My VIews on the part played by sexuality in the aetiology of the neuroses 8 страница

We must keep to our view that the technique of this last group of jokes that we have examined lies in nothing else than in bringing forward ‘faulty reasoning’. But we are obliged to admit that their examination has so far led us more into obscurity than understanding. Nevertheless we do not abandon our expectation that a more complete knowledge of the techniques of jokes will lead us to a result which can serve as a starting point for further discoveries.7

The next examples of jokes, with which we shall pursue our enquiry, offer an easier task. Their technique, in particular, reminds us of what we already know.

First, here is a joke of Lichtenberg’s:

‘January is the month in which we offer our dear friends wishes, and the rest are the months in which they are not fulfilled.’

Since these jokes are to be described as refined rather than strong, and work by methods that are unobtrusive, we will begin by presenting a number of them in order to intensify their effect:

‘Human life falls into two halves. In the first half we wish the second one would come; and in the second we wish the first one were back.’

‘Experience consists in experiencing what we do not wish to experience.’

(Both these last two are from Fischer, 1889.)

These examples cannot fail to remind us of a group with which we have already dealt and which is distinguished by the ‘multiple use of the same material’. The last example in particular will raise the question of why we did not include it in that group instead of introducing it here in a fresh connection. ‘Experience’ is once again described in its own terms, just as ‘jealousy’ was earlier (p. 1640). I should not be inclined to dispute this classification very seriously. But as regards the other two examples (which are of a similar nature), I think another factor is more striking and more important than the multiple use of the same words, in which in this case there is nothing that fringes on double meaning. I should like in particular to stress the fact that here new and unexpected unities are set up, relations of ideas to one another, definitions made mutually or by reference to a common third element. I should like to name this process ‘unification’. It is clearly analogous to condensation by compression into the same words. Thus the two halves of human life are described by a mutual relation discovered to exist between them: in the first we wish the second would come and in the second we wish the first were back. Speaking more precisely, two very similar mutual relations have been chosen for representation. To the similarity of the relations there corresponds a similarity of the words, which may indeed remind us of the multiple use of the same material: ‘wish... would come’ - ‘wish... back’. In Lichtenberg’s joke January and the months contrasted with it are characterized by a (once again, modified) relation to a third element; these are the good wishes, which are received in the first month and not fulfilled in the remaining ones. Here the distinction from the multiple use of the same material (which approximates to double meaning) is very clear.¹

¹ In order to give a better description of ‘unification’ than the examples above allow of, I will make use of something I have already mentioned - namely the peculiar negative relation that holds between jokes and riddles, according to which the one conceals what the other exhibits. Many of the riddles with the production of which G. T. Fechner, the philosopher, passed his time when he was blind, are characterized by a high degree of unification, which lends them a special charm. Take, for instance, as a neat example, Riddle No. 203 (Dr. Mises’ Rätselbüchlein, 4th edition, enlarged, N.D.):

Die beiden ersten finden ihre Ruhestätte

Im Paar der andern, und das Ganze macht ihr Bette.

[My two first (Toten, the dead) find their resting-place in my two last (Gräber, graves), and my whole (Totengräber, grave-digger) makes their bed.]

We are told nothing about the two pairs of syllables that have to be guessed except a relation that holds between them, and about the whole we are only told its relation to the first pair.

The following are two examples of description by relation to the same or a slightly modified third element:

Die erste Silb’hat Zähn’ und Haare,

Die zweite Zähne in den Haaren,

Wer auf den Zähnen nicht hat Haare,

Vom Ganzen kaufe keine Waren. No. 170.

[The first syllable has teeth and hair (Ross, horse), the second has teeth in the hair (Kamm, comb). No one who has not hair on his teeth (i.e. who is not able to look after his interests) should buy goods from the whole (

Rosskamm, horse-dealer).]

Die erste Silbe frisst,

Die andere Silbe isst,

Die dritte wird gefressen,

Das Ganze wird gegessen. No. 168.

