This is the fourth of several installments on Sigmund Freud’s Jokes [Witz] 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, I address his second chapter, where Freud asserts that the characteristic of jokes lies in their form of expression, and thus he gives us a laundry list of joke techniques, which he tries to narrow down to a few meta-types. This chapter is not particularly interesting to me at present, but let’s get into it for the purposes of rigor. Freud notes that sometimes a joke relies on word usage, and sometimes it relies more on the situation, thus he arrives at two categories of joke techniques or jokework:
- Techniques of verbal jokes
- Techniques of conceptual jokes
I’ll deal with the former over the next several days, and address the latter in future posts.
Techniques of verbal jokes
Freud notes that there are three major categories for the techniques of verbal jokes:
- “Condensation [Verdichtung]” (28).
- “Multiple uses of the same material” (21, 28).
- “Double meaning” (28).
I’ll deal with the first of these, Condensation and it’s two sub-variations, today.
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“Condensation [Verdichtung]” (28).
Condensation is Freud’s attempt to incorporate the “peculiar brevity of wit” that he gets from Theodor Lipps and discusses in his introduction (b). For Freud, condensation is a process of reducing by bring things together, “accompanied by the formation of a substitute” (10). Freud notes two types of substitutes.
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“With formation of [compound or] composite word,” (28).
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These include creative words like “anecdotage,” “alcoholidays” (12) or my current favorite “carcolepsy”.
Such words make use of the classical rhetorical trope of allusion, they hint at a crossover of meaning of the two words to form something bigger.
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“With [alteration or] modification” (28)
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This is a modification of the form of expression – the slighter the modification, the better the joke.
Freud’s example is a Minister of Agriculture, formerly a farmer, when he resigned, another said of him that “Like Cincinnatus [a Roman], he has gone back to his place before the plow,” when the common expression is “behind the plow,” in front of the plow is the ox (16).
Another old favorite is Fred Allen’s quip that he didn’t do movies because, “I have a face that was made for radio.” Voices are for radio, faces are for film and television.
Freud links this condensation process to one he described in his The Interpretation of Dreams.
Summary
So these are the first techniques of verbal jokes, and Freud takes a ridiculous amount of time describing examples, connecting them to the theories from the introduction and making arguments. These categorizations of jokes doesn’t do much for my work, but they are interesting to think about when writing jokes.
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?
