This is the first of several installments on Sigmund Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905; free eBook) – and the reactions to it. I’m using this blog to make public my notes, both to help people to understand the theories as well as to help me clarify in my own mind what philosophers and theorists have said about comedy, humor, jokes, etc.
In this installment, Freud introduces the project and goes into several theories about jokes and the comic that have come before; namely, from Jean Paul Richter, Theodor Vischer, Kuno Fischer, and Theodor Lipps. [Maybe someday I’ll get hardcore and attempt to work through these guys in German.]
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). In the order in which he discusses them (and I will follow his lead), they are:
Activity
The bringing forward of what is hidden
Relation to the content of our thoughts
The characteristic of playful judgement
The coupling of dissimilar things
Contrasting ideas
Sense in nonsense
The succession of bewilderment and enlightenment
The peculiar brevity of wit
The problem, for Freud, is there’s no unified theory that relates all the criteria and characteristics to one another.
We are entirely without insight into the connection that presumably exists between the separate determinants…. We need to be told, further, whether a joke must satisfy all these determinants in order to be a proper joke, or need only satisfy some, and if so, which can be replaced by others and which are indispensable. We should also wish to have a grouping and classification of jokes on the basis of the characteristics considered essential (6-7).
Freud moves pretty fast, so to clarify, I will deal with the first four of the above criteria and characteristics here, and the rest in a subsequent post to keep things manageable.
Activity
Theodor Lipps says that jokes are “entirely subjective” instances of the comic (or humor; what’s funny). Through a joke, the comic (or humor) “is attached to action of ours as such, to which we invariably stand in the relation of subject and never of object, not even of voluntary object” (80, as cited in Jokes, 3). We make jokes – we’re the jokers – and in these jokes we produce the comic; thus, we are active, striving to create humor.
A joke is “[A]ny conscious and successful evocation of what is comic, whether the comic of observation or of situation” (78, as cited in Jokes, 3). The competing ideas that it’s “subjective,” that we find it funny ourselves and thus try to make the joke, but that it must also be “successful” creates quite a bit of a problem, that Freud will later try to correct. Also, Freud will challenge the idea that this action is entirely “conscious.”
The bringing forward of what is hidden: Physical caricature
Kuno Fischer begins with the idea of the caricature, which is a subset of the comic that characterizes and reveals the physical world:
Many caricatures of Reagan depicted him as old.
If it is concealed, it must be uncovered in the light of the comic way of looking at things; if it is noticed only a little or scarcely at all, it must be brought forward and made obvious, so that it lies clear and open to the light of day… In this way caricature comes about. (as cited in Jokes, 3)
Caricature brings the concealed into the open, and yet characterizes it as comic by highlighting and “making obvious,” which usually involve hyperbolic representation. But this is again done with physical things: a politician’s age, or actions, etc. There’s another level beyond the physical: the world of thoughts.
Relation to the content of our thoughts
Fischer posits, in contrast, that what makes jokes a subset of the comic is their relation, not to an active subject/joker, but “to [the comic’s] object, which he considers is the concealed ugliness of the world of thoughts” (3).
World of thoughts and ideas
Fischer notes,
Our whole spiritual world, the intellectual kingdom of our thoughts and ideas, does not unfold itself before the gaze of external observation, it cannot be directly imagined pictorially and visibly; and yet it too contains its inhibitions, its weaknesses and its deformities – a wealth of ridiculous and comic contrasts (as cited in Jokes, 3)
To unpack this, the “world of thoughts and ideas” as differentiated from the physical world that we can observe is fairly straightforward; to avoid going all Marxist with ideology here, I’ll go to Kenneth Burke and his “Definition of Man [sic]” as “Inventors of the negative.” The world of thoughts and ideas is the world of the conceptual, and Burke might say of zero and “not.” We can’t see nothing – there’s nothing there to see – but we can conceptualize absence, and refer to things that are not physically present. But that’s still imagining “pictorially and visibly.” We picture something and note its absence.
We can also conceptualize things that have no physical presence (or absence), like wealth, prosperity, peace in the Middle East, freedom and ‘Merica! Concepts like these cannot be pinned down to individual objects or things, and yet the concepts carry psychological force; they shape our actions, tell us what to like and how to think, and they don’t always work as a cohesive whole – they’re a mess of contradictions. When we call attention to these contradictions and contrasts, we’ve made a judgement, which can take the form of a joke.
A joke is a judgement which produces a comic contrast; [comic contrast] has already played a silent part in caricature, but only in judgment does it attain its peculiar form and the free sphere of its unfolding (3).
So a joke is a judgment that displays or produces a comic contrast, which could run to ridicule and superiority theory, but to be comic it must be done playfully.
The characteristic of playful judgement
Fischer makes an analogy to the aesthetic, to beauty and form, which Freud describes as:
[A]esthetic freedom lies in the playful contemplation of things. Elsewhere 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)
Thus playful judging is similarly “a sort of judging released from its usual rules and regulations” (4). Freud quotes Jean Paul Richter: “Freedom produces jokes and jokes produce freedom” (4).
We can see how this idea plays out in the notions of play spaces, and particularly in the simple carnivalesque, where the norms and rules of polite society are temporarily suspended and people are “free.” Freud similarly will incorporate an idea of how this “freedom” will come about.
This is the first of several installments on Sigmund Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905; free eBook) – and the reactions to it. I’m using this blog to make public my notes, both to help people to understand the theories as well as to help me clarify in my own mind what philosophers and theorists have said about comedy, humor, jokes, etc.
To unpack this, the “world of thoughts and ideas” as differentiated from the physical world that we can observe is fairly straightforward; to avoid going all Marxist with ideology here, I’ll go to Kenneth Burke and his “Definition of Man [sic]” as “Inventors of the negative.” The world of thoughts and ideas is the world of the conceptual, and Burke might say of zero and “not.” We can’t see nothing – there’s nothing there to see – but we can conceptualize absence, and refer to things that are not physically present. But that’s still imagining “pictorially and visibly.” We picture something and note its absence.