audience assumed that the young authors still knew nothing of the conditions governing the origin of children and were therefore able to believe that a wife could boast of the offspring born during her husband’s long absence and that a husband could rejoice with her over them. What the authors produced on the basis of this ignorance might be described as nonsense or absurdity.
A third example will show us yet another technique, the acquaintance of which we have made in jokes, in the service of the naïve. A ‘Frenchwoman’¹ was engaged as governess for a little girl, but did not meet with her personal approval. Scarcely had the newcomer left the room when the little girl gave voice to loud criticism: ‘That a Frenchwoman? She may call herself one because she once lay beside a Frenchman!’ This might have been a joke - even a tolerably good one (double meaning or allusion, with double entendre) if the child had had the slightest notion of the possibility of the double meaning. In fact she had merely transferred to the stranger she disliked a facetious way of describing a thing as ungenuine which she had often heard: ‘That genuine gold? It may once have lain beside gold.’ Owing to the child’s ignorance, which so completely altered the psychical process in her understanding hearers, her remark became a naïve one. In consequence of this condition, there is the possibility of a misleading naïveté. We may assume in the child an ignorance that no longer exists; and children often represent themselves as naïve, so as to enjoy a liberty that they would not otherwise be granted.
¹ [‘Französin.’ The ordinary term for a French governess in Austria.]
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1765
We can illustrate from these examples the position occupied by the naïve between jokes and the comic. The naïve (in speech) agrees with jokes as regards wording and content: it brings about a misuse of words, a piece of nonsense, or a piece of smut. But the psychical process in the first person, who produces it, which raised so many interesting and puzzling questions for us in regard to jokes, is here completely absent. A naïve person thinks he has used his means of expression and trains of thought normally and simply, and he has no arrière pensée in mind; nor does he derive any yield of pleasure from producing something naïve. None of the characteristics of the naïve exist except in the apprehension of the person who hears it - a person who coincides with the third person in jokes. Moreover the person who produces it does so without any effort. The complicated technique, which in jokes is designed to paralyse the inhibition arising from rational criticism, is absent in him; he does not possess this inhibition as yet, so that he can produce nonsense and smut directly and without compromise. In that respect the naïve is a marginal case of the joke; it arises if in the formula for the construction of jokes we reduce the value of the censorship to zero.
Whereas it was a condition for the effectiveness of a joke that both persons should be subject to approximately the same inhibitions or internal resistances, it will be seen that it is a condition for the naïve that the one person should possess inhibitions which the other is without. The apprehension of the naïve lies with the person provided with inhibitions, and he alone obtains the yield of pleasure which the naïve brings about. We have come near to guessing that that pleasure arises from the lifting of inhibitions. Since the pleasure from jokes has the same origin - a core of verbal pleasure and pleasure from nonsense, and a casing of pleasure in the lifting of inhibitions or in the relief of psychical expenditure - this similar relation to inhibition explains the internal kinship between the naïve and jokes. In both of them the pleasure arises through the lifting of internal inhibition.
The psychical process in the receptive person, however, is as much more complicated in the case of the naïve as it is simplified in comparison with jokes in the productive person. (In the case of the naïve, incidentally, our own self invariably coincides with the receptive person, while in the case of jokes we may equally occupy the position of the productive one.) When the receptive person hears something naïve, it must on the one hand affect him like a joke - and our examples give evidence precisely of this - for, as with a joke, the lifting of the censorship is made possible for him by no more than the effort of listening. But only a part of the pleasure created by the naïve can be explained in this way; and even this might be endangered in certain instances - for example, at hearing a naïve piece of smut. We might react to this at once with the same indignation that might be felt against a real piece of smut, if it were not that another factor spares us this indignation and at the same time offers us the more important part of our pleasure in the naïve. This other factor is the condition already mentioned that, in order to recognize the naïve, we must know that the internal inhibition is absent in the producing person. Only when this is certain do we laugh instead of being indignant. Thus we take the producing person’s psychical state into consideration, put ourselves into it and try to understand it by comparing it with our own. It is these processes of empathy and comparison that result in the economy in expenditure which we discharge by laughing.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1766
It would be possible to prefer a simpler account - that our indignation is made superfluous by the fact that the other person has had no need to overcome a resistance; in that case the laughter would occur at the cost of the economy in indignation. In order to discourage this view, which is on the whole misleading, I will make a sharper distinction between two cases which I have treated together above. The naïve which we come across can either be in the nature of a joke, as it was in our examples, or in the nature of smut (or of what is in general objectionable); and the latter will occur especially when it is expressed not in speech but in action. This second alternative is really misleading: one could suppose, as far as it is concerned, that the pleasure arises from the economized and transformed indignation. But the first alternative throws more light on things. A naïve remark - e.g. ‘Bubizin - can in itself act like a minor joke and give no cause for indignation. This alternative is certainly the less frequent; but it is the purer and by far the more instructive. In so far as what we are concerned with is the fact that the child has seriously and without arrière pensée believed that the syllable ‘Medi’ in ‘Medizin’ is identical with her own name ‘Mädi’, our pleasure in what we hear receives an increase which has no longer anything to do with pleasure in a joke. We now look at what has been said from two points of view - once in the way it happened in the child and once in the way it would have happened to us; and in making this comparison we see that the child has found an identity and that she has overcome a barrier that exists for us; and we then seem to go further and say to ourselves: ‘If you choose to understand what you’ve heard, you can economize the expenditure on keeping up this barrier.’ The expenditure liberated in a comparison like this is the source of pleasure in the naïve and it is discharged by laughter; and it is, incidentally, the same pleasure that we should otherwise have transformed into indignation, if this had not been excluded by our understanding of the producing person and, in this case, by the nature of what was said as well. But if we take the instance of a naïve joke as a model for the other alternative, of something naïve that is objectionable, we shall see that there too the economy in inhibition can arise directly from the comparison, that there is no necessity for us to assume an indignation that begins and is then stifled, and that this indignation in fact only corresponds to using the liberated expenditure in another way - against which in the case of jokes complicated protective arrangements were necessary.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1767
This comparison, and this economy in expenditure by putting oneself into the mental process of the producing person, can only claim to be of significance for the naïve, however, if it is not in it alone that they are found. A suspicion occurs to us, in fact, that this mechanism, which is wholly alien to jokes, may be a part and perhaps an essential part of the psychical process in the comic. Looked at from this point of view - and this is undoubtedly the most important aspect of the naïve - the naïve thus presents itself as a species of the comic. The extra element in our examples of naïve speeches that is added to the pleasure of a joke is ‘comic’ pleasure. We should be inclined to assume of it quite generally that it arises from expenditure economized in a comparison of someone else’s remarks with our own. But since this leads us to far-reaching considerations, we will first conclude our discussion of the naïve. The naïve, then, would be a species of the comic in so far as its pleasure springs from the difference in expenditure which arises in trying to understand someone else; and it would approach the joke in being subject to the condition that the expenditure economized in the comparison must be an inhibitory expenditure.¹
Let us hastily add a few points of agreement and of difference between the concepts that we have just reached and those which have long been familiar in the psychology of the comic. The putting of oneself in the other person’s place and trying to understand him is clearly nothing other than the ‘comic lending’ which since Jean Paul has played a part in the analysis of the comic; the ‘comparing’ of someone else’s mental process with one’s own corresponds to the ‘psychological contrast’ which we can at last find a place for here, after not knowing what to do with it in jokes. But we differ in our explanation of comic pleasure from many authorities who regard it as arising from the oscillation of attention backwards and forwards between contrasting ideas. A mechanism of pleasure like this would seem incomprehensible to us;² but we may point out that in a comparison between contrasts a difference in expenditure occurs which, if it is not used for some other purpose, becomes capable of discharge and may thus become a source of pleasure.
¹ In what I have written, I have all the time identified the naïve with the naïve-comic, which is certainly not in every case admissible. But it is enough for our purposes to study the character of the naïve in ‘naïve jokes’ and in ‘naïve smut’. Any further investigation would imply an intention on my part of using this as a basis for my explanation of the comic.
² Bergson, too, rejects the idea of comic pleasure having any such derivation, which is evidently influenced by an effort to establish an analogy with the laughter caused by tickling; and he supports his view with some good arguments (1900, 99). - The explanation of comic pleasure given by Lipps is on a quite different plane: in accordance with his view of the comic, he would regard it as something that is ‘unexpectedly small’.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1768
It is only with misgivings that I venture to approach the problem of the comic itself. It would be presumptuous to expect that my efforts would be able to make any decisive contribution to its solution when the works of a great number of eminent thinkers have failed to produce a wholly satisfactory explanation. My intention is in fact no more than to pursue the lines of thought that have proved valuable with jokes a short distance further into the sphere of the comic.
The comic arises in the first instance as an unintended discovery derived from human social relations. It is found in people - in their movements, forms, actions and traits of character, originally in all probability only in their physical characteristics but later in their mental ones as well or, as the case may be, in the expression of those characteristics. By means of a very common sort of personification, animals become comic too, and inanimate objects. At the same time, the comic is capable of being detached from people, in so far as we recognize the conditions under which a person seems comic. In this way the comic of situation comes about, and this recognition affords the possibility of making a person comic at one’s will by putting him in situations in which his actions are subject to these comic conditions. The discovery that one has it in one’s power to make someone else comic opens the way to an undreamt-of yield of comic pleasure and is the origin of a highly developed technique. One can make oneself comic, too, as easily as other people. The methods that serve to make people comic are: putting them in a comic situation, mimicry, disguise, unmasking, caricature, parody, travesty, and so on. It is obvious that these techniques can be used to serve hostile and aggressive purposes. One can make a person comic in order to make him become contemptible, to deprive him of his claim to dignity and authority. But even if such an intention habitually underlies making people comic, this need not be the meaning of what is comic spontaneously.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1769
This irregular survey of the occurrences of the comic will already show us that a very extensive field of origin is to be ascribed to it and that such specialized conditions as we found, for instance, in the naïve are not to be expected in it. In order to get on the track of the determining condition that is valid for the comic, the most important thing is the choice of an introductory case. We shall choose the comic of movement, because we recollect that the most primitive kind of stage performance - the pantomime - uses that method for making us laugh. The answer to the question of why we laugh at the clown’s movements is that they seem to us extravagant and inexpedient. We are laughing at an expenditure that is too large. Let us look now for the determining condition outside the comic that is artificially constructed - where it can be found unintended. A child’s movements do not seem to us comic, although he kicks and jumps about. On the other hand, it is comic where a child who is learning to write follows the movements of his pen with his tongue stuck out; in these associated motions we see an unnecessary expenditure of movement which we should spare ourselves if we were carrying out the same activity. Similarly, other such associated motions, or merely exaggerated expressive movements, seem to us comic in adults too. Pure examples of this species of the comic are to be seen, for instance, in the movements of someone playing skittles who, after he has released the ball, follows its course as though he could still continue to direct it. Thus, too, all grimaces are comic which exaggerate the normal expression of the emotions, even if they are produced involuntarily as in sufferers from St. Vitus’s dance (chorea). And in the same way, the passionate movements of a modern conductor seem comic to any unmusical person who cannot understand their necessity. Indeed, it is from this comic of movement that the comic of bodily shapes and facial features branches off; for these are regarded as though they were the outcome of an exaggerated or pointless movement. Staring eyes, a hooked nose hanging down to the mouth, ears sticking out, a hump-back - all such things probably only produce a comic effect in so far as movements are imagined which would be necessary to bring about these features; and here the nose, the ears and other parts of the body are imagined as more movable than they are in reality. There is no doubt that it is comic if someone can ‘waggle his ears’, and it would certainly be still more comic if he could move his nose up and down. A good deal of the comic effect produced on us by animals comes from our perceiving in them movements such as these which we cannot imitate ourselves.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1770
But how is it that we laugh when we have recognized that some other person’s movements are exaggerated and inexpedient? By making a comparison, I believe, between the movement I observe in the other person and the one that I should have carried out myself in his place. The two things compared must of course be judged by the same standard, and this standard is my expenditure of innervation, which is linked to my idea of the movement in both of the two cases. This statement calls for elucidation and expansion.
