“The Authorities”
Like in his book on dreams, Freud begins The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious with a survey of expert opinions on the workings of humour. They include novelist Jean Paul, psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, and philosophers, Theodor Vischer, Kuno Fischer, and Theodor Lipps. Their opinions include ways to view humour as “playful judgment”, “a free play of ideas”, “sense in nonsense”, “bafflement and light dawning.” Lipps emphsizes brevity, “wit says what it does say, not always in few, but always in too few words.” This allows the listener the pleasure to figure things out. With more depth some of the opinions move closer to where Freud is heading. To have wit is to have “the ability to…find hidden similarities”, and “linking two ideas which in some way are contrasted with each other.”
An example used to illustrate this is from writer Heinrich Heine, about a character of Hirsch-Hyacinth, a lottery-collector and corn-remover, “who boasts to the poet of his connections with the rich Baron Rothschild and finally says: ‘And as truly as God will grant me his blessings, Doctor Heine, I was sitting next to Salomon Rothschild and he treated me just like his equal, quite famillionairely.‘”
FAMILI AR
MILLIONAIRE
FAMILLIONAIRE
The joke points to Hirsch’s actual lack of connection with the Baron betraying a “playful judgment” of rich people, creating a “bafflement” and a “light dawning” to the meaning of his invented word famillionaire, and a brevity of saying so much with one sentence. The “free play of ideas” allowed Hirsch to create a new word with a condensation, a combination of two words, that makes “sense in nonsense”, as described before. Freud was quick to pick up his dream theory to explain these types of jokes. “The interesting processes of condensation with substitute-formation which we have recognized to be the core of the joke-technique in verbal jokes pointed us towards the formation of dreams, for the same psychical processes have been discovered in the mechanism at work there.”
Being aware that these are joke examples from the early 20th century, they may not be funny to modern audiences, but they are funny compared to a simple statement that “a rich person treated me as an inferior.” It may mean the same thing but what makes the above sentence more funny is the type of joke that it is and what it does to the listener. Freud says, “we are now prepared for the part played in hostile aggression by the joke. The joke will allow us to turn to good account those ridiculous features in our enemy that the presence of opposing obstacles would not let us utter aloud or consciously; again, that is, it will get around restrictions and open up sources of pleasure that have become inaccessible.”
The Pleasure Principle
Freud points directly at the pleasure, which he is beginning to flesh out into a theory that we will see later in The Two Principles of Mental Functioning, [see: The Pleasure Principle: https://rumble.com/v1gurqv-the-pleasure-principle-sigmund-freud.html] where, briefly, each subject seeks to gain pleasure and avoid pain to get their needs met. In this case, in an insulting joke, Freud says, “we note that ‘saving in effort spent on inhibition or suppression’ seemed to be the secret of the pleasurable effect of [opinionated] jokes.” They are “ways of restoring old freedoms and of disburdening us from the compulsion of our intellectual education.” In modern day language, it’s about letting go of political correctness, and being authentic with our actual feelings. We all have repressed negative opinions of others or systems that disadvantage us.
An example in the Brill translation of the book is as follows:
“X and Y met at a dinner. X acting as a Toastmaster, introduced Y as follows: ‘My friend, Y, is a very wonderful man. All you have to do is open his mouth, put in a dinner, and a speech appears.’ Responding to the speaker, Y said: ‘My friend, the Toastmaster, told you what a wonderful man I am…Let me tell you what a wonderful man he is. All you have to do is open anybody’s mouth, put in his speech, and the dinner appears.”
When the joke is good natured for both people, it’s considered a ‘Roast.’ When the context leads only to a permanent devaluation and defeat of the target, it becomes personal. When the listener feels insulted by the joke or doesn’t agree with their point of view, the joke transforms into a “diatribe” and produces “indignation” in the listener. The listener can also respond with insulting jokes of their own.
Jokes in political campaigns, or gossip about celebrities would be perfect examples of aggressive jokes that reduce psychological pain and self-judgment in the subject, who feels envious about a celebrity, and wants to see them fail, or if the subject feels oppressed by a political figure, and wants to ‘kick the bum out’, but there has to be willing and supportive listeners for the exchange to go well, or it has the possibility of turning into conflict.
This has an important effect on the teller of the joke since another pleasure of jokes, Freud illustrates, is the pleasure in seeing another person laugh. The teller would then need to tell it to another person to continue to gain pleasure from that joke and bask in the listener’s pleasure vicariously.
Even if there are a lot of willing audience members, there is still a need to create new jokes when successful jokes themselves become dated, or boring with repetition. When listeners no longer understand the historical context required to make the appropriate associations, a fresh new joke, with the same aim at increasing pleasure and reducing stress, is created with current contexts. When looking at boredom, a pleasure comes if the joke is relevant, but it wears off once relief is enjoyed. It cannot be enjoyed any further at the same intensity of pleasure because the inhibition targeted by the joke has already been released. Another inhibition has to be targeted for a new joke.
