This is the tenth 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.
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 faulty reasoning, with its two sub-sets, sophistical jokes and automatic extension.
Faulty reasoning
These have the “appearance of logic” about them, but are really “facades” for pieces of faulty reasoning (43). Freud later calls a first sub-category of these “sophistical” pieces of faulty reasoning, or “sophistical” jokes (46). The key example, most often referenced, is the Kettle Joke.
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Sophistical jokes: The kettle joke
A. borrowed a copper kettle from B. and after he had returned it was sued by B. because the kettle now had a big hole in it which made it unusable. His [A.’s] defence was:
“First, I never borrowed a kettle from B. at all; secondly, the kettle had a hole in it already when I got it from him; thirdly, I gave him back the kettle undamaged.”
Each one of these defences is valid in itself, but taken together they exclude one another. A. was treating in isolation what had to be regarded as connected whole…. We might also say: A. has put an “and” where only an “either-or” is possible (44).
Freud has another category, however, which he describes as “automatic.”
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Automatic extension
Automatic jokes are when the faulty reasoning is an automatic extension of previously accepted norms or logic. Freud’s examples are pretty horrible, in cultural terms; here’s his second one:
The bridegroom was most disagreeably surprised when the bride was introduced to him, and drew the broker on one side and whispered his remonstrances: “Why have you brought me here?” he asked reproachfully. “She‘s ugly and old, she squints and has bad teeth and bleary eyes . . .”
“You needn‘t lower your voice”, interrupted the broker, “she‘s deaf as well.”
In each of his cases, Freud argues,
A person who has reacted in the same way several times in succession repeats this mode of expression on the next occasion, when it is unsuitable and defeats his own intentions. He neglects to adapt himself to the needs of the situation, by giving way to the automatic action of habit…. The broker in the second story is so much fascinated by the enumeration of the bride’s defects and infirmities that he completes the list out of his own knowledge, though that was certainly not his business or purpose…. In every case automatic action triumphs over the expedient modification of thought and expression. (46)
Summary
So faulty reasoning is another technique by which the joker makes use of deviations from normal thinking within the situation to achieve humor.
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?