What we are here comparing is on the one hand the psychical expenditure while we are having a certain idea and on the other hand the content of the thing that we are having the idea of. Our statement says that the former is not in general and in theory independent of the latter, the content of the idea, and in particular that the idea of something large demands more expenditure than the idea of something small. So long as it is only a matter of the idea of different large movements, there should be no difficulties over the theoretical grounds for our statement or over proving it by observation. We shall see that in this case an attribute of the idea in fact coincides with an attribute of what we have an idea of, though psychology warns us as a rule against such a confusion.
I have acquired the idea of a movement of a particular size by carrying the movement out myself or by imitating it, and through this action I have learnt a standard for this movement in my innervatory sensations.¹
When, now, I perceive a movement like this of greater or lesser size in someone else, the securest way to an understanding (an apperception) of it will be for me to carry it out by imitation, and I can then decide from the comparison on which of the movements my expenditure was the greater. An impulsion of this kind to imitation is undoubtedly present in perceptions of movements. But actually I do not carry the imitation through, any more than I still spell words out if I learnt to read by spelling. Instead of imitating the movement with my muscles, I have an idea of it though the medium of my memory-traces of expenditures on similar movements. Ideation or ‘thinking’ differs from acting or performing above all in the fact that it displaces far smaller cathectic energies and holds back the main expenditure from discharge.
¹ The memory of this innervatory expenditure will remain the essential part of my idea of this movement, and there will always be modes of thinking in my mental life in which the idea will be represented by nothing else than this expenditure. In other circumstances, indeed, this element may be replaced by another - for instance, by visual images of the aim of the movement or by a verbal image; and in certain kinds of abstract thinking a token will suffice instead of the full content of the idea.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1771
But how is the quantitative factor - the greater or lesser size - of the perceived movement to be given expression in the idea? And if there can be no representation of quantity in the idea, which is made up of qualities, how can I distinguish the ideas of movements of different sizes? - how can I make the comparison on which everything here depends? The way is pointed out by physiology, for it teaches us that even during the process of ideation innervations run out to the muscles, though these, it is true, correspond to a very modest expenditure of energy. Now it becomes very plausible to suppose that this innervatory energy that accompanies the process of ideation is used to represent the quantitative factor of the idea: that it is larger when there is an idea of a large movement than when it is a question of a small one. Thus the idea of the larger movement would in this case in fact be the larger one - that is, it would be the idea accompanied by the larger expenditure of energy.
Direct observation shows that human beings are in the habit of expressing the attributes of largeness and smallness in the contents of their ideas by means of a varying expenditure in a kind of ideational mimetics. If a child or a man from the common people, or a member of certain races, narrates or describes something, it is easy to see that he is not content to make his idea plain to the hearer by the choice of clear words, but that he also represents its subject-matter in his expressive movements: he combines the mimetic and the verbal forms of representation. And he especially demonstrates quantities and intensities: ‘a high mountain’ - and he raises his hand over his head, ‘a little dwarf’ - and he holds it near the ground. He may have broken himself of the habit of painting with his hands, yet for that reason he will do it with his voice; and if he exercises self-control in this too, it may be wagered that he will open his eyes wide when he describes something large and squeeze them shut when he comes to something small. What he is thus expressing is not his affects but actually the content of what he is having an idea of.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1772
Are we to suppose, then, that this need for mimetics is only aroused by the requirements of communicating something, in spite of the fact that a good part of this method of representation altogether escapes the hearer’s attention? On the contrary, I believe that these mimetics exist, even if with less liveliness, quite apart from any communication, that they occur as well when the subject is forming an idea of something for his own private benefit and is thinking of something pictorially, and that he then expresses ‘large’ and ‘small’ in his own body just as he does in speech, at all events by a change in the innervation of his features and sense organs. I can even believe that the somatic innervation which is commensurate with the content of what he is having an idea of may have been the beginning and origin of mimetics for purposes of communication; it only needed to be intensified and made noticeable to other people in order to be able to serve that end. If I support the view that to the ‘expression of the emotions’, which is well known as the physical concomitant of mental processes, there should be added the ‘expression of the ideational content’, I can see quite clearly that my remarks relating to the category of large and small do not exhaust the subject. I might myself add a variety of points even before arriving at the phenomena of tension by which a person indicates somatically the concentration of his attention and the level of abstraction at which his thinking is at the moment proceeding. I regard the matter as a really important one, and I believe that if ideational mimetics are followed up, they may be as useful in other branches of aesthetics as they are here for an understanding of the comic.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1773
To return now to the comic of movement. When, I repeat, a particular movement is perceived, the impulsion is given to forming an idea of it by means of a certain expenditure of energy. In ‘trying to understand’, therefore, in apperceiving this movement, I make a certain expenditure, and in this portion of the mental process I behave exactly as though I were putting myself in the place of the person I am observing. But at the same moment, probably, I bear in mind the aim of this movement, and my earlier experience enables me to estimate the scale of expenditure required for reaching that aim. In doing so I disregard the person whom I am observing and behave as though I myself wanted to reach the aim of the movement. These two possibilities in my imagination amount to a comparison between the observed movement and my own. If the other person’s movement is exaggerated and inexpedient, my increased expenditure in order to understand i| is inhibited in statu nascendi, as it were in the act of being mobilized; it is declared superfluous and is free for use elsewhere or perhaps for discharge by laughter. This would be the way in which, other circumstances being favourable, pleasure in a comic movement is generated - an innervatory expenditure which has become an unusable surplus when a comparison is made with a movement of one’s own.
It will be seen that our discussions must proceed in two different directions: first, to establish the conditions governing the discharge of the surplus, and second, to examine whether the other cases of the comic can be looked at in the same way as the comic of movement.
We will take the second question first and will turn from the comic of movement and action to the comic which is found in the intellectual functions and the character traits of other people.
As a sample of this class we may choose comic nonsense, as it is produced by ignorant candidates in an examination; it is no doubt more difficult to give a simple example of character traits. We should not be confused if we find that nonsense and stupidity, which so often produce a comic effect, are nevertheless not felt as comic in every case, just as the same characters which on one occasion can be laughed at as comic may on another occasion strike one as contemptible or hateful. This fact, of which we must not lose sight, merely points out that other factors are concerned in producing the comic effect besides the comparison we know about - factors which we may be able to trace out in another connection.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1774
The comic that is found in someone else’s intellectual and mental characteristics is evidently once again the outcome of a comparison between him and my own self, though, curiously enough, a comparison which has as a rule produced the opposite result to that in the case of a comic movement or action. In this latter case it was comic if the other person had made a greater expenditure than I thought I should need. In the case of a mental function, on the contrary, it becomes comic if the other person has spared himself expenditure which I regard as indispensable (for nonsense and stupidity are inefficiencies of function). In the former case I laugh because he has taken too much trouble, in the latter because he has taken too little. The comic effect apparently depends, therefore, on the difference between the two cathectic expenditures - one’s own and the other person’s as estimated by ‘empathy’ - and not on which of the two the difference favours. But this peculiarity, which at first sight confuses our judgement, vanishes when we bear in mind that a restriction of our muscular work and an increase of our intellectual work fit in with the course of our personal development towards a higher level of civilization. By raising our intellectual expenditure we can achieve the same result with a diminished expenditure on our movements. Evidence of this cultural success is provided by our machines.¹
Thus a uniform explanation is provided of the fact that a person appears comic to us if, in comparison with ourselves, he makes too great an expenditure on his bodily functions and too little on his mental ones; and it cannot be denied that in both these cases our laughter expresses a pleasurable sense of the superiority which we feel in relation to him. If the relation in the two cases is reversed - if the other person’s physical expenditure is found to be less than ours or his mental expenditure greater - then we no longer laugh, we are filled with astonishment and admiration.²
¹ As the proverb says: ‘Was man nicht im Kopfe hat, muss man in den Beinen haben.’ [Literally: ‘What one hasn’t in one’s head one must have in one’s legs,’]
² The contradictoriness with which the determining conditions of the comic are pervaded - the fact that sometimes an excess and sometimes an insufficiency seems to be the source of comic pleasure - has contributed no little to the confusion of the problem. Cf. Lipps (1898, 47).
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1775
The origin of comic pleasure which has been discussed here - its derivation from a comparison of another person with our self, from the difference between our own psychical expenditure and the other person’s as estimated by empathy - is probably the most important genetically. It is certain, however, that it has not remained the only one. We have learnt at one time or other to disregard this comparison between the other person and ourself and to derive the pleasurable difference from the one side only, whether from the empathy or from the processes in ourself - which proves that the feeling of superiority bears no essential relation to comic pleasure. A comparison is indispensable for the generation of this pleasure. We find that it is made between two cathectic expenditures that occur in rapid succession and are concerned with the same function, and these expenditures are either brought about in us through empathy into someone else or, without any such relation, are discovered in our own mental processes.
