This is the sixth 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 third sub-set of verbal joke techniques, “Double meaning” (28), and its five sub-sub-sets: Name and thing, metaphorical and literal, play on words, double entendre, and with allusion.
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“Double meaning” (28).
Freud extends his idea of using a word’s “full” versus “watered-down,” meaning to commonly understood techniques of joking, particularly words that have “double meaning” or “plays upon words.” Freud notes that the distinction between his second and third group here are not clean, and he further notes several “sub-classes” of this latter group that are similarly not cleanly divisible.
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“Meaning as a name and as a thing” (28).
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“Cases of the double meaning of a name and of a thing denoted by it” (23). Like making references to shooting (“discharge”) to or about a guy named Pistol.
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“Metaphorical and literal meanings” (28).
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“Double meaning arising from the literal and metaphorical meanings of a word” (24). Freud’s example is quite involved, comparing a doctor who held a laryngoscope up to his contemporaries as a reference to Hamlet’s thought of a play as a way to hold a mirror up to society. [Anyone got a better one?]
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“Double meaning proper, or play on words” (24, 28).
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These first three differ from the last two in that the meanings of the words tend to be equally prominent. Freud’s examples:
A doctor, as he came away from a lady’s bedside, said to her husband with a shake of his head, “I don’t like her looks.” “I’ve not liked her looks for a long time,” the husband hastened to agree.
Louis C.K. has a joke that’s parallel. When his bank notifies him that he has “insufficient funds,” he agrees, “Well that’s a good way to put it too. I agree with that. I find my funds to be grossly insufficient.
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“Double entendre [Zweideutigkeit]” (28).
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In double entendres, “the effect of the joke depends quite specially on the sexual meaning,” which is less prominent as it is less socially acceptable (27). His example is:
This girl reminds me of Dreyfus [a soldier on trial]. The army doesn’t believe in her innocence.
Another good example here is Mercutio’s line from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet:
Tis no less [a good day], I tell you; for the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon.
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“Double meaning with an allusion” (28).
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Not all double meanings [Zweideutigkeit] have to be sexual. Freud defines this last category generically as “Where in a case of double meaning the two meanings are not equally obvious” or “are not equally prominent but in which one lies behind the other” (27-28).
All of these forms work through the process Freud has described as the succession of bewilderment and enlightenment/illumination, as previously described.
Summary
So these are more techniques of verbal jokes, and once more, Freud takes a ridiculous amount of time describing examples, connecting them to the theories from the introduction and making arguments. These categorizations of jokes still don’t do much for my work, but they are interesting to think about when writing jokes.
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?