Contagion
Freud also hints at the contagiousness of jokes that can relieve psychological oppression in a group of people. “The process in the joke’s first person produces pleasure by lifting inhibition, reducing local expenditure; it does not seem to come to rest until, by the introduction of the mediating third person, it has obtained general relief by means of a discharge [of energy].” If the listeners agree with the point of view in the joke, it can spread to others as the subject gains pleasure in the retelling of it, and exhaust the final pleasure of the joke. The joke then spreads in the culture until it is exhausted of pleasure for anyone that was willing to hear it. Even the dinner example above shows how tension and release can be passed like a hot potato between two people, but in that case they both got to enjoy release. The audience then, in the dinner example above, could retell the joke to others who never heard it before, or keep repeating it in their minds until they get bored and forget about it.
Unconscious processing
Consciousness is involved in humour, especially when it is analyzed, but so is the unconscious when it creates ideas for the joke material. Intuitions, or psychological associations, can pop out of the unconscious with novel associations and groupings of words and ideas. Yet, too much conscious analysis can interfere with the process. Freud says, “first, how it comes about that we scarcely ever know what it is we are laughing at in a joke, even though we can settle it by analytic investigation: this laughter is just the result of an automatic process which is only made possible by keeping our conscious attention at bay.” This sounds similar to the process of movie watching where the situations on screen are unbelievable compared to reality, but because people suspend disbelief, or another way of saying it, because they don’t analyze the movie to death, they are able to enjoy it.
Build up and release
A lot of Freudian psychology is a reminder that the brain creates pleasure by building up tension and then releasing it. Jokes are no different. He says, “anything that arouses interest and bafflement acts in these two directions – that is, the absurd, and the ‘contrast of ideas’…which I regard as nothing but a means of reinforcing its effect. Anything baffling summons up in the listener that state of energy-distribution which Lipps called ‘psychical damming-up’, and no doubt he is also right to assume that the ‘release’ turns out to be all the more powerful, the greater the prior damming.”
Displacement and condensation
As Freud tries to compare his dream theory to jokes, he finds there are some similarities and some differences. Displacement of sensitive dream material related to self-complexes, defensively push the unpleasant ideas, to dwell instead on similar ideas that don’t have that charge of negative affect, eg. guilt, shame, hostility, jealousy, etc. Thinking about it now, it makes sense that if the brain is constantly dwelling on thoughts that are literally causing brain damage with stress chemicals, a natural survival mechanism would be to move the mind’s thinking away from the painful complex, to mitigate the damage. The condensation and symbolization, the destination of the displacements, can create narratives that are unreliable, but safe. What is different here from dreams, in jokes, is a need to go in the opposite direction and gain relief by letting go of the defensive censorship and seeing the truth, as the mind sees it. Freud says, “the dream predominantly serves to spare ourselves the unpleasure, the joke to gain pleasure; but in these two aims, all our psychical activities meet.”
Self-deprecation
Jumping to a later paper, Humour (1927), Freud looked at another use of jokes, but jokes that are self-deprecating. Freud uses an example of, “a criminal who was being led out to the gallows on a Monday [who] remarked: ‘Well, the week’s beginning nicely’, he was producing the humour himself; the humorous process is completed in his own person and obviously affords him a certain sense of satisfaction.” The subject can momentarily let go of the stress of their predicament. Freud connects it to his understanding of narcissism at the time. “Humour has something liberating about it; but it also has something of grandeur and elevation…The grandeur in it clearly lies in the triumph of narcissism, the victorious assertion of the ego’s invulnerability. The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.”
“This last feature is a quite essential element of humour. Let us suppose that the criminal…had said: ‘It doesn’t worry me. What does it matter, after all, if a fellow like me is hanged? The world won’t come to an end because of it.’ We should have to admit that such a speech does in fact display the same magnificent superiority over the real situation, but it does not betray a trace of humour. Indeed, it is based on an appraisal of reality which runs directly counter to the appraisal made by humour. Humour is not resigned; it is rebellious. It signifies not only the triumph of the ego but also of the pleasure principle, which is able here to assert itself against the unkindness of the real circumstances.”
The need for humour
A darker side of humour, are deliberate insults, and their ability to steal pride from others. The need to feel superior, to relieve feelings of inferiority is an endless tit-for-tat. There’s a point where the humour touches on areas where the listener already feels shame and inferiority, so it becomes salt on the wound. The cycle of revenge can spin the entire thing out of control with reprisals.
Yet for many, when humour is expressed with skill, it becomes indispensible to our life. In a world without humour, we would have to follow rules that ignore our humanity. There would be no self-acceptance of human limitations, no rebellion against external and internal exploitative processes, and no way to criticize the way things are and shine a light on how things could be better. The great thing is that our unconscious aids humour automatically so that attempts at control and censorship are met with fresh associations and powerful impulses that appear in Freudian slips and unexpected laughter. A lot of what freedom is, is the freedom to feel, and face the world authentically. No example is better than being with friends and releasing how we really feel. The relief of repression is big and so is the laughter.
The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious – Sigmund Freud: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780141185545/
Humour (1927d) – Sigmund Freud: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780099426769/
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/