This is the thirteenth 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. However, along the way, Freud has said some weird things that a lot of people call him on.
In particular, he makes a distinction between the comic and jokes [Witz], and begins to hint about jests [Scherz], he characterizes his jokework process as concerned only with the point of view of the joker, which he asserts can be known, he admits he still doesn’t know what a joke is, but “he knows it when he sees it,” he distinguishes his “opposites” from irony proper, and allusions and riddles from jokes. Let’s address each of these in turn.
The comic versus jokes and jests
Freud differentiates the “comic” from “jokes” a bit in the introduction, stating with Theodor Lipps that the comic is what is humorous or funny, but jokes are the result of an active joker. He notes that Kuno Fischer says jokes are a subset of the comic that “bring forward what is hidden.” However, Freud leaves off fully differentiating the comic from jokes. And he again defers that in chapter II:
We must keep to our view that the technique of this last group of jokes that we have examined lies in nothing else than in bringing forward “faulty reasoning.” But we are obliged to admit that their examination has so far led us more into obscurity than understanding. (47)
This issue is important because it overlaps other problems in Freud’s theory, like the difference between a joker’s intention and the joke’s reception by the audience.
Freud hints through an example that jests [Scherz] and jokes [Witz] might apply to the same thing (56), but we should know there’s a distinction he’ll make there later.
Author versus audience intention
Freud considers and dismisses the question of an audience finding a displacement in a joke that may not have been intended. He announces that he is interested in “jokework” or “the psychical processes involved in the construction of the joke” (38). He is not interested in the understanding or “taking in” of the joke – at least, not until later (38).
This is part and parcel to the difference between the comic (humorous, funny) and jokes: the comic can be found, jokes must be conceptualized and told. Further, this omission of the audience, for myself and many others, is key and represents a mistake that gets carried on by a lot of early humor theorists – that it’s only the joke writer, or more specifically, how and why the critic thinks the joke was written, that matters, and he claims he can tell the difference:
If this distinction is not clear to us, we have an unfailing means of bringing it tangibly before our eyes in our attempts at reduction. (38)
I’m not convinced.
Characterizing jokes
Freud also includes a brief definition of “‘characterizing’ jokes“: a joke that “seeks by an example to illustrate a [person’s] characteristic[s]” (39).
What’s a joke?
Freud admits he isn’t really sure if the examples qualify as jokes.
It is the case, however, that in a number of instances we are in doubt whether the particular example ought to be called a joke or not…. In coming to our decision, we can base ourselves on nothing but a certain “feeling,” which we may interpret as meaning that the decision is made in our judgement in accordance with particular criteria that are not yet accessible to our knowledge” (43).
This kind of “I can’t define obscenity, but I know it when I see it” definition rarely flies.
Analogies
When he gets to analogies, Freud again is tripped up:
We have already admitted that in some of the examples we have examined we have not been able to banish a doubt as to whether they ought to be regarded as jokes at all; and in this uncertainty we have recognized that the foundations of our enquiry have been seriously shaken. But I am aware of this uncertainty in no other material more strongly or more frequently than in jokes of analogy. There is a feeling – and this is probably true of a large number of other people under the same conditions – which tells me “this is a joke, I can pronounce this to be a joke” even before the hidden essential nature of jokes has been discovered. This feeling leaves me in the lurch most often in the case of joking analogies. If to begin with I unhesitatingly pronounce an analogy to be a joke, a moment later I seem to notice that the enjoyment it gives me is of a quality different from what I am accustomed to derive from a joke. And the circumstance that joking analogies are very seldom able to provoke the explosive laugh which signalizes a good joke makes it impossible for me to resolve the doubt in my usual way – by limiting myself to the best and most effective examples of a species. (60)
Again, it’s a “feeling,” but in the case of analogies, it’s of a different “quality.” Further, the best jokes “provoke” an “explosive laugh.” Here we see the first instance of Relief theory – that there’s a hydraulic pressure building that “explodes” when “provoked.”
Further, after working through several humorous analogies and finding them wanting, Freud says,
So far we have found that whenever an analogy strikes us as being in the nature of a joke it owes this impression to the admixture of one of the joke-techniques that are familiar to us. (64).
What all this analysis has shown is that the joke [Witz], or more specifically the jokework, though it might incorporate many techniques, is not a term used to describe the whole of a joking statement. There are specific components that are jokework, and others that might best be described as “humor adjacent,” strange, quirky, interesting or curious but not bringing a laugh on their own. Freud expresses his inability to parse out the differences a bit later
But, that being so, we are completely at a loss to see what it is that determines the joking characteristic of analogies, since that characteristic certainly does not reside in analogy as a form of expression of thought or in the operation of making a comparison. All we can do is to include analogy among the species of “indirect representation” used by the joke-technique and we must leave unresolved the problem which we have met with much more clearly in the case of analogies than in the methods of joking that we came across earlier. No doubt, moreover, there must be some special reason why the decision whether something is a joke or not offers greater difficulties in analogies than in other forms of expression. (65)
So Freud kicks that can down the road. However, he does identify a lot of things that are not jokes.
Distinction between opposites and irony
Freud doesn’t limit either opposites or overstatement to jokes, but extends it to other forms of persuasion, like Mark Antony’s speech at the funeral of Caesar in Shakespeare’s Julias Caesar: “For Brutus is an honorable man…” Freud notes,
But we call this “irony” and no longer a joke. The only technique that characterizes irony is representation by the opposite. Moreover we read and hear of “ironical jokes.” So it can no longer be doubted that technique alone is insufficient to characterize the nature of jokes. Something further is needed which we have not yet discovered. But on the other hand it remains an uncontradicted fact that if we undo the technique of a joke it disappears. For the time being we may find difficulty in thinking how these two fixed points that we have arrived at in explaining jokes can be reconciled. (54)
Ok, so irony is a type of representation by the opposite, but it’s not joking – irony by itself is not jokework, or at least, not always – and Freud defers decision on this until a later time.
Distinction between allusions and jokes
Freud talks at length about various forms of allusion, but when when it comes down to it, allusion isn’t always a joke either.
Allusion is perhaps the commonest and most easily manageable method of joking…. But it precisely reminds us once more of the fact that had begun to puzzle us in our consideration of the technique of jokes. An allusion in itself does not constitute a joke; there are correctly constructed allusions which have no claim to such a character. Only allusions that possess that character can be described as jokes. So that the criterion of jokes, which we have pursued into their technique, eludes us there once again. (58-59)
Distinction between jokes and riddles
Freud does say something here about riddles: Basically, for a riddle to be a joke, it must possess unification:
The great majority of all such riddles [those that are not jokes] lack unification. That is to say, the clue by which one syllable is to be guessed is quite independent of those that point to the second or third, as well as of the indication which is to lead to the separate discovery of the whole. (49)
Summary
If we were to occupy ourselves by cataloging all the things that are not jokes – or not always jokes – we’d never finish. Freud will eventually answer these questions. Here he’s just building narrative tension; however, most of us don’t find those answers, when they do come, to be satisfactory. And I haven’t even begun to discuss his examples; apparently, Freud thinks that it’s funny that all Jewish men are dirty and don’t bathe, and that many Jewish women are unattractive and unmarriable. Quite the recurring themes.
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?