The first of these cases - in which, therefore, the other person still plays a part, though no longer in comparison with our own self - arises when the pleasurable difference in cathectic expenditures is brought about by external influences, which we may sum up as a ‘situation’. For that reason, this species of the comic is also known as ‘the comic of situation’. The characteristics of the person who provides the comic effect do not in this case play an essential part: we laugh even if we have to confess that we should have had to do the same in that situation. We are here extracting the comic from the relation of human beings to the often over-powerful external world; and so far as the mental processes of a human being are concerned, this external world also comprises social conventions and necessities and even his own bodily needs. A typical instance of the latter kind is provided if, in the middle of an activity which makes demands on a person’s mental powers, he is suddenly interrupted by a pain or an excretory need. The contrast which, through empathy, offers us the comic difference is that between the high degree of interest taken by him before the interruption and the minimal one that he has left over for his mental activity when the interruption has occurred. The person who offers us this difference becomes comic to us once again for his inferiority; but he is inferior only in comparison with his earlier self and not in comparison with us, for we know that in the same circumstances we could not have behaved otherwise. But it is noteworthy that we only find someone’s being put in a position of inferiority comic where there is empathy - that is, where someone else is concerned: if we ourselves were in similar straits we should be conscious only of distressing feelings. It is probably only by keeping such feelings away from ourselves that we are able to enjoy pleasure from the difference arising out of a comparison between these changing cathexes.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1776
The other source of the comic, which we find in the transformations of our own cathexes, lies in our relations with the future, which we are accustomed to anticipate with our expectant ideas. I assume that a quantitatively definite expenditure underlies each of our ideas - an expenditure which, in the event of a disappointment, is therefore diminished by a definite difference. Here I may once again recall the remarks I made earlier on ‘ideational mimetics’. But it seems to me to be easier to prove a real mobilization of cathectic energy in the case of expectation. It is quite obviously true of a number of cases that motor preparations are what form the expression of expectation - above all in all cases in which the expected event makes demands on my motility - and that these preparations can be at once determined quantitatively. If I am expecting to catch a ball which is being thrown to me, I put my body into tensions which will enable it to meet the impact of the ball; and, should the ball when it is caught turn out to be too light, my superfluous movements make me comic to the spectators. I have let myself be enticed by my expectation into an exaggerated expenditure of movement. The same is true if, for instance, I lift a fruit which I have judged to be heavy out of a basket, but which, to my disappointment, turns out to be a sham one, hollow and made of wax. My hand, by jumping up, betrays the fact that I had prepared an innervation too large for the purpose - and I am laughed at for it. There is at least one case in which the expenditure on expectation can be directly demonstrated measurably by physiological experiments on animals. In Pavlov’s experiments on salivary secretions, various kinds of food are set before dogs in whom a salivary fistula has been opened; the amounts of saliva secreted then vary according to whether the experimental conditions confirm or disappoint the dogs’ expectations of being fed with the food set before them.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1777
Even when what is expected makes demands on my sense organs and not on my motility, I may assume that the expectation is expressed in a certain motor expenditure towards making the senses tense and towards holding back other impressions that are not expected; and, in general, I may regard an attitude of attention as being a motor function equivalent to a certain expenditure. I may further take it as a premiss that the preparatory activity of expectation will not be independent of the magnitude of the impression that is expected, but that I shall represent its largeness or smallness mimetically by a larger or smaller preparatory expenditure, as in the case of making a communication and in the case of thinking unaccompanied by expectation. The expenditure on expectation is, however, put together from several components, and in the case of my disappointment, too, various points will be involved - not only whether what happens is perceptually greater or smaller than what is expected, but also whether it is worthy of the great interest which I had expended on the expectation. In this way I shall perhaps be led to take into account, besides the expenditure on the representation of large and small (the ideational mimetics), the expenditure on tightening the attention (the expenditure on expectation), and beyond this in other cases the expenditure on abstraction. But these other kinds of expenditure can easily be traced back to that on large and small, since what is more interesting, more sublime and even more abstract are only special cases, with particular qualities, of what is larger. If we consider in addition that, according to Lipps and other writers, quantitative (and not qualitative) contrast is to be regarded primarily as the source of comic pleasure, we shall on the whole feel glad that we chose the comic of movement as the starting-point of our enquiry.
Lipps, in the volume which has been so often quoted in these pages, has attempted, as an amplification to Kant’s statement that the comic is ‘an expectation that has turned to nothing’, to derive comic pleasure quite generally from expectation. In spite, however, of the many instructive and valuable findings which this attempt has brought to light, I should like to support the criticism made by other authorities that Lipps has taken the field of origin of the comic far too narrowly and has been obliged to use great violence in order to bring its phenomena within the scope of his formula.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1778
Mankind have not been content to enjoy the comic where they have come upon it in their experience; they have also sought to bring it about intentionally, and we can learn more about the nature of the comic if we study the means which serve to make things comic. First and foremost, it is possible to produce the comic in relation to oneself in order to amuse other people - for instance, by making oneself out clumsy or stupid. In that way one produces a comic effect exactly as though one really were these things, by fulfilling the condition of the comparison which leads to the difference in expenditure. But one does not in this way make oneself ridiculous or contemptible, but may in some circumstances even achieve admiration. The feeling of superiority does not arise in the other person if he knows that one has only been pretending; and this affords fresh evidence of the fundamental independence of the comic from the feeling of superiority.
As regards making other people comic, the principal means is to put them in situations in which a person becomes comic as a result of human dependence on external events, particularly on social factors, without regard to the personal characteristics of the individual concerned - that is to say, by employing the comic of situation. This putting of someone in a comic situation may be a real one (a practical joke¹) - by sticking out a leg so that someone trips over it as though he were clumsy, by making him seem stupid by exploiting his credulity, or trying to convince him of something nonsensical, and so on - or it may be simulated by speech or play. The aggressiveness, to which making a person comic usually ministers, is much assisted by the fact that the comic pleasure is independent of the reality of the comic situation, so that everyone is in fact exposed, without any defence, to being made comic.
¹ [In English in the original.]
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1779
But there are yet other means of making things comic which deserve special consideration and also indicate in part fresh sources of comic pleasure. Among these, for instance, is mimicry, which gives quite extraordinary pleasure to the hearer and makes its object comic even if it is still far from the exaggeration of a caricature. It is much easier to find a reason for the comic effect of caricature than for that of mere mimicry. Caricature, parody and travesty (as well as their practical counterpart, unmasking) are directed against people and objects which lay claim to authority and respect, which are in some sense ‘sublime’. They are procedures for Herabsetzung, as the apt German expression has it.¹ What is sublime is something large in the figurative, psychical sense; and I should like to suggest, or rather to repeat my suggestion, that, like what is somatically large, it is represented by an increased expenditure. It requires little observation to establish that when I speak of something sublime I innervate my speech in a different way, I make different facial expressions, and I try to bring the whole way in which I hold myself into harmony with the dignity of what I am having an idea of. I impose a solemn restraint upon myself - not very different from what I should adopt if I were to enter the presence of an exalted personality, a monarch, or a prince of science. I shall hardly be wrong in assuming that this different innervation in my ideational mimetics corresponds to an increased expenditure. The third instance of an increased expenditure of this kind is no doubt to be found when I proceed in abstract trains of thought instead of in the habitual concrete and plastic ones. When, therefore, the procedures that I have discussed for the degradation of the sublime allow me to have an idea of it as though it were something commonplace, in whose presence I need not pull myself together but may, to use the military formula, ‘stand easy’, I am being spared the increased expenditure of the solemn restraint; and the comparison between this new ideational method (instigated by empathy) and the previously habitual one, which is simultaneously trying to establish itself - this comparison once again creates the difference in expenditure which can be discharged by laughter.
¹ ‘Degradation’ [in English in the original]. Bain (1865, 248) writes: ‘The occasion of the Ludicrous is the Degradation of some person or interest, possessing dignity, in circumstances that excite no other strong emotion.’
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1780
Caricature, as is well known, brings about degradation by emphasizing in the general impression given by the exalted object a single trait which is comic in itself but was bound to be overlooked so long as it was only perceivable in the general picture. By isolating this, a comic effect can be attained which extends in our memory over the whole object. This is subject to the condition that the actual presence of the exalted object himself does not keep us in a reverential attitude. If a comic trait of this kind that has been overlooked is lacking in reality, a caricature will unhesitatingly create it by exaggerating one that is not comic in itself; and the fact that the effect of the caricature is not essentially diminished by this falsification of reality is once again an indication of the origin of comic pleasure.
Parody and travesty achieve the degradation of something exalted in another way: by destroying the unity that exists between people’s characters as we know them and their speeches and actions, by replacing either the exalted figures or their utterances by inferior ones. They are distinguished from caricature in this, but not in the mechanism of their production of comic pleasure. The same mechanism is also used for unmasking, which only applies where someone has seized dignity and authority by a deception and these have to be taken from him in reality. We have already met with a few examples of the comic effect of unmasking in jokes - for instance, in the story of the aristocratic lady who, at the first onset of her labour-pains, exclaimed ‘Ah! mon Dieu!’ but whom the doctor would not assist till she cried out ‘Aa-ee, aa-ee!’. Having come to know the characteristics of the comic, we can no longer dispute that this anecdote is in fact an example of comic unmasking and has no justifiable claim to be called a joke. It only recalls jokes by its setting and by the technical method of ‘representation by something very small’ - in this case the patient’s cry, which is found sufficient to establish the indication for treatment. It nevertheless remains true that our linguistic sense, if we call on it for a decision, raises no objection to our calling a story like this a joke. We may explain this by reflecting that linguistic usage is not based on the scientific insight into the nature of jokes that we have arrived at in this laborious investigation. Since one of the functions of jokes is to make hidden sources of comic pleasure accessible once more (p. 1698), any device that brings to light something that is not manifestly comic may, by a loose analogy, be termed a joke. This applies preferably, however, to unmasking as well as to other methods of making people comic.¹
¹ ‘Thus every conscious and ingenious evocation of the comic (whether the comic of contemplation or of situation) is in general described as a joke. We, of course, cannot here make use of this concept of the joke either.’ (Lipps, 1898, 78.)
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1781
Under the heading of ‘unmasking’ we may also include a procedure for making things comic with which we are already acquainted - the method of degrading the dignity of individuals by directing attention to the frailties which they share with all humanity, but in particular the dependence of their mental functions on bodily needs. The unmasking is equivalent here to an admonition: such and such a person, who is admired as a demigod, is after all only human like you and me. Here, too, are to be placed the efforts at laying bare the monotonous psychical automatism that lies behind the wealth and apparent freedom of psychical functions. We came across examples of ‘unmasking’ of this kind in the marriage-broker jokes, and felt a doubt at the time whether these anecdotes have a right to be counted as jokes. We are now able to decide with greater certainty that the anecdote of the echo who reinforced all the assertions of the marriage-broker and finally confirmed his admission that the bride had a hump with the exclamation ‘And what a hump!’ - that this anecdote is essentially a comic story, an example of the unmasking of a psychical automatism. Here, however, the comic story is only serving as a façade. For anyone who will attend to the hidden meaning of the marriage-broker anecdotes, the whole thing remains an admirably staged joke; anyone who does not penetrate so far is left with a comic story. The same thing applies to the other joke, about the marriage-broker who, in order to answer an objection, ended by confessing the truth with a cry of ‘But I ask you, who would lend such people anything?’. Here again we have a comic unmasking as the façade for a joke, though in this instance the characteristic of a joke is much more unmistakable, since the marriage-broker’s remark is at the same time a representation by the opposite. In trying to prove that the people are rich he at the same time proves that they are not rich, but very poor. Here a joke and the comic are combined, and teach us that the same remark can be both things at once.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1782
We are glad to seize the opportunity of returning to jokes from the comic of unmasking, since our true problem is not to determine the nature of the comic but to throw light on the relation between jokes and the comic. We have discussed the uncovering of psychical automatism, in a case in which our feeling as to whether something is comic or a joke left us in the lurch. And we will now add another case in which there is a similar confusion between jokes and the comic - the case of nonsensical jokes. But our investigation will show us in the end that as regards this second case the convergence between jokes and the comic can be theoretically accounted for.
In discussing the techniques of jokes we found that giving free play to modes of thought which are usual in the unconscious but which can only be judged as examples of ‘faulty reasoning’ in the conscious is the technical method adopted in many jokes; and about these, once again, we felt doubts whether they possessed the true character of jokes, so that we were inclined to classify them simply as comic stories. We were unable to reach a decision about our doubts because at the time we were ignorant of the essential characteristic of jokes. Subsequently, led by an analogy with the dream-work, we discovered that it lay in the compromise effected by the joke-work between the demands of reasonable criticism and the urge not to renounce the ancient pleasure in words and nonsense. What came about in this way as a compromise, when the preconscious start of the thought was left for a moment to unconscious revision, satisfied both claims in every instance, but presented itself to criticism in various forms and had to put up with various judgements at its hands. Sometimes a joke would succeed in slipping on the appearance of an insignificant but nevertheless permissible assertion, another time it would smuggle itself in as the expression of a valuable thought. But, in the marginal case of effecting a compromise, it would give up attempting to satisfy criticism. Boasting of the sources of pleasure at its command, it would appear before criticism as sheer nonsense and not be afraid to provoke contradiction from it; for the joke could reckon on the hearer straightening out the disfigurement in the form of its expression by unconscious revision and so giving it back its meaning.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1783
In what instances, then, will a joke appear before criticism as nonsense? Particularly when it makes use of the modes of thought which are usual in the unconscious but are proscribed in conscious thought - faulty reasoning, in fact. For certain modes of thought proper to the unconscious have also been retained by the conscious - for instance, some kinds of indirect representation, allusion, and so on - even though their conscious employment is subject to considerable restrictions. When a joke makes use of these techniques it will raise little or no objection on the part of criticism; objections will only appear if it also makes use for its technique of the methods with which conscious thought will have nothing more to do. A joke can still avoid objection, if it conceals the faulty reasoning it has used and disguises it under a show of logic, as happened in the anecdotes of the cake and the liqueur, of the salmon mayonnaise, and similar ones. But if it produces the faulty reasoning undisguised, then the objections of criticism will follow with certainty.