[The first syllable gobbles (Sau, sow), the second syllable eats (Er, he), the third is gobbled (Kraut, weeds), the whole is eaten (Sauerkraut).]

The most perfect instance of unification is to be found in a riddle of Schleiermacher’s, which cannot be denied the character of a joke:

Von der letzten umschlungen

Schwebt das vollendete Ganze

Zu den zwei ersten empor.

[Entwined by my last (Strick, rope), my completed whole (Galgenstrick, rogue) swings to the top of my two first (Galgen, gallows).]

The great majority of all such riddles lack unification. That is to say, the clue by which one syllable is to be guessed is quite independent of those that point to the second or third, as well as of the indication which is to lead to the separate discovery of the whole.

Here is a neat example of a unification joke which needs no explanation:

‘The French poet J. B. Rousseau wrote an Ode to Posterity. Voltaire was not of opinion that the poem merited survival, and jokingly remarked: "This poem will not reach its destination."' (Fischer, 1889.)

This last example draws attention to the fact that it is essentially unification that lies at the bottom of jokes that can be described as ‘ready repartees’. For repartee consists in the defence going to meet the aggression, in ‘turning the tables on someone’ or ‘paying someone back in his own coin’ - that is, in establishing an unexpected unity between attack and counter-attack. For instance:

‘An innkeeper had a whitlow on his finger and the baker said to him: "You must have got that by putting your finger in your beer." "It wasn’t that", replied the innkeeper, "I got a piece of your bread under my nail."' (From Überhorst (1900, 2).)

‘Serenissimus was making a tour through his provinces and noticed a man in the crowd who bore a striking resemblance to his own exalted person. He beckoned to him and asked: "Was your mother at one time in service in the Palace?"- "No, your Highness," was the reply, "but my father was."'

‘Duke Charles of Württemberg happened on one of his rides to come upon a dyer who was engaged on his job. Pointing to the grey horse he was riding, the Duke called out: "Can you dye him blue?" "Yes, of course, your Highness," came the answer, "if he can stand boiling."'

In this excellent tu quoque, in which a nonsensical question is met by an equally impossible condition, there is another technical factor at work which would have been absent if the dyer had answered: ‘No, your Highness. I’m afraid the horse wouldn’t stand boiling.’

Unification has another, quite specially interesting technical instrument at its disposal: stringing things together with the conjunction ‘and’. If things are strung together in this way it implies that they are connected: we cannot help understanding it so. For instance, when Heine, speaking of the city of Göttingen in the Harzreise, remarks: ‘Speaking generally, the inhabitants of Göttingen are divided into students, professors, philistines and donkeys’, we take this grouping in precisely the sense which Heine emphasizes in an addition to the sentence: ‘and these four classes are anything but sharply divided.’ Or, again, when he speaks of the school in which he had to put up with ‘so much Latin, caning and Geography’, this series, which is made even more transparent by the position of the ‘caning’ between the two educational subjects, tells us that the unmistakable view taken by the schoolboys of the caning certainly extended to Latin and Geography was well.

Among the examples given by Lipps of ‘joking enumeration’ (‘co-ordination’), we find the following lines quoted as being closely akin to Heine’s ‘students, professors, philistines and donkeys’:

Mit einer Gabel und mit Müh’

Zos ihn die Mutter aus der Brüh.

[With a fork and much to-do

His mother dragged him from the stew.]

It is as though (Lipps comments), the Müh [trouble, to-do] were an instrument like the fork. We have a feeling, however, that these lines, though they are very comic, are far from being a joke, while Heine’s list undoubtedly is one. We may perhaps recall these examples later, when we need no longer evade the problem of the relation between the comic and jokes.

9 We observed in the example of the Duke and the dyer that it would remain a joke by unification if the dyer had replied: ‘No, I’m afraid the horse wouldn’t stand boiling.’ But his actual reply was: ‘ Yes, your Highness, if he can stand boiling.’ The replacement of the really appropriate ‘no’ by a ‘yes’ constitutes a new technical method of joking, the employment of which we will pursue in some other examples.

