This is the fifth 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
We’re discussing the second sub-set of verbal joke techniques, “Multiple uses of the same material” (21, 28), and its four sub-sub-sets: Whole and parts, different order, slight modification, full and empty.
-
“Multiple uses of the same material” (21, 28).
-
“As a whole and in parts” (28).
-
“The multiple use of the same word, once as a whole and again in the syllables into which it falls” (20).
Freud’s examples are primarily German and Italian, one of my favorites is from Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, Act II, scene ii, Where Dromio of Syracuse and Antipholus of Syracuse meet back up after some misadventures where Dromio discovered his doppleganger’s wife:
Ant S.: “What’s her name?”
Dro. S. “Nell, sir; but her name and three quarters, that is, an ell [~18″] and three quarters, will not measure her from hip to hip.”
-
- “In a different order” (28).
John F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country” comes easily to mind; it’s witty, though not particularly humorous.
-
-
“With slight modification” (28).
-
“Taking the same verbal material and [repeating it,] merely make some alteration in its arrangement. The slighter the alteration – the more one has the impression of something different being said in the same words – the better is the joke technically” (21).
This can just be the alteration of a letter, as in Freud’s example of a Jewish woman who confronts a Jewish politician by saying, “Herr Hofrat, your ante-semitism was well-known to me; your antisemitism is new to me.” The first acknowledges he’s Jewish, the second that he’s racist.
-
-
“Of the same words full and empty” (28).
-
Better yet is relying on usage to imply a different meaning. Freud notes, “Words are plastic material with which one can do all kinds of things. There are words which, when used in certain connections, have lost their original full meaning, but which regain it in other connections” (22).
Freud uses the example of a blind man meeting a lame man and asking him, “How are you getting along?” The lame man answers, “As you see.” “Getting along” and “seeing” are commonly used in metaphorical terms, this use implies their full, literal meaning. Of course this overlaps with a category below, but still.
Later, Freud brings in the following joke, and says it’s “case of the same word, used ‘full’ and ’empty’ (Group II (f))” (34), but he later calls it a combination of double-meaning, (sub-species f,)” but “double-meaning” is III (i), below (37).
Two Jews met in the neighborhood of the bath-house. “Have you taken a bath?” asked one of them. “What?” asked the other in return, “Is there one missing?”
Freud argues that the full value of “taken a bath” is restored in the answer.
Summary
So these are more techniques of verbal jokes, and again Freud takes a ridiculous amount of time describing examples, connecting them to the theories from the introduction and making arguments. Once again, these categorizations of jokes don’t do much for my work, but they are interesting to think about when writing jokes.
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?