In such cases the joke has another resource. The faulty reasoning, which it uses for its technique as one of the modes of thought of the unconscious, strikes criticism - even though not invariably so - as being comic. Consciously giving free play to unconscious modes of thought (which have been rejected as faulty) is a means of producing comic pleasure; and it is easy to understand this, since it certainly requires a greater expenditure of energy to establish a preconscious cathexis than to give free play to an unconscious one. When, on hearing a thought which has, as it were, been formed in the unconscious, we compare it with its correction, a difference in expenditure emerges for us from which comic pleasure arises. A joke which makes use of faulty reasoning like this for its technique, and therefore appears nonsensical, can thus produce a comic effect at the same time. If we fail to detect the joke, we are once again left with only the comic or funny story.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1784
The story of the borrowed kettle which had a hole in it when it was given back (p. 1664) is an excellent example of the purely comic effect of giving free play to the unconscious mode of thought. It will be recalled that the borrower, when he was questioned, replied firstly that he had not borrowed a kettle at all, secondly that it had had a hole in it already when he borrowed it, and thirdly that he had given it back undamaged and without a hole. This mutual cancelling-out by several thoughts, each of which is in itself valid, is precisely what does not occur in the unconscious. In dreams, in which the modes of thought of the unconscious are actually manifest, there is accordingly no such thing as an ‘either-or’,¹ only a simultaneous juxtaposition. In the example of a dream, which, in spite of its complication, I chose in my Interpretation of Dreams as a specimen of the work of interpretation, I tried to rid myself of the reproach of having failed to relieve a patient of her pains by psychical treatment. My reasons were: (1) that she herself was responsible for her illness because she would not accept my solution, (2) that her pains were of organic origin and were therefore no concern of mine, (3) that her pains were connected with her widowhood, for which I was evidently not responsible and (4) that her pains were due to an injection from a contaminated syringe, which had been given her by someone else. All these reasons stood side by side, as though they were not mutually exclusive. I was obliged to replace the ‘and’ of the dream by an ‘either-or’ in order to escape a charge of nonsense.
There is a similar comic story of a Hungarian village in which the blacksmith had been guilty of a capital offence. The burgomaster, however, decided that as a penalty a tailor should be hanged and not the blacksmith, because there were two tailors in the village but no second blacksmith, and the crime must be expiated. A displacement of this kind from the figure of the guilty person to another naturally contradicts every law of conscious logic but by no means the mode of thought of the unconscious. I do not hesitate to call this story comic, and yet I have included the one about the kettle among the jokes. I will now admit that this latter story too is far more correctly described as ‘comic’ rather than as a joke. But I now understand how it is that my feeling, which is as a rule so sure, can leave me in doubt as to whether this story is comic or a joke. This is a case in which I cannot come to a decision on the basis of my feeling - when, that is, the comic arises from the uncovering of a mode of thought that is exclusively proper to the unconscious. A story like this may be comic and a joke at the same time; but it will give me the impression of being a joke, even if it is merely comic, because the use of the faulty reasoning of the unconscious reminds me of jokes, just as did the manoeuvres for uncovering what is not manifestly comic (p. 1781).
I set great store by clarifying this most delicate point in my arguments - the relation of jokes to the comic; and I will therefore supplement what I have said with a few negative statements. I may first draw attention to the fact that the instance of the convergence of jokes and the comic which I am dealing with here is not identical with the former one (p. 1781). It is true that the distinction is a rather narrow one, but it can be made with certainty. In the earlier case the comic arose from the uncovering of psychical automatism. This, however, is by no means peculiar to the unconscious alone, nor does it play any striking part in the technique of jokes. Unmasking only comes into relation with jokes accidentally, when it serves some other joke-technique, such as representation by the opposite. But in the case of giving free play to unconscious modes of thought the convergence of jokes and the comic is a necessary one, since the same method which is used here by the first person of the joke as a technique for releasing pleasure must from its very nature produce comic pleasure in the third person.
¹ At the most, it is introduced by the narrator by way of interpretation.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1785
One might be tempted to generalize from this last case and look for the relation of jokes to the comic in the notion that the effect of jokes on the third person takes place according to the mechanism of comic pleasure. But there is no question of this being so. Contact with the comic is by no means to be found in all jokes or even in the majority of them; in most cases, on the contrary, a clear distinction is to be made between jokes and the comic. Whenever a joke succeeds in escaping the appearance of nonsense - that is, in most jokes accompanied by double meaning and allusion - there is no trace to be found in the hearer of any effect resembling the comic. This may be tested in the examples I have given earlier, or on a few new ones that I can bring up:
Telegram of congratulations to a gambler on his seventieth Birthday: ‘Trente et quarante.’ (Dividing-up with allusion.)
Hevesi somewhere describes the process of tobacco manufacture: ‘The bright yellow leaves . . . were dipped in a sauce and were sauced in this dip.’ (Multiple use of the same material).
Madame de Maintenon was known as ‘Madame de Maintenant’. (Modification of a name.)
Professor Kästner said to a prince who stood in front of a telescope during a demonstration: ‘Your Highness, I know quite well that you are "durchläuchtig [illustrious]",¹ but you are not "durchsigtig [transparent]."'
Count Andrássy was known as ‘ Minister of the Fine Exterior’.
It might further be thought that at any rate all jokes with a façade of nonsense will seem comic and must produce a comic affect. But I must recall that jokes of this kind very often affect the hearer in another way and provoke bewilderment and a tendency to repudiation (see p. 1727 n.). Thus it evidently depends on whether the nonsense of a joke appears as comic or as sheer ordinary nonsense - and we have not yet investigated what determines this. We therefore stick to our conclusion that jokes are from their nature to be distinguished from the comic and only converge with it, on the one hand in certain special cases, and on the other hand in their aim of obtaining pleasure from intellectual sources.
During these enquiries into the relations between jokes and the comic the distinction has become plain to us which we must emphasize as the most important and which points at the same time to a main psychological characteristic of the comic. We found ourselves obliged to locate the pleasure in jokes in the unconscious; no reason is to be found for making the same localization in the case of the comic. On the contrary, all the analyses we have hitherto made have pointed to the source of comic pleasure being a comparison between two expenditures both of which must be ascribed to the preconscious. Jokes and the comic are distinguished first and foremost in their psychical localization; the joke, it may be said, is the contribution made to the comic from the realm of the unconscious.
¹ [An adjective derived from ‘Durchlaucht’, a title applied to minor royalty: ‘Serene Highness’.]
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1786
There is no need to apologize for this digression, since the relation of jokes to the comic was the reason for our being forced into an investigation of the comic. But it is certainly time we returned to our previous topic - the discussion of the methods which serve for making things comic. We considered caricature and unmasking first, because we can derive some indications from these two for the analysis of the comic of mimicry. As a rule, no doubt, mimicry is permeated with caricature - the exaggeration of traits that are not otherwise striking -, and it also involves the characteristic of degradation. But this does not seem to exhaust its nature. It cannot be disputed that it is in itself an extraordinarily fertile source of comic pleasure, for we laugh particularly at the faithfulness of a piece of mimicry. It is not easy to give a satisfactory explanation of this unless one is prepared to adopt the view held by Bergson (1900), which approximates the comic of mimicry to the comic due to the discovery of psychical automatism. Bergson’s opinion is that everything in a living person that makes one think of an inanimate mechanism has a comic effect. His formula for this runs ‘mécanisation de la vie’. He explains the comic of mimicry by starting out from a problem raised by Pascal in his Pensées of why it is that one laughs when one compares two similar faces neither of which has a comic effect by itself. ‘What is living should never, according to our expectation, be repeated exactly the same. When we find such a repetition we always suspect some mechanism lying behind the living thing.’ When one sees two faces that resemble each other closely, one thinks of two impressions from the same mould or of some similar mechanical procedure. In short, the cause of laughter in such cases would be the divergence of the living from the inanimate, or, as we might say, the degradation of the living to the inanimate (ibid., 35). If, moreover, we were to accept these plausible suggestions of Bergson’s, we should not find it difficult to include his view under our own formula. Experience has taught us that every living thing is different from every other and calls for a kind of expenditure by our understanding; and we find ourselves disappointed if, as a result of complete conformity or deceptive mimicry, we need make no fresh expenditure. But we are disappointed in the sense of a relief, and the expenditure on expectation which has become superfluous is discharged by laughter. The same formula would also cover all the cases which Bergson considers of comic rigidity (‘raideur’), of professional customs, fixed ideas, and turns of speech repeated on every possible occasion. All these cases would go back to a comparison between the expenditure on expectation and the expenditure actually required for an understanding of something that has remained the same; and the larger amount needed for expectation would be based on observation of the multiplicity and plasticity of living things. In the case of mimicry, accordingly, the source of the comic pleasure would be not the comic of situation but of expectation.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1787
Since we derive comic pleasure in general from a comparison, it is incumbent on us to examine the comic of comparison itself; and this, indeed, serves as a method of making things comic. Our interest in this question will be increased when we recall that in the case of analogies, too, we often found that our ‘feeling’ left us in the lurch as to whether something was to be called a joke or merely comic (p. 1680 f.).
