This is the eighth 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 already addressed all of his “Techniques of verbal jokes,” so now I move on to the “Techniques of conceptual jokes,” which he says rely more on the situation.
Techniques of conceptual jokes
Freud says, “But there really are jokes whose technique resists almost any attempt to connect it with the groups that have so far been considered” (i.e. verbal jokes; 33). He later characterizes these conceptual jokes as “mak[ing] use of deviations from normal thinking,” (42) and gives us three categories:
“Faulty reasoning,” “Unification,” “Indirect Representation” – these, then, are the headings under which we can classify those techniques of conceptual jokes” (59).
However, later he seems to remember that he had five:
This is equally true, however, of the techniques of conceptual jokes – displacement, faulty reasoning, absurdity, indirect representation, representation by the opposite – which re-appear one and all in the technique of the dream-work. (65)
Where did unification go? Representation by the opposite was just a subset of unification. Nevertheless, over the next several days I will address each of the five in the order that Freud covers them, breaking them up with some larger points he makes along the way: displacement, absurdity, faulty reasoning, unification, and indirect representation. First up is displacement.
Displacement
Freud returns to a joke he mentioned previously.
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?” (34)
In the bath house joke (and others) Freud finds that the technique being used is to “divert” or “displace” the emphasis or “accent” of the question (“bathed”) to a different one (“taken/stolen a bath”).
I propose to describe it as ‘displacement,’ since its essence lies in the diversion of the train of thought, the displacement of the psychological emphasis on to a topic other than the opening one” (36).
It is in this technique the Freud’s theory most overlaps with Incongruity Theory, as we’ve described it previously. It’s classic misdirection, creating surprise.
Displacement habitually takes place between a remark and a reply which pursues the train of thought in a direction other than that in which it was started by the original remark. (38)
Summary
So displacement is the first of several techniques by which the joker makes use of deviations from normal thinking within the situation to achieve humor.
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?
