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.
Techniques of conceptual jokes
Freud characterizes these conceptual jokes as “mak[ing] use of deviations from normal thinking,” (42) and ultimately arrives at five categories: displacement, absurdity, faulty reasoning, unification, and indirect representation. Now up is absurdity.
Absurdity
Freud classifies these as “jokes which… undisguisedly exhibit a piece of nonsense or stupidity” (39), sometimes to point out further absurdity, and sometimes not.
Pointing out further absurdity
One of his shorter examples here is as follows:
“Never to be born would be the best thing for mortal men.” “But,” adds the philosophical comment in Fliegende Blätter [trans. Flying leaves; A German satirical magazine], “this happens to scarcely one person in a hundred thousand.” (40)
Freud argues that the comment is nonsensical, the idea that “scarcely one person in a hundred thousand” is “never born” makes no sense. But it highlights the nonsense of the statement that preceded it: If you were never born, you wouldn’t be a mortal – you wouldn’t exist, or collectively, the category of “mortal men” wouldn’t exist. Freud thus concludes
The technique of the nonsensical joke which we have so far considered really consists, therefore, in presenting something that is stupid and nonsensical, the sense of which lies in the revelation and demonstration of something else that is stupid and nonsensical (41).
However, Freud also allows that it doesn’t always do this.
Without
Freud has a number of examples here as well, but here’s a short one: Lichtenberg’s joke where,
That’s dumb.
He wondered how it is that cats have two holes cut in their skin precisely at the place where their eyes are…. [Georg Christoph] Lichtenberg’s is a joke which makes use of stupidity for some purpose and behind which something lies. But what? For the moment, we must admit, no answer can be given. (42)
Summary
So absurdity is another technique by which the joker makes use of deviations from normal thinking within the situation to achieve humor. Freud says sometimes they are enlightening, but sometimes not. However, I read the last example as a critique of creationists – it seems to be critiquing evolution by saying that they think it randomly happened that way, which is absurd, but ascribing an absurd argument to someone is a straw man fallacy, and those who make such allegations are the ones at fault, to it boomerangs.
This is the ninth 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.