The subject would, it must be admitted, deserve more careful treatment than our interests can devote to it. The main attribute that we enquire after in an analogy is whether it is apt - that is, whether it draws attention to a conformity which is really present in two different objects. The original pleasure in rediscovering the same thing (Groos, 1899, 153) is not the only motive that favours the use of analogies; there is the further fact that analogies are capable of a use which brings with it a relief of intellectual work - if, that is to say, one follows the usual practice of comparing what is less known with what is better known or the abstract with the concrete, and by the comparison elucidates what is more unfamiliar or more difficult. Every such comparison, especially of something abstract with something concrete, involves a certain degradation and a certain economy in expenditure on abstraction (in the sense of ideational mimetics), but this is of course not sufficient to allow the characteristic of the comic to come clearly into prominence. It does not emerge suddenly but gradually from the pleasure of the relief brought about by the comparison. There are plenty of cases which merely fringe on the comic and in which doubt might be felt whether they show the characteristic of the comic. The comparison becomes undoubtedly comic if there is a rise in the level of difference between the expenditure on abstraction in the two things that are being compared, if something serious and unfamiliar, especially if it is of an intellectual or moral nature, is brought into comparison with something commonplace and inferior. The previous pleasure of the relief and the contribution from the determinants of ideational mimetics may perhaps explain the gradual transition, conditioned by quantitative factors, from general pleasure to comic pleasure during the comparison. I shall no doubt avoid misunderstandings if I stress the fact that I do not trace the comic pleasure in analogies to the contrast between the two things compared but to the difference between the two expenditures on abstraction. When an unfamiliar thing that is hard to take in, a thing that is abstract and in fact sublime in an intellectual sense, is alleged to tally with something familiar and inferior, in imagining which there is a complete absence of any expenditure on abstraction, then that abstract thing is itself unmasked as something equally inferior. The comic of comparison is thus reduced to a case of degradation.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1788
A comparison can, however, as we have already seen, be in the nature of a joke, without a trace of comic admixture - precisely, that is, when it avoids degradation. Thus the comparison of truth with a torch that cannot be carried through a crowd without singeing someone’s beard is purely in the nature of a joke, because it takes a watered-down turn of speech (‘the torch of truth’) at its full value, and it is not comic, because a torch as an object, though it is a concrete thing, is not without a certain distinction. But a comparison can just as easily be a joke and comic as well, and can be each independently of the other, since a comparison can be of help to certain techniques of jokes, such as unification or allusion. In this way Nestroy’s comparison of memory to a ‘warehouse’ (p. 1683) is at once comic and a joke - the former because of the extraordinary degradation which the psychological concept has to put up with in being compared to a ‘warehouse’, and the latter because the person making use of the comparison is a clerk, who thus establishes in the comparison a quite unexpected unification between psychology and his profession. Heine’s phrase ‘till at last all the buttons burst on the breeches of my patience’ seems at first sight to be no more than a remarkable example of a comically degrading comparison; but on further consideration we must also allow it the characteristics of a joke, since the comparison, as a means of allusion, impinges on the region of the obscene and so succeeds in liberating pleasure in the obscene. The same material, by what is admittedly not an entirely chance coincidence, provides us with a yield of pleasure which is simultaneously comic and of the character of a joke. If the conditions of the one favour the generation of the other, their union has a confusing effect on the ‘feeling’ which is supposed to tell us whether we are being offered a joke or something comic, and a decision can only be arrived at by an attentive investigation that has been freed from any predisposition to a particular kind of pleasure.
However attractive it may be to follow up these more intimate determinants of the yield of comic pleasure, the author must bear in mind that neither his education nor his daily occupation justify his extending his enquiries far beyond the sphere of jokes; and he must confess that the topic of comic comparisons makes him particularly aware of his inability.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1789
We therefore readily recall that many authorities do not recognize the sharp conceptual and material distinction between jokes and the comic to which we have found ourselves led, and that they regard jokes as simply ‘the comic of speech’ or ‘of words’. In order to test this view we will choose one example each of something intentionally and of something involuntarily comic in words to compare with jokes. We have remarked earlier that we believe ourselves very well able to distinguish a comic remark from a joke:
‘With a fork and much to-do
His mother dragged him from the stew’
is merely comic; Heine’s remark about the four castes among the inhabitants of Göttingen - ‘professors, students, philistines and donkeys’ is par excellence a joke.
For something intentionally comic I will take as a model Stettenheim’s ‘Wippchen’. People speak of Stettenheim as ‘witty’ because he possesses to a special degree the gift of evoking the comic. This capacity does in fact aptly determine the ‘wit’ that one ‘has’ in contrast to the ‘joke’ that one ‘makes’.¹ It cannot be disputed that the letters of Wippchen, the Correspondent from Bernau, are also ‘witty’ in so far as they are abundantly sprinkled with jokes of every kind, among them some that are genuinely successful (e.g. of a display by savages: ‘in ceremonial undress’). But what gives these productions their peculiar character is not these separate jokes but the almost too abundant comic of speech which flows through them. ‘Wippchen’ was no doubt originally intended as a satirical figure, a modification of Gustav Freytag’s ‘Schmock’, one of those uneducated people who misuse and trade away the nation’s store of culture; but the author’s enjoyment of the comic effects achieved in his picture of this character has evidently pushed the satirical purpose little by little into the background. Wippchen’s productions are for the most part ‘comic nonsense’. The author has made use of the pleasurable mood brought about by the piling up of these successes to introduce (justifiably, it must be said), alongside perfectly permissible material, all kinds of insipidities which could not be tolerated on their own account. Wippchen’s nonsense produces a specific effect on account of a peculiar technique. If one looks more closely at these ‘jokes’ one is specially struck by a few kinds which give the whole production its stamp. Wippchen makes use predominantly of combinations (amalgamations), modifications of familiar turns of speech and quotations and replacements of a few commonplace elements in them by more pretentious and weighty forms of expression. This incidentally is coming near to the techniques of jokes.
¹ [The same German word ‘Witz’ is used here for both ‘wit’ and ‘joke’.]
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1790
Here, for instance, are some amalgamations (taken from the preface and the first pages of the whole series):
‘Turkey has money wie Heu am Meere.’ This is made up of the two expressions: ‘Money wie Heu’ and ‘Money wie Sand am Meer '.¹
Or, ‘I am no more than a column stripped of its leaves,² which bears witness to its vanished glory’ - condensed from ‘a tree stripped of its leaves’ and ‘a column which . . . etc.’
Or, ‘Where is the thread of Ariadne which will lead me from the Scylla of this Augean stable?’ to which three Greek legends have each contributed an element.
The modifications and substitutions can be summarized without much difficulty. Their nature can be seen from the following examples, which are characteristic of Wippchen and behind which we have a glimpse of another, more current and usually more commonplace wording, which has been reduced to a cliché:
‘Mier Papier und Tinte höher zu hängen.’ We use the phrase ‘einem den Brotkorb höher hängen ' metaphorically for ‘to put someone in more difficult circumstances’. So why should not the metaphor be extended to other material?
¹ [These are two common expressions in German, equivalent to ‘money like dirt’ or ‘oceans of money’.]
² [‘Eine entlaubte Säule’ - an echo of ‘Eine entleibte Seele’, ‘a disembodied spirit’.]
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1791
‘Battles in which the Russians sometimes draw the shorter and sometimes the longer.’ Only the first of these expressions [‘den Kürzeren ziehen’, ‘draw the shorter’] is in common use; but in view of its derivation there would be no absurdity in bringing the second into use as well.
‘While I was still young, Pegasus stirred within me.’ If we put back ‘the poet’ instead of ‘Pegasus’ we find an autobiographical cliché well-worn by frequent use. It is true that ‘Pegasus’ is not a suitable substitute for ‘the poet’, but it has a conceptual relation with it and is a high-sounding word.
‘Thus I lived through the thorny shoes of childhood.’ A simile instead of a simple statement. ‘Die Kinderschuhe austreten’ [‘to wear out the shoes of childhood’, ‘to leave the nursery behind’] is one of the images connected with the concept of childhood.
From the profusion of Wippchen’s other productions some can be stressed as pure examples of the comic. For instance, as a comic disappointment: ‘For hours the fight fluctuated, until at last it remained undecided.’ Or, as a comic unmasking (of ignorance): ‘Clio, the Medusa of History.’ Or quotations such as: ‘Habent sua fata morgana.’¹ But our interest is more aroused by the amalgamations and modifications, because they repeat familiar joke-techniques. We may, for instance, compare with the modifications such jokes as ‘he has a great future behind him’, or ‘er hat ein Ideal vor dem Kopf’, or Lichtenberg’s modification joke ‘new spas cure well’, and so on. Are Wippchen’s productions which have the same technique now to be called jokes? or how do they differ from these?
¹ [Habent sua fata libelli (books have their destinies)' is a Latin saying attributed to Terence. ‘Fata Morgana’ is the Italian name for a particular kind of mirage seen in the Straits of Messina: from Morgan le Fey (fairy), King Arthur’s sister.]
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1792
It is not difficult to answer. Let us recall that jokes present a double face to their hearer, force him to adopt two different views of them. In a nonsense joke, like the ones last mentioned, the one view, which only takes the wording into account, regards it as nonsense; the other view, following the hints that are given, passes through the hearer’s unconscious and finds an excellent sense in it. In Wippchen’s joke-like productions one face of the joke is blank, as though it were rudimentary: a Janus head but with only one face developed on it. If we allow the technique to lure us into the unconscious, we come upon nothing. The amalgamations lead us to no instance in which the two things that are amalgamated really yield a new meaning; if we attempt an analysis, they fall completely apart. The modifications and substitutions lead, as they do in jokes, to a usual and familiar wording; but the modification or substitution itself tells us nothing fresh and as a rule, indeed, nothing possible or serviceable. So that only the one view of these ‘jokes’ is left over - that they are nonsense. We can merely decide whether we choose to call such productions, which have freed themselves from one of the most essential characteristics of jokes, ‘bad’ jokes or not jokes at all.
Rudimentary jokes of this kind undoubtedly produce a comic effect, which we can account for in more than one way. Either the comic arises from the uncovering of the modes of thought of the unconscious, as in cases we considered earlier, or the pleasure comes from the comparison with a complete joke. Nothing prevents our supposing that both these ways of generating comic pleasure converge here. It is not impossible that here the inadequacy of support from a joke is precisely what makes the nonsense into comic nonsense.
For there are other easily intelligible cases in which inadequacy of this kind as compared with what ought to be effected makes the nonsense irresistibly comic. The counterpart of jokes - riddles - can perhaps offer us better examples of this than jokes themselves. For instance, here is a ‘facetious question’: ‘What is it that hangs on the wall and that one can dry one’s hands on?’ It would be a stupid riddle if the answer were ‘a hand-towel’. But that answer is rejected. - ‘No, a herring.’ - ‘But for heaven’s sake’, comes the infuriated protest ‘a herring doesn’t hang on the wall.’ - ‘You can hang it up there.’ - ‘But who in the world is going to dry his hands on a herring?’ - ‘Well’, is the soothing reply, ‘you don’t have to.’ This explanation, given by means of two typical displacements, shows how far this question falls short of a genuine riddle; and on account of its absolute inadequacy it strikes us as being - instead of simply nonsensically stupid - irresistibly comic. In this way, by failing to comply with essential conditions, jokes, riddles, and other things, which do not produce comic pleasure in themselves, are made into sources of comic pleasure.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1793
There is still less difficulty in understanding the case of the involuntary comic of speech, which we can find realized as often as we please in, for instance, the poems of Friederike Kempner (1891):
Against Vivisection
Ein unbekanntes Band der Seelen kettet
Den Menschen an das arme Tier.
Das Tier hat einen Willen - ergo Seele -
Wenn auch 'ne kleinere als wir.¹
Or a conversation between a loving married couple:
The Contrast
‘Wie glücklich bin ich’, ruft sie leise,
‘Auch ich’, sagt lauter ihr Gemahl,
‘Es macht mich deine Art und Weise
Sehr stolz auf meine gute Wahl!’ ²
There is nothing here to make us think of jokes. But there is no doubt that it is the inadequacy of these ‘poems’ that makes them comic - the quite extraordinary clumsiness of their expression, which is linked with the tritest or most journalistic turns of phrase, the simple-minded limitation of their thought, the absence of any trace of poetic matter or form. In spite of all this, however, it is not obvious why we find Kempner’s poems comic. We find many similar products nothing but shockingly bad; they do not make us laugh but annoy us. But it is precisely the greatness of the distance that separates them from what we expect of a poem that imposes the comic view on us; if this difference struck us as smaller we should be more inclined to criticize than to laugh. Furthermore, the comic effect of Kempner’s poems is assured by a subsidiary circumstance - the authoress’s unmistakably good intentions and a peculiar sincerity of feeling which disarms our ridicule or our annoyance and which we sense behind her helpless phrases.
