In The Purloined Punch Line, Jerry Aline Flieger picks apart Freud’s arguments, looking for consistency. She finds some problematic assumptions right from the start.
In his introduction, Freud finds nine criteria and characteristics of jokes that “[Seem] to us at first sight so very much to the point and so easily confirmed by instances” that we can easily accept them (6). One of these is “The characteristic of playful judgement.”
Playful judgment
Freud, working from Kuno Fischer’s work, notes that jokes are judgments that produce “comic contrasts,” but unlike bona fide, “useful” discourse, jokes and the judgments they produce are playful in nature, like the aesthetic. Flieger draws our attention to this passage:
The aesthetic attitude towards an object is characterized by the condition that we do not ask anything of the object, especially no satisfaction of our serious needs, but content ourselves with the enjoyment of contemplating it. The aesthetic attitude is playful in contrast to work. (4)
Flieger notes that Freud is saying that jokes are “divorced from serious needs” (59); that we don’t expect them to satisfy any biological function, but only psychological “enjoyment.”
Tendentious jokes
The problem is that Freud devotes a massive amount of space toward a distinction between tendentious jokes, which fulfill “a hostile purpose”, and innocent jokes, which are “a purely aesthetic – ‘aim in itself'” (58). Tendentious jokes have a serious purpose: they express “a hostile urge directed against a victim” (58). She quotes Freud here:
By making our enemy small, inferior, despicable, or comic, we achieve in a roundabout way the enjoyment of overcoming him. (103)
Flieger clearly takes this type of psychological “enjoyment” is, for Freud, the expression of a deeper, serious biological need.
There are other passages Flieger points to later that corroborate with this evidence, and I’ll get to them in due time. However, I need to put up a brief note about deconstruction.
Deconstruction
When critics find inconsistencies, we generally use them to question the author’s thesis by a process some call deconstruction (others don’t name it, but they generally hit the steps in some fashion). The term has a lot of uses, but my understanding and usage of the term is based on Derridean (from Jacques Derrida) Deconstruction, as explained by Barbara Biesecker, Ph.D [Though if she ever reads this (she won’t), she’ll probably tell me I’m wrong, as I am about so much of Derrida].
Derridean Deconstruction is a four step process, initiated by the critic, but grounded in the text. Though the critic points out the problem, the problem is with the text itself; the text essentially deconstructs itself through internal inconsistencies. What the critic does is:
- Locate a key binary opposition in the text. For Freud, they are things like unconscious versus conscious (although there’s also preconscious) and tendentious versus innocent jokes.
- Determine the hierarchy in the author’s theory. Freud views innocent jokes as frivolous and purely aesthetic, so only tendentious jokes, which have a hostile purpose, matter. The hierarchy is: tendentious/innocent.
- Find an example in the text where the hierarchy is inverted. In the above case, Freud says all jokes are aesthetic; although they produce judgment, they can fulfill no purpose, satisfy no need save enjoyment. Essentially: tendentious = innocent.
- Carry this inversion through to the rest of the text. What happens when we apply the broken or inverted hierarchy to other examples? If the hierarchy breaks down in this case, can we use the case as a key to show the flaws in all the other cases? What happens to the overarching argument?
People get mad at the critics [Though, to be fair, Derrida’s writing style casts him as an asshole], but the problem is with the text and theory itself: in the immortal words of rapper and actor Ice-T, “You played yourself.”
Flieger will essentially take apart Freud’s theory of tendentious jokes and see what remains in the rubble; strap in, it’s going to be fun to watch [If you’re into such things]!
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?