A joke similar to the one we have just mentioned (also quoted by Fischer) is simpler:

‘Frederick the Great heard of a preacher in Silesia who had the reputation of being in contact with spirits. He sent for the man and received him with the question "You can conjure up spirits?" The reply was: "At your Majesty’s command. But they don’t come."' It is quite obvious here that the method used in the joke lay in nothing else than the replacing of the only possible answer ‘no’ by its opposite. In order to carry out the replacement, it was necessary to add a ‘but’ to the ‘yes’; so that ‘yes’ and ‘but’ are equivalent in sense to ‘no’.

This ‘representation by the opposite’, as we shall call it, serves the joke-work in various forms. In the next two examples it appears almost pure:

‘This lady resembles the Venus of Milo in many respects: she, too, is extraordinarily old, like her she has no teeth, and there are white patches on the yellowish surface of her body.’ (Heine.)

Here we have a representation of ugliness through resemblances to what is most beautiful. It is true that these resemblances can only exist in qualities that are expressed in terms with a double meaning or in unimportant details. This latter feature applies to our second example - ‘The Great Spirit’, by Lichtenberg:

‘He united in himself the characteristics of the greatest men. He carried his head askew like Alexander; he always had to wear a toupet like Caesar; he could drink coffee like Leibnitz; and once he was properly settled in his armchair, he forgot eating and drinking like Newton, and had to be woken up like him; he wore his wig like Dr. Johnson, and he always left a breeches-button undone like Cervantes.’0

Von Falke (1897, 271) brought home a particularly good example of representation by the opposite from a journey to Ireland, an example in which no use whatever is made of words with a double meaning. The scene was a wax-work show (as it might be, Madame Tussaud’s). A guide was conducting a company of old and young visitors from figure to figure and commenting on them: ‘This is the Duke of Wellington and his horse’, he explained. Whereupon a young lady asked: ‘Which is the Duke of Wellington and which is his horse?’ ‘Just as you like, my pretty child,’ was the reply. ‘You pays your money and you takes your choice.’

The reduction of this Irish joke would be: ‘Shameless the things these wax-work people dare to offer the public! One can’t distinguish between the horse and its rider! (Facetious exaggeration.) And that’s what one pays one’s money for!’ This indignant exclamation is then dramatized, based on a small occurrence. In place of the public in general an individual lady appears and the figure of the rider is particularized: he must be the Duke of Wellington, who is so extremely popular in Ireland. But the shamelessness of the proprietor or guide, who takes money out of people’s pockets and offers them no thing in return, is represented by the opposite - by a speech in which he boasts himself a conscientious man of business, who has nothing more closely at heart than regard for the rights which the public has acquired by its payment. And now we can see that the technique of this joke is not quite a simple one. In so far as it enables the swindler to insist on his conscientiousness it is a case of representation by the opposite; but in so far as it effects this on an occasion on which something quite different is demanded of him - so that he replies with business like respectability where what we expect of him is the identification of the figures - it is an instance of displacement. The technique of the joke lies in a combination of the two methods.

No great distance separates this example from a small group which might be described as ‘overstatement’ jokes. In these the ‘yes’ which would be in place in the reduction is replaced by a ‘no’, which, however, on account of its content, has the force of an intensified ‘yes’, and vice versa. A denial is a substitute for an overstated confirmation. Thus, for instance, in Lessing’s epigram:¹

Die gute Galathee! Man sagt, sie schwärz’ ihr Haar;

Da doch ihr Haar schon schwarz, als sie es kaufte, war.

[Good Galathea blacks her hair, ‘tis thought;

And yet her hair was black when it was bought.]

Or Lichtenberg’s malicious defence of philosophy:

‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy’, said Prince Hamlet contemptuously. Lichtenberg knew that this condemnation is not nearly severe enough, for it does not take into account all the objections that can be made to philosophy. He therefore added what was missing: ‘But there is much, too, in philosophy that is not to be found in heaven or earth.’ His addition, it is true, emphasizes the way in which philosophy compensates us for the insufficiency for which Hamlet censures it. But this compensation implies another and still greater reproach.