Here we are reminded of a problem whose consideration we have postponed. Difference in expenditure is undoubtedly the basic determining condition of comic pleasure; but observation shows that this difference does not invariably give rise to pleasure. What further conditions must be present or what disturbances must be kept back, in order that comic pleasure may actually arise from the difference in expenditure? Before we turn to answering this question, we will conclude this discussion with a clear assertion that the comic of speech does not coincide with jokes, and that jokes must therefore be something other than the comic of speech.
¹ [ Between mankind and poor dumb beasts there stretches
A chain of souls impossible to see.
Poor dumb beasts have a will - ergo a soul too -
E’en though they have a soul smaller than we.]
² [ ‘How fortunate am I!’ she softly cried.
‘I too’, declared her husband’s louder voice:
‘Your many qualities fill me with pride
At having made so excellent a choice.’]
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1794
Now that we are on the point of approaching an answer to our last question, as to the necessary conditions for the generating of comic pleasure from the difference in expenditure, we may allow ourselves a relief which cannot fail to give us pleasure. An accurate reply to the question would be identical with an exhaustive account of the nature of the comic, for which we can claim neither capacity nor authority. We shall once more be content to throw light on the problem of the comic only so far as it contrasts clearly with the problem of jokes.
Every theory of the comic is objected to by its critics on the score that its definition overlooks what is essential to the comic; ‘The comic is based on a contrast between ideas.’ ‘Yes, in so far as the contrast has a comic and not some other effect.’ ‘The feeling of the comic arises from the disappointment of an expectation.’ ‘Yes, unless the disappointment is in fact a distressing one.’ No doubt the objections are justified; but we shall be over-estimating them if we conclude from them that the essential feature of the comic has hitherto escaped detection. What impairs the universal validity of these definitions are conditions which are indispensable for the generating of comic pleasure; but we do not need to look for the essence of the comic in them. In any case, it will only become easy for us to dismiss the objections and throw light on the contradictions to the definitions of the comic if we suppose that the origin of comic pleasure lies in a comparison of the difference between two expenditures. Comic pleasure and the effect by which it is known - laughter - can only come about if this difference is unutilizable and capable of discharge. We obtain no pleasurable effect but at most a transient sense of pleasure in which the characteristic of being comic does not emerge, if the difference is put to another use as soon as it is recognized. Just as special contrivances have to be adopted in the case of jokes in order to prevent the use elsewhere of the expenditure that is recognized as superfluous, so, too, comic pleasure can only appear in circumstances that guarantee this same condition. For this reason occasions on which these differences in expenditure occur in our ideational life are uncommonly numerous, but the occasions on which the comic emerges from those differences are relatively quite rare.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1795
Two observations force themselves on anyone who studies even cursorily the conditions for the generation of the comic from difference in expenditure. Firstly, there are cases in which the comic appears habitually and as though by force of necessity, and on the contrary others in which it seems entirely dependent on the circumstances and on the standpoint of the observer. But secondly, unusually large differences very often break through unfavourable conditions, so that the comic feeling emerges in spite of them. In connection with the first of these points it would be possible to set up two classes - the inevitably comic and the occasionally comic - though one must be prepared from the first to renounce the notion of finding the inevitability of the comic in the first class free from exceptions. It would be tempting to enquire into the determining conditions for the two classes.
The conditions, some of which have been brought together as the ‘isolation’ of the comic situation, apply essentially to the second class. A closer analysis elicits the following facts:
(a) The most favourable condition for the production of comic pleasure is a generally cheerful mood in which one is ‘inclined to laugh’. In a toxic mood of cheerfulness almost everything seems comic, probably by comparison with the expenditure in a normal state. Indeed, jokes, the comic and all similar methods of getting pleasure from mental activity are no more than ways of regaining this cheerful mood - this euphoria - from a single point of approach, when it is not present as a general disposition of the psyche.
(b) A similarly favourable effect is produced by an expectation of the comic, by being attuned to comic pleasure. For this reason, if an intention to make something comic is communicated to one by someone else, differences of such a low degree are sufficient that they would probably be overlooked if they occurred in one’s experience unintentionally. Anyone who starts out to read a comic book or goes to the theatre to see a farce owes to this intention his ability to laugh at things which would scarcely have provided him with a case of the comic in his ordinary life. In the last resort it is in the recollection of having laughed and in the expectation of laughing that he laughs when he sees the comic actor come on to the stage, before the latter can have made any attempt at making him laugh. For that reason, too, one admits feeling ashamed afterwards over what one has been able to laugh at the play.
(c) Unfavourable conditions for the comic arise from the kind of mental activity with which a particular person is occupied at the moment. Imaginative or intellectual work that pursues serious aims interferes with the capacity of the cathexes for discharge - cathexes which the work requires for its displacements - so that only unexpectedly large differences in expenditure are able to break through to comic pleasure. What are quite specially unfavourable for the comic are all kinds of intellectual processes which are sufficiently remote from what is perceptual to bring ideational mimetics to a stop. There is no place whatever left for the comic in abstract reflection except when that mode of thought is suddenly interrupted.
(d) The opportunity for the release of comic pleasure disappears, too, if the attention is focused precisely on the comparison from which the comic may emerge. In such circumstances what would otherwise have the most certain comic effect loses its comic force. A movement or a function cannot be comic for a person whose interest is directed to comparing it with a standard which he has clearly before his mind. Thus the examiner does not find the nonsense comic which the candidate produces in his ignorance; he is annoyed by it, while the candidate’s fellow students, who are far more interested in what luck he will have than in how much he knows, laugh heartily at the same nonsense. A gymnastic or dancing instructor seldom has an eye for the comic in his pupils’ movements; and a clergyman entirely overlooks the comic in the human weaknesses which the writer of comedies can bring to light so effectively. The comic process will not bear being hypercathected by attention; it must be able to take its course quite unobserved in this respect, incidentally, just like jokes. It would, however, contradict the nomenclature of the ‘processes of consciousness’ of which I made use, with good reason, in my Interpretation of Dreams if one sought to speak of the comic process as a necessarily unconscious one. It forms part, rather, of the preconscious; and such processes, which run their course in the preconscious but lack the cathexis of attention with which consciousness is linked, may aptly be given the name of ‘automatic’. The process of comparing expenditures must remain automatic if it is to produce comic pleasure.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1796
(e) The comic is greatly interfered with if the situation from which it ought to develop gives rise at the same time to a release of strong affect. A discharge of the operative difference is as a rule out of the question in such a case. The affects, disposition and attitude of the individual in each particular case make it understandable that the comic emerges and vanishes according to the standpoint of each particular person, and that an absolute comic exists only in exceptional instances. The contingency or relativity of the comic is therefore far greater than that of a joke, which never happens of its own accord but is invariably made, and in which the conditions under which it can find acceptance can be observed at the time at which it is constructed. The generation of affect is the most intense of all the conditions that interfere with the comic and its importance in this respect has been nowhere overlooked.¹ For this reason it has been said that the comic feeling comes easiest in more or less indifferent cases where the feelings and interests are not strongly involved. Yet precisely in cases where there is a release of affect one can observe a particularly strong difference in expenditure bring about the automatism of release. When Colonel Butler answers Octavio’s warnings by exclaiming ‘with a bitter laugh’: ‘Thanks from the House of Austria!’, his embitterment does not prevent his laughing. The laugh applies to his memory of the disappointment he believes he has suffered; and on the other hand the magnitude of the disappointment cannot be portrayed more impressively by the dramatist than by his showing it capable of forcing a laugh in the midst of the storm of feelings that have been released. I am inclined to think that this explanation would apply to every case in which laughter occurs in circumstances other than pleasurable ones and accompanied by intensely distressing or strained emotions.
(f) If we add to this that the generating of comic pleasure can be encouraged by any other pleasurable accompanying circumstance as though by some sort of contagious effect (working in the same kind of way as the fore-pleasure principle with tendentious jokes), we shall have mentioned enough of the conditions governing comic pleasure for our purposes, though certainly not all of them. We can then see that these conditions, as well as the inconstancy and contingency of the comic effect, cannot be explained so easily by any other hypothesis than that of the derivation of comic pleasure from the discharge of a difference which, under the most varying circumstances, is liable to be used in ways other than discharge.
¹ ‘It is easy for you to laugh; it means nothing more to you.’
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1797
The comic of sexuality and obscenity would deserve more detailed consideration; but we can only touch upon it here with a few comments. The starting-point would once more be exposure. A chance exposure has a comic effect on us because we compare the ease with which we have enjoyed the sight with the great expenditure which would otherwise be required for reaching this end. Thus the case approaches that of the naïvely comic, but is simpler. Every exposure of which we are made the spectator (or audience in the case of smut) by a third person is equivalent to the exposed person being made comic. We have seen that it is the task of jokes to take the place of smut and so once more to open access to a lost source of comic pleasure. As opposed to this, witnessing an exposure is not a case of the comic for the witness, because his own effort in doing so does away with the determining condition of comic pleasure: nothing is left but the sexual pleasure in what is seen. If the witness gives an account to someone else, the person who has been witnessed becomes comic once more, because there is a predominant sense that the latter has omitted the expenditure which would have been in place for concealing his secret. Apart from this, the spheres of sexuality and obscenity offer the amplest occasions for obtaining comic pleasure alongside pleasurable sexual excitement; for they can show human beings in their dependence on bodily needs (degradation) or they can reveal the physical demands lying behind the claim of mental love (unmasking).
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1798
An invitation to us to look for an understanding of the comic in its psychogenesis is also to be found, surprisingly enough, in Bergson’s charming and lively volume Le rire. We have already made the acquaintance of Bergson’s formulas for grasping the characteristics of the comic: ‘mécanisation de la vie’, ‘substitution quelconque de l’artificial au naturel’.¹ He proceeds by a plausible train of thought from automatism to automata, and tries to trace back a number of comic effects to the faded recollection of a children’s toy. In this connection he reaches for a moment a point of view, which, it is true, he soon abandons: he endeavours to explain the comic as an after-effect of the joys of childhood. ‘Peut-être même devrions-nous pousser la simplification plus loin encore, remonter à nos souvenirs les plus anciens, chercher dans les jeux qui amusèrent l’enfant la première ébauche des combinaisons qui font rire l’homme . . . Trop souvent surtout nous méconnaissons ce qu’il y a d’encore enfantin, pour ainsi dire, dans la plupart de nos émotions joyeuses.’ (Bergson, 1900, 68 ff.)² Since we have traced back jokes to children’s play with words and thoughts which has been frustrated by rational criticism we cannot help feeling tempted to investigate the infantile roots which Bergson suspects in the case of the comic as well.
¹ [‘Mechanization of life’ - ‘some kind of substitution of the artificial for the natural.’]
² [‘Perhaps we should even carry simplification further still, go back to our oldest memories, and trace in the games that amused the child the first sketch of the combinations which make the grown man laugh . . . Above all, we too often fail to recognize how much of childishness, so to speak, there still is in most of our joyful emotions.’]
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1799
And, in fact, if we examine the relation of the comic to the child we come upon a whole number of connections which seem promising. Children themselves do not strike us as in any way comic, though their nature fulfils all the conditions which, if we compare it with our own nature, yield a comic difference: the excessive expenditure on movement as well as the small intellectual expenditure, the domination of the mental functions by the bodily ones, and other features. A child only produces a comic effect on us when he conducts himself not as a child but as a serious adult, and he produces it then in the same way as other people who disguise themselves. But so long as he retains his childish nature the perception of him affords us a pure pleasure, perhaps one that reminds us slightly of the comic. We call him naïve, in so far as he shows us his lack of inhibition, and we describe as naïvely comic those of his utterances which in another person we should have judged obscenities or jokes.
