This is the seventh of several installments on Sigmund Freud’s Jokes [Witz] and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905; free eBook) – and the reactions to it. Just trying to get some clarity.
In this installment, I continue with his second chapter, where Freud gives us a laundry list of joke techniques, trying to narrow down to a few meta-types. We’re working through Freud’s first category of joke techniques or jokework, which rely on word usage:
Techniques of verbal jokes
By way of summary, Freud gives us some final thoughts about the first category as a whole.
Final Thoughts
Condensation rules
When looking at all three sub-categories – condensation, multiple uses and double meaning – taken together, Freud finds that the underlying principle is a “tendency to economy,” what he’s previously called “the peculiar brevity of wit,” and that they can all be grouped under “condensation” (30). Most of the those strictly in the sub-category of condensation as described above can be loosely described as sound jokes.
Sound jokes [Klangwitze] have “similarity of [word] structure or rhyming assonance, or whether they share the same first few letters, and so on” (31). However, as we start to get to the second and third class of verbal jokes, we start to get past puns and into plays on words (itself a sub-sub-category), and Freud describes this transition as a spectrum.
Beyond sound jokes
Freud notes Kuno Fischer’s distinction between two sub-categories: puns and plays on words.
A pun is a bad play upon words, since it plays upon the word not as a word but as a sound (Fischer, 78).
A play on words “passes from the sound of the word to the word itself” (Fischer, 78).
But Freud finds the distinction to be haphazard and to establish an unnecessary hierarchy in terms of technique. Puns are, for Freud,
[T]he lowest form of verbal joke, probably because they are the ‘cheapest’ – can be made with the least trouble. And they do in fact make the least demand on the technique of expression, just as the play upon words proper makes the highest. (30-31)
However, in contrast, Freud finds that in terms of technique, “puns merely form a sub-species of the group which reaches its peak in the pay upon words proper” (33).
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?