Two Jewish jokes, though they are of a coarse type, are even clearer, since they are free from any trace of displacement:

‘Two Jews were discussing baths. "I have a bath every year", said one of them, "whether I need one or not."'

It is obvious that this boastful insistence on his cleanliness only serves to convict him of uncleanliness.

‘A Jew noticed the remains of some food in another one’s beard. "I can tell you what you had to eat yesterday." - "Well, tell me." - "Lentils, then." - "Wrong: the day before yesterday! "'

The following example is an excellent ‘overstatement’ joke, which can easily be traced back to representation by the opposite:

‘The King condescended to visit a surgical clinic and came on the professor as he was carrying out the amputation of a leg. He accompanied all its stages with loud expressions of his royal satisfaction: "Bravo! bravo! my dear Professor!" When the operation was finished, the professor approached him and asked him with a deep bow: "Is it your Majesty’s command that I should remove the other leg too?" ‘

¹ Modelled on one in the Greek Anthology.2

The professor’s thoughts during the royal applause could certainly not have been expressed unaltered: ‘This makes it look as though I were taking off the poor fellows bad leg by royal command and only for the royal satisfaction. After all I really have other reasons for the operation.’ But he then goes to the King and says: ‘I have no reasons for carrying out an operation other than your Majesty’s command. The applause you honoured me with has made me so happy that I only await your Majesty’s orders to amputate the sound limb too.’ In this way he succeeds in making himself understood by saying the opposite of what he thinks but must keep to himself. This opposite is an overstatement that cannot be believed.

As these examples show, representation by the opposite is an instrument of joke-technique that is used frequently and works powerfully. But there is something else that we should not overlook: namely that this technique is by no means peculiar to jokes. When Mark Antony, after he has made a long speech in the Forum and has reversed the emotional attitude of his audience round Caesar’s corpse, finally exclaims once more:

‘For Brutus is an honourable man...’

he knows that the people will now shout back to him the true sense of his words:

‘They were traitors: honourable men!’

Or when Simplicissimus describes a collection of incredible pieces of brutality and cynicism as the expressions of ‘men of feeling’, this too is a representation by the opposite. But we call this ‘irony’ and no longer a joke. The only technique that characterizes irony is representation by the opposite. Moreover we read and hear of ‘ironical jokes’. So it can no longer be doubted that technique alone is insufficient to characterize the nature of jokes. Something further is needed which we have not yet discovered. But on the other hand it remains an uncontradicted fact that if we undo the technique of a joke it disappears. For the time being we may find difficulty in thinking how these two fixed points that we have arrived at in explaining jokes can be reconciled.

3 If representation by the opposite is one of the technical methods of jokes, we can expect that jokes may also make use of its contrary - representation by something similar or akin. A further pursuit of our enquiry will in fact show us that this is the technique of a fresh and particularly comprehensive group of conceptual jokes. We shall describe the peculiarity of this technique far more appropriately if, instead of representation by something ‘akin’, we say by something ‘correlated’ or ‘connected’. We will take our start, in fact, with this latter characteristic and illustrate it at once by an example.

Here is an American anecdote: ‘Two not particularly scrupulous business men had succeeded, by dint of a series of highly risky enterprises, in amassing a large fortune, and they were now making efforts to push their way into good society. One method, which struck them as a likely one, was to have their portraits painted by the most celebrated and highly paid artist in the city, whose pictures had an immense reputation. The precious canvases were shown for the first time at a large evening party, and the two hosts themselves led the most influential connoisseur and art critic up to the wall upon which the portraits were hanging side by side, to extract his admiring judgement on them. He studied the works for a long time, and then, shaking his head, as though there was something he had missed, pointed to the gap between the pictures and asked quietly: "But where’s the Saviour?"' (I.e. ‘I don’t see the picture of the Saviour’.)