On the other hand, children are without a feeling for the comic. This assertion seems to say no more than that the comic feeling, like such a number of other things, only starts at some point in the course of mental development; and this would be by no means surprising, especially as it has to be admitted that the feeling already emerges clearly at an age which has to be counted as part of childhood. But it can nevertheless be shown that the assertion that children lack the feeling of the comic contains more than something self-evident. In the first place, it is easy to see that it could not be otherwise if our view is correct which derives the comic feeling from a difference in expenditure that arises in the course of understanding another person. Let us once again take the comic of movement as an example. The comparison which provides the difference runs (stated in conscious formulas): ‘That is how he does it’ and ‘This is how I should do it, how I did it’. But a child is without the standard contained in the second sentence; he understands simply by mimicry: he does it in just the same way. The child’s upbringing presents him with a standard: ‘this is how you ought to do it.’ If he now makes use of this standard in making the comparison, he will easily conclude: ‘he did not do it right’ and ‘I can do it better’. In this case he laughs at the other person, he laughs at him in the feeling of his own superiority. There is nothing to prevent our deriving this laughter too from a difference in expenditure; but on the analogy of the cases of laughing at people that we have come across we may infer that the comic feeling is not present in a child’s superior laughter. It is a laughter of pure pleasure. In our own case when we have a clear judgement of our own superiority, we merely smile instead of laughing, or, if we laugh, we can nevertheless distinguish this becoming conscious of our superiority from the comic that makes us laugh.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1800
It is probably right to say that children laugh from pure pleasure in a variety of circumstances that we feel as ‘comic’ and cannot find the motive for, whereas a child’s motives are clear and can be stated. For instance, if someone slips in the street and falls down we laugh because the impression - we do not know why - is comic. A child laughs in the same case from a feeling of superiority or from Schadenfreude: ‘You’ve fallen down, I haven’t.’ Certain motives for pleasure in children seem to be lost to us adults, and instead in the same circumstances we have the ‘comic’ feeling as a substitute for the lost one.
If one might generalize, it would seem most attractive to place the specific characteristic of the comic which we are in search of in an awakening of the infantile - to regard the comic as the regained ‘lost laughter of childhood’. One could then say: ‘I laugh at a difference in expenditure between another person and myself, every time I rediscover the child in him.’ Or, put more exactly, the complete comparison which leads to the comic would run: ‘That is how he does it - I do it in another way - he does it as I used to do it as a child.’
Thus the laughter would always apply to the comparison between the adult’s ego and the child’s ego. Even the lack of uniformity in the comic difference - the fact that what seems to me comic is sometimes a greater and sometimes a smaller expenditure - would fit in with the infantile determinant; actually what is comic is invariably on the infantile side.
This is not contradicted by the fact that, when children themselves are the object of the comparison, they do not give me a comic impression but a purely pleasurable one; nor is it contradicted because the comparison with the infantile only produces a comic effect if any other use of the difference is avoided. For these are matters concerned with the conditions governing discharge. Whatever brings a psychical process into connection with others operates against the discharge of the surplus cathexis and puts it to some other use; whatever isolates a psychical act encourages discharge. A conscious attitude to children as objects of comparison therefore makes impossible the discharge that is necessary for comic pleasure. Only when the cathexis is preconscious is there an approximation to an isolation such as, incidentally, we may ascribe to the mental processes in children as well. The addition to the comparison (‘I did it like that as a child too’) from which the comic effect is derived would thus only come into consideration, as far as differences of medium magnitude are concerned, if no other nexus could gain control over the liberated surplus.
If we pursue our attempt to discover the essence of the comic in a preconscious link with the infantile, we must go a step further than Bergson and admit that a comparison need not, in order to produce the comic, arouse old childish pleasures and childish play; it will be enough for it to touch upon childish nature in general, and perhaps even on childish suffering. Here we shall be parting from Bergson but remaining in agreement with ourselves if we connect comic pleasure not with recollected pleasure but once more with a comparison. It may be that cases of the former kind may coincide with the invariably and irresistibly comic.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1801
Let us at this point review the scheme which we drew up earlier of the various comic possibilities. We remarked that the comic difference was found either
(a) by a comparison between another person and oneself, or
(b) by a comparison entirely within the other person, or
(c) by a comparison entirely within oneself.
In the first of these cases the other person would appear to me as a child; in the second he would reduce himself to a child; and in the third I should discover the child in myself.
The first case would include the comic of movement and form, of mental functioning and of character. The corresponding infantile factors would be the urge to movement and the child’s inferior mental and moral development. So that, for instance, a stupid person would be comic to me in so far as he reminded me of a lazy child and a bad person in so far as he reminded me of a naughty child. There could only be a question of a childish pleasure lost to adults in the single instance in which the child’s own joy in movement was concerned.
The second case, in which the comic depends entirely on ‘empathy’, includes the most numerous possibilities - the comic of situation, of exaggeration (caricature), of mimicry, of degradation and of unmasking. This is the case in which the introduction of the infantile point of view proves most useful. For the comic of situation is mostly based on embarrassments, in which we rediscover the child’s helplessness. The worst of the embarrassments, the interference by the peremptory demands of natural needs with other functions, corresponds to the child’s incomplete control over his bodily functions. Where the comic of situation operates by means of repetitions, it is based on the child’s peculiar pleasure in constant repetition (of questions or of being told stories) which make him a nuisance to the adult. Exaggeration, which still gives pleasure to adults in so far as it can find justification with their critical faculty, is connected with the child’s peculiar lack of a sense of proportion, his ignorance of all quantitative relations, which he comes to know later than qualitative ones. The use of moderation and restraint, even in the case of permitted impulses, is a late fruit of education and is acquired by the mutual inhibition of mental activities brought together in a combination. Where such combinations are weakened, as in the unconscious of dreams or in the mono-ideism of psychoneuroses, the child’s lack of moderation re-emerges.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1802
We found relatively great difficulties in understanding the comic of mimicry so long as we left the infantile factor out of account. But mimicry is the child’s best art and the driving motive of most of his games. A child’s ambition aims far less at excelling among his equals than at mimicking the grown-ups. The relation of children to adults is also the basis of the comic of degradation, which corresponds to the condescension shown by adults in their attitude to the life of children. There is little that gives children greater pleasure than when a grown-up lets himself down to their level, renounces his oppressive superiority and plays with them as an equal. This relief, which gives the child pure pleasure, becomes in adults, in the form of degradation, a means of making things comic and a source of comic pleasure. As regards unmasking, we know that it goes back to degradation.
We come up against the most difficulties in finding the infantile basis of the third case, the comic of expectation, which no doubt explains why those authorities who have put this case first in their discussion of the comic have found no occasion for taking account of the infantile factor in the comic. The comic of expectation is no doubt the remotest in children; the capacity to grasp it is the latest to appear. In most of the instances which seem comic to an adult a child would probably feel only disappointment. We might, however, take the child’s power of blissful expectation and credulity as a basis for understanding how we appear to ourselves comic ‘as a child’ when we meet with a comic disappointment.
What we have said would seem to suggest a certain probability for a translation of the comic feeling that might run; ‘Those things are comic which are not proper for an adult.’ Nevertheless I do not feel bold enough, in virtue of my whole attitude to the problem of the comic, to defend this last assertion with as much seriousness as my earlier ones. I am unable to decide whether degradation to being a child is only a special case of comic degradation, or whether everything comic is based fundamentally on degradation to being a child.¹
¹ The fact that comic pleasure has its source in the ‘quantitative contrast’ of a comparison between small and large, which after all also expresses the essential relation between a child and an adult - this would certainly be a strange coincidence if the comic had no other connection with the infantile.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1803
An enquiry which deals with the comic, however cursorily, would be seriously incomplete if it did not find room for at least a few remarks about humour. The essential kinship between the two is so little open to doubt that an attempt at explaining the comic is bound to make at least some contribution to an understanding of humour. However much that is pertinent and impressive may have been brought forward in the appreciation of humour (which, itself one of the highest psychical achievements, enjoys the particular favour of thinkers), yet we cannot evade an attempt at giving expression to its nature by an approach to the formulas for jokes and for the comic.
We have seen that the release of distressing affects is the greatest obstacle to the emergence of the comic. As soon as the aimless movement does damage, or the stupidity leads to mischief, or the disappointment causes pain, the possibility of a comic effect is at an end. This is true, at all events, for a person who cannot ward off such unpleasure, who is himself its victim or is obliged to have a share in it; whereas a person who is not concerned shows by his demeanour that the situation involved contains everything that is required for a comic effect. Now humour is a means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the distressing affects that interfere with it; it acts as a substitute for the generation of these affects, it puts itself in their place. The conditions for its appearance are given if there is a situation in which, according to our usual habits, we should be tempted to release a distressing affect and if motives then operate upon us which suppress that affect in statu nascendi. In the cases that have just been mentioned the person who is the victim of the injury, pain, and so on, might obtain humorous pleasure, while the unconcerned person laughs from comic pleasure. The pleasure of humour, if this is so, comes about - we cannot say otherwise - at the cost of a release of affect that does not occur: it arises from an economy in the expenditure of affect.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1804
Humour is the most easily satisfied among the species of the comic. It completes its course within a single person; another person’s participation adds nothing new to it. I can keep to myself the enjoyment of the humorous pleasure that has arisen in me, without feeling obliged to communicate it. It is not easy to say what happens in a person when humorous pleasure is generated; but we can obtain some insight if we examine the cases in which humour is communicated or sympathized with, cases in which, by an understanding of the humorous person, we arrive at the same pleasure as his. The crudest case of humour - what is known as Galgenhumor - may be instructive in this connection. A rogue who was being led out to execution on a Monday remarked: ‘Well, this week’s beginning nicely.’ This is actually a joke, since the remark is quite apt in itself, but on the other hand, is misplaced in a nonsensical way, since for the man himself there would be no further events that week. But humour is concerned in the making of such a joke - that is, in disregarding what it is that distinguishes the beginning of this week from others, in denying the distinction which might give rise to motives for quite special emotions. The case was the same when the rogue on his way to execution asked for a scarf for his bare throat so as not to catch cold - an otherwise laudable precaution but one which, in view of what lay in store so shortly for the neck, was remarkably superfluous and unimportant. It must be confessed that there is something like magnanimity in this blague, in the man’s tenacious hold upon his customary self and his disregard of what might overthrow that self and drive it to despair. This kind of grandeur of humour appears unmistakably in cases in which our admiration is not inhibited by the circumstances of the humorous person.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1805
In Victor Hugo’s Hernani, the bandit who has become involved in a conspiracy against his King, Charles I of Spain (the Emperor Charles V), has fallen into the hands of this powerful enemy. He foresees that, convicted of high treason, it is his fate to lose his head. But this fore-knowledge does not prevent his letting himself be known as a Hereditary Grandee of Spain and declaring that he has no intention of renouncing any of the privileges that are his due. A Grandee of Spain might cover his head in the presence of his royal master. Very well, then:
. . . . Nos têtes ont le droit
De tomber couvertes devant de toi.¹
This is humour on the grand scale, and if when we hear it we do not laugh, that is because our admiration covers the humorous pleasure. In the case of the rogue who refuses to catch cold on the way to execution we laugh heartily. The situation that ought to drive the criminal to despair might rouse intense pity in us; but that pity is inhibited because we understand that he, who is more closely concerned, makes nothing of the situation. As a result of this understanding, the expenditure on the pity, which was already prepared, becomes unutilizable and we laugh it off. We are, as it were, infected by the rogue’s indifference - though we notice that it has cost him a great expenditure of psychical work.
