This is the eleventh of several installments on Sigmund Freud’s Jokes [Witz] and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905; free eBook) – and the reactions to it. Still trying for clarity.
In this installment, I’m still addressing his second chapter, and his laundry list of joke techniques, which he is trying to narrow down to a few meta-types. We’ve moved on to the “Techniques of conceptual jokes,” which he says rely more on the situation for their humor.
Techniques of conceptual jokes
Freud characterizes these conceptual jokes as “mak[ing] use of deviations from normal thinking,” (42) and ultimately arrives at five categories: displacement, absurdity, faulty reasoning, unification, and indirect representation. Now up is unification, which has four sub-sets: ready repartees, “ands,” representation by the opposite and overstatement.
Unification
Unification is Freud’s fourth category of conceptual jokes. He says, “Their technique, in particular, reminds us of what we already know” (47). He describes these jokes as “refined rather than strong,” and that they “work by methods that are unobtrusive,” so he gives us multiple examples (47).
January is the month in which we offer our dear friends wishes, and the rest are the months in which they are not fulfilled.
Human life falls into two halves. In the first half we wish the second one would come; and in the second we wish the first one were back.
Experience consists in experiencing what we do not wish to experience. (47)
The last two are borrowed from Fischer. While he notes some overlap with “multiple use of the same material,” Freud finds something more in these jokes:
I should like in particular to stress the fact that here new and unexpected unities are set up, relations of ideas to one another, definitions made mutually or by reference to a common third element. I should like to name this process “unification.” (47)
While this process “is clearly analogous to condensation by compression into the same words,” the examples, particularly the first one, “are characterized by a (once again, modified) relation to a third element” (48).
Freud then launches into a series of sub-sets.
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Ready repartees
Freud notes,
[R]epartee consists in the defence going to meet the aggression, in “turning the tables on someone” or “paying someone back in his own coin” – that is, in establishing an unexpected unity between attack and counter-attack. (49-50)
Some of Freud’s examples are clever:
The French poet J. B. Rousseau wrote an Ode to Posterity. Voltaire was not of opinion that the poem merited survival, and jokingly remarked: “This poem will not reach its destination.” (Fischer, 1889; 49)
Duke Charles of Württemberg happened on one of his rides to come upon a dyer who was engaged on his job. Pointing to the grey horse he was riding, the Duke called out: “Can you dye him blue?”
“Yes, of course, your Highness,” came the answer, “if he can stand boiling.” (50)
I always like the old joke, falsely attributed to Winston Churchill, where an offended woman says to her offender,
“If you were my husband, sir, I’d give you a dose of poison!”
The man looked at her. “If I were your husband,” said he, “I’d take it!”
These are thought to be an return attack, a rejoinder that comes uniquely out of the situation, unifying what was said or done with something unexpected.
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“and”
Unification has another, quite specially interesting technical instrument at its disposal: stringing things together with the conjunction “and.” If things are strung together in this way it implies that they are connected: we cannot help understanding it so. (50)
Freud’s example:
For instance, when Heine, speaking of the city of Göttingen in the Harzreise, remarks: “Speaking generally, the inhabitants of Göttingen are divided into students, professors, philistines and donkeys,” we take this grouping in precisely the sense which Heine emphasizes in an addition to the sentence: “and these four classes are anything but sharply divided.”
Freud argues that in this example (and in other cases) the “and” causes us to make connections and assumptions we might otherwise miss.
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Representation by the opposite
The replacement of the really appropriate “no” by a “yes” constitutes a new technical method of joking. (51)
Freud uses the example of the Duke’s horse, which he wants dyed blue, and also this one:
Frederick the Great heard of a preacher in Silesia who had the reputation of being in contact with spirits. He sent for the man and received him with the question “You can conjure up spirits?”
The reply was: “At your Majesty‘s command. But they don‘t come.”‘
Freud notes
In order to carry out the replacement, it was necessary to add a “but” to the “yes”; so that “yes” and “but” are equivalent in sense to “no” (51).
The example with the Duke’s horse adds an “if,” with similar effect. Freud comes to call this “representation by the opposite” (51-52).
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Overstatement
In these the “yes” which would be in place in the reduction is replaced by a “no,” which, however, on account of its content, has the force of an intensified “yes,” and vice versa. A denial is a substitute for an overstated confirmation. (52)
Freud’s examples are:
Two Jews were discussing baths. “I have a bath every year,” said one of them, “whether I need one or not.”
A Jew noticed the remains of some food in another one‘s beard. “I can tell you what you had to eat yesterday.”
“Well, tell me.”
“Lentils, then.”
“Wrong: the day before yesterday!” (53)
This is the idea of protesting too much, or revealing things that one shouldn’t. While Freud constantly points out that his classifications overlap, he misses making a distinction between this and his “automatic” faulty reasoning, above.
As these examples show, representation by the opposite is an instrument of joke-technique that is used frequently and works powerfully. (54)
Summary
So displacement is the first of several techniques by which the joker makes use of deviations from normal thinking within the situation to achieve humor.
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?