The meaning of this remark is clear. It is once again a question of the representation of something that cannot be expressed directly. How does this ‘indirect representation’ come about? Starting from the representation in the joke, we trace the path backwards through a series of easily established associations and inferences.4

We can guess from the question ‘Where’s the Saviour: Where’s the picture of the Saviour?’ that the sight of the two pictures had reminded the speaker of a similar sight, familiar to him, as to us, which however, included an element that was missing here - the picture of the Saviour between two other pictures. There is only one such situation: Christ hanging between the two thieves. The missing element is brought into prominence by the joke. The similarity lies in the pictures, hanging to the right and left of the Saviour, which the joke passes over; it can only consist in the fact that the pictures hanging on the walls are pictures of thieves. What the critic wanted to say but could not say was: ‘You are a couple of rascals’ or, in greater detail: ‘What do I care about your pictures? You are a couple of rascals - I know that!’ And he did in fact end by saying it by means of a few associations and inferences, using the method which we speak of as an ‘allusion’.

We at once recall where we have already come across allusion - in connection, namely, with double meaning. When two meanings are expressed in one word and one of them is so much more frequent and usual that it occurs to us at once, while the second is more out of the way and therefore less prominent, we proposed to speak of this as ‘double meaning with an allusion’. In a whole number of the examples we have already examined we remarked that the technique was not a simple one, and we now perceive that the ‘allusion’ was the complicating factor in them. (See, for instance, the inversion joke about the wife who has lain back a bit and so has been able to earn a lot or the nonsensical joke about the man who replied to congratulations on the birth of his youngest child by saying that it was remarkable what human hands could accomplish.)

In the American anecdote we now have before us an allusion without any double meaning, and we see that its characteristic is replacement by something linked to it in a conceptual connection. It may easily be guessed that the utilizable connection can be of more than one kind. In order not to lose ourselves in a maze of detail, we will discuss only the most marked variants and these only in a few examples.

The connection used for the replacement may be merely a resemblance in sound, so that this sub-species becomes analogous to puns among verbal jokes. Here, however, it is not the resemblance in sound between two words, but between whole sentences, characteristic phrases, and so on.

For instance, Lichtenberg coined the saying: ‘New spas cure well’, which at once reminds us of the proverb: ‘New brooms sweep clean.’ The two phrases share the first one and a half words and the last word, as well as the whole structure of the sentence.¹ And there is no doubt that the sentence came into the witty philosopher’s head as an imitation of the familiar proverb. Thus Lichtenberg’s saying becomes an allusion to the proverb. By means of this allusion something is suggested that is not said straight out - namely that something else is responsible for the effects produced by spas besides the unvarying characteristics of thermal springs.

A similar technical solution applies to another jest [Scherz] or joke [Witz] of Lichtenberg’s: ‘A girl scarcely twelve Moden old.’ This sounds like ‘twelve Monden [moons]’, i.e. months, and may originally have been a slip of the pen for the latter, which is a permissible expression in poetry. But it also makes good sense to use the changing fashion instead of the changing moon as a method of determining a woman’s age.

The connection may also consist in similarity except for a ‘slight modification’. So that this technique, too, is parallel to a verbal technique. Both species of joke make almost the same impression, but they can be better distinguished from each other if we consider the processes of the joke-work.

Here is an example of a verbal joke or pun of this kind: Marie Wilt was a great singer, famous, however, for the compass not only of her voice. She suffered the humiliation of having the title of a play based on Jules Verne’s well-known novel used as an allusion to her misshapen figure: ‘Round the Wilt in 80 Days’.²

Or: ‘Every fathom a queen’, a modification of Shakespeare’s familiar ‘Every inch a king’. The allusion to this quotation was made with reference to an aristocratic and over-life-size lady. No very serious objection could really be made if anyone were to prefer to include this joke among the ‘condensations accompanied by modifications as substitute’. (See ‘tête-à-bête’, p. 1631.)

¹ [In the German the first syllables of ‘spas (Bäder)' and ‘brooms (Besen)' sound alike; and in the German proverb the last word is ‘well (gut)'.]