An economy of pity is one of the most frequent sources of humorous pleasure. Mark Twain’s humour usually works with his mechanism. In an account of his brother’s life, for instance, he tells us how he was at one time employed on a great road-making enterprise. The premature explosion of a mine blew him up into the air and he came down again far away from the place where he had been working. We are bound to have feelings of sympathy for the victim of the accident and would like to ask whether he was injured by it. But when the story goes on to say that his brother had a half-day’s wages deducted for being ‘absent from his place of employment’ we are entirely distracted from our pity and become almost as hard-hearted as the contractor and almost as indifferent to possible damage to the brother’s health. On another occasion Mark Twain presents us with his family tree, which he traces back to one of Columbus’s fellow-voyagers. He then describes this ancestor’s character and how his baggage consisted entirely of a number of pieces of washing each of which had a different laundry-mark - here we cannot help laughing at the cost of an economy of the feelings of piety into which we were prepared to enter at the beginning of this family history. The mechanism of the humorous pleasure is not interfered with by our knowledge that this pedigree is a fictitious one and that the fiction serves the satirical purpose of exposing the embellishments in similar accounts by other people: it is as independent of the condition that it must be real as in the case of making things comic. In yet another story, Mark Twain describes how his brother constructed a subterranean dwelling, into which he brought a bed, a table and a lamp and which he roofed over with a large piece of sailcloth with a hole in the middle. At night, however, after the hut was finished, a cow that was being driven home fell through the opening of the roof on to the table and put out the lamp. His brother patiently helped to get the beast out and put the establishment to rights again. Next night the same interruption was repeated and his brother behaved as before. And so it was every following night. Repetition makes the story comic, but Mark Twain ends it by reporting that on the forty-sixth night, when the cow fell through again, his brother finally remarked: ‘The thing’s beginning to get monotonous.’ At this our humorous pleasure cannot be kept back, for what we had long expected to hear was that this obstinate set of misfortunes would make his brother angry. And indeed the small contributions of humour that we produce ourselves are as a rule made at the cost of anger - instead of getting angry.²
¹ [‘Our heads have the right to fall before you covered.’]
² The grandiose humorous effect of a figure like that of the fat knight Sir John Falstaff rests on an economy in contempt and indignation. We recognize him as an undeserving gormandizer and swindler, but our condenmation is disarmed by a whole number of factors. We can see that he knows himself as well as we do; he impresses us by his wit, and, besides this, his physical misproportion has the effect of encouraging us to take a comic view of him instead of a serious one, as though the demands of morality and honour must rebound from so fat a stomach. His doings are on the whole harmless, and are almost excused by the comic baseness of the people he cheats. We admit that the poor fellow has a right to try to live and enjoy himself like anyone else, and we almost pity him because in the chief situations we find him a plaything in the hands of someone far his superior. So we cannot feel angry with him and we add all that we economize in indignation with him to the comic pleasure which he affords us apart from this. Sir John’s own humour arises in fact from the superiority of an ego which neither his physical nor his moral defects can rob of its cheerfulness and assurance.
The ingenious knight Don Quixote de la Mancha is, on the contrary, a figure who possesses no humour himself but who with his seriousness offers us a pleasure which could be called humorous, though its mechanism shows an important divergence from that of humour. Don Quixote is originally a purely comic figure, a big child; the phantasies from his books of chivalry have gone to his head. It is well known that to begin with the author intended nothing else of him and that his creation gradually grew far beyond its creator’s first intentions. But after the author had equipped this ridiculous figure with the deepest wisdom and the noblest purposes and had made him into the symbolic representative of an idealism which believes in the realization of its aims and takes duties seriously and takes promises literally, this figure ceased to have a comic effect. Just as in other cases humorous pleasure arises from the prevention of an emotion, so it does here from the interference with comic pleasure. But it is clear that these examples have already carried us a long way from the simple cases of humour.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1806
The species of humour are extraordinarily variegated according to the nature of the emotion which is economized in favour of the humour: pity, anger, pain, tenderness, and so on. Their number seems to remain uncompleted because the kingdom of humour is constantly being enlarged whenever an artist or writer succeeds in submitting some hitherto unconquered emotions to the control of humour, in making them, by devices like those in the examples we have given, into sources of humorous pleasure. The artists in Simplicissismus, for instance, have had astonishing results in achieving humour at the cost of horror and disgust. The forms in which humour is manifested are, moreover, determined by two peculiarities which are connected with the conditions under which it is generated. Humour may, in the first place, appear merged with a joke or some other species of the comic; in that case its task is to get rid of a possibility implicit in the situation that an affect may be generated which would interfere with the pleasurable outcome. In the second place, it may stop this generating of an affect entirely or only partially; this last is actually the commoner case since it is easier to bring about, and it produces the various forms of ‘broken’¹ humour - the humour that smiles through tears. It withdraws a part of its energy from the affect and in exchange gives it a tinge of humour.
The humorous pleasure derived from sympathy originates, as can be seen from the examples above, from a peculiar technique comparable to displacement, by means of which the release of affect that is already in preparation is disappointed and the cathexis diverted on to something else, often on to something of secondary importance. But this does not help us at all to understand the process by which the displacement away from the generating of affect takes place in the humorous person himself. We can see that the receiver imitates the creator of the humour in his mental processes, but this tells us nothing of the forces which make the process possible in the latter.
¹ A term which is used in quite another sense in Vischer’s aesthetics.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1807
We can only say that if someone succeeds, for instance, in disregarding a painful affect by reflecting on the greatness of the interests of the world as compared with his own smallness, we do not regard this as an achievement of humour but of philosophical thought, and if we put ourselves into his train of thought, we obtain no yield of pleasure. Humorous displacement is thus just as impossible under the glare of conscious attention as is comic comparison; like the latter, it is tied to the condition of remaining preconscious or automatic.
We can gain some information about humorous displacement if we look at it in the light of a defensive process. Defensive processes are the psychical correlative of the flight reflex and perform the task of preventing the generation of unpleasure from internal sources. In fulfilling this task they serve mental events as an automatic regulation, which in the end, incidentally, turns out to be detrimental and has to be subjected to conscious thinking. I have indicated one particular form of this defence, repression that has failed, as the operative mechanism for the development of psychoneuroses. Humour can be regarded as the highest of these defensive processes. It scorns to withdraw the ideational content bearing the distressing affect from conscious attention as repression does, and thus surmounts the automatism of defence. It brings this about by finding a means of withdrawing the energy from the release of unpleasure that is already in preparation and of transforming it, by discharge, into pleasure. It is even conceivable that once again it may be a connection with the infantile that puts the means for achieving this at its disposal. Only in childhood have there been distressing affects at which the adult would smile to-day - just as he laughs, as a humorist, at his present distressing affects. The exaltation of his ego, to which the humorous displacement bears witness, and of which the translation would no doubt be ‘I am too big (too fine) to be distressed by these things’, might well be derived from his comparing his present ego with his childish one. This view is to some extent supported by the part played by the infantile in neurotic processes of repression.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1808
On the whole humour is closer to the comic than to jokes. It shares with the former its psychical localization in the preconscious whereas jokes, as we have had to suppose, are formed as a compromise between the unconscious and the preconscious. On the other hand humour does not participate in a peculiar characteristic common to jokes and the comic, on which we have perhaps not yet laid sufficient stress. It is a necessary condition for generating the comic that we should be obliged, simultaneously or in rapid succession, to apply to one and the same act of ideation two different ideational methods, between which the ‘comparison’ is then made and the comic difference emerges. Differences in expenditure of this kind arise between that belongs to someone else and to oneself, between what is as usual and what has been changed, between what is expected and what happens.¹ In the case of jokes, the difference between two simultaneous methods of viewing things, which operate with a different expenditure, applies to the process in the person who hears the joke. One of these two views, following the hints contained in the joke, passes along the path of thought through the unconscious; the other stays on the surface and views the joke like any other wording that has emerged from the preconscious and become conscious. We should perhaps be justified in representing the pleasure from a joke that is heard as being derived from the difference between these two methods of viewing it.² Here we are saying of jokes what we described as their possessing a Janus head, while the relation between jokes and the comic had still to be cleared up.³
¹ If we are prepared to do a little violence to the concept of ‘expectation’, we can, following Lipps, include a very large region of the comic under the comic of expectation. But what are probably the most basic instances of the comic, those arising from a comparison between someone else’s expenditure and one’s own, would be the very ones that fitted in least easily to this grouping.
² We can accept this formula without question, since it leads to nothing that would contradict our earlier discussions. The difference between the two expenditures must in essence come down to the inhibitory expenditure that is saved. The lack of this economy in inhibition in the case of the comic, and the absence of quantitative contrast in the case of jokes, would determine the distinction between the comic feeling and the impression of a joke, in spite of their agreeing in the characteristic of using two kinds of ideational activity for the same view.
³ This peculiarity of the ‘double face’ [in French in the original] has naturally not escaped the authorities. Mélinand (1895), from whom I have borrowed this phrase, states the determinants of laughter in the following formula: ‘Ce qui fait rire c’est ce qui est à la fois, d’un côté, absurde et de l’autre, familier.’ [‘What makes one laugh is what is on the one hand absurd, and on the other familiar.’] This formula fits jokes better than the comic, but does not completely cover the former either. - Bergson (1900, 98) defines the comic situation by the ‘interférence des séries’: ‘Une situation est toujours comique quand elle appartient en même temps à deux séries d’événements absolument indépendantes, et qu’elle peut s’interpréter à la fois dans deux sens tout différents.’ [‘A situation is always comic when it belongs at the same time to two series of events that are absolutely independent, and where it can be interpreted simultaneously in two quite different senses.’] - Lipps regards the comic as ‘the bigness and smallness of the same thing’.
Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious
1809
In the case of humour the characteristic which we have just brought forward becomes effaced. It is true that we feel humorous pleasure when an emotion is avoided which we should have expected because it usually accompanies the situation, and to that extent humour too comes under the extended concept of the comic of expectation. But with humour it is no longer a question of two different methods of viewing the same subject matter. The fact that the situation is dominated by the emotion that is to be avoided, which is of an unpleasurable character, puts an end to the possibility of comparing it with the characteristics of the comic and of jokes. Humorous displacement is in fact a case of a liberated expenditure being used elsewhere - a case which has been shown to be so perilous to a comic effect.
We are now at the end of our task, having reduced the mechanism of humorous pleasure to a formula analogous to those for comic pleasure and for jokes. The pleasure in jokes has seemed to us to arise from an economy in expenditure upon inhibition, the pleasure in the comic from an economy in expenditure upon ideation (upon cathexis) and the pleasure in humour from an economy in expenditure upon feeling. In all three modes of working of our mental apparatus the pleasure is derived from an economy. All three are agreed in representing methods of regaining from mental activity a pleasure which has in fact been lost through the development of that activity. For the euphoria which we endeavour to reach by these means is nothing other than the mood of a period of life in which we were accustomed to deal with our psychical work in general with a small expenditure of energy - the mood of our childhood, when we were ignorant of the comic, when we were incapable of jokes and when we had no need of humour to make us feel happy in our life.