² [The German for ‘world’ is ‘Welt '.]6

A friend said of someone who had lofty views but was obstinate in the pursuit of his aims: ‘Er hat ein Ideal vor dem Kopf.’ The current phrase is: ‘Ein Brett vor dem Kopf haben’. The modification alludes to this phrase and makes use of its meaning for its own purposes. Here, once more, the technique might be described as ‘condensation with modification’.

It is almost impossible to distinguish between ‘allusion by means of modification’ and ‘condensation with substitution’, if the modification is limited to a change of letters. For instance: ‘Dichteritis’ ¹ This allusion to the scourge of ‘Diphteritis ' represents authorship by unqualified persons as another public danger.

Negative particles make very neat allusions possible at the cost of slight alterations:

‘My fellow-unbeliever Spinoza’, says Heine. ‘We, by the ungrace of God, day-labourers, serfs, negroes, villeins...’ is how Lichtenberg begins a manifesto (which he carries no further) made by these unfortunates - who certainly have more right to this title than kings and princes have to its unmodified form.

Finally, another kind of allusion consists in ‘omission’, which may be compared to condensation without the formation of a substitute. Actually, in every allusion something is omitted, viz. the train of thought leading to the allusion. It only depends on whether the more obvious thing is the gap in the wording of the allusion or the substitute which partly fills the gap. Thus a series of examples would lead us back from blatant omission to allusion proper.

¹ [A non-existent word, which might be translated ‘authoritis’ - from ‘Dichter (an author)'.]7

Omission without a substitute is shown in the following example: There is a witty and pugnacious journalist in Vienna, whose biting invective has repeatedly led to his being physically maltreated by the subjects of his attacks. On one occasion, when a fresh misdeed on the part of one of his habitual opponents was being discussed, somebody exclaimed: ‘If X hears of this, he’ll get his ears boxed again.’ The technique of this joke includes, in the first place, bewilderment at its apparent nonsense, since we cannot see how getting one’s ears boxed can be an immediate consequence of having heard something. The absurdity of the remark disappears if we insert in the gap: ‘he’ll write such a scathing article upon the man that... etc.’ Allusion by means of omission, combined with nonsense, are accordingly the technical methods used in this joke.

‘He praises himself so much that the price of fumigating candles is going up.’ (Heine.) This gap is easy to fill. What is omitted has been replaced by an inference, which then leads back to what has been omitted, in the form of an allusion: ‘self-praise stinks.’

And now once again two Jews outside the bath-house:

One of them sighed: ‘Another year gone by already!’

These examples leave us in no doubt that here the omission forms part of the allusion.

There is still quite a marked gap to be seen in our next example, though it is a genuine and correct allusive joke. After an artists’ carnival in Vienna a jest-book was circulated, in which, among others, the following highly remarkable epigram appeared:

‘A wife is like an umbrella. Sooner or later one takes a cab.’

An umbrella is not enough protection against rain. The ‘sooner or later’ can only mean ‘if it rains hard’, and a cab is a public vehicle. But since we are only concerned here with the form of the analogy, we will postpone the closer examination of this joke to a later moment.8

Heine’s ‘Bäder von Lucca’ contains a regular wasp’s next of the most stinging allusions and makes the most ingenious use of this form of joke for polemical purposes (against Count Platen). Long before the reader can suspect what is afoot, there are foreshadowings of a particular theme, peculiarly ill-adapted for direct representation, by allusions to material of the most varied kind, - for instance, in Hirsch-Hyacinth’s verbal contortions: ‘You are too stout and I am too thin; you have a good deal of imagination and I have all the more business sense; I am a practicus and you are a diarrheticus; in short you are my complete antipodex.’ - ‘Venus Urinia’ - ‘the stout Gudel von Dreckwall’ of Hamburg, and so on. In what follows, the events described by the author take a turn which seems at first merely to display his mischievous spirit but soon reveals its symbolic relation to his polemical purpose and at the same time shows itself as allusive. Eventually the attack on Platen bursts out, and thenceforward allusions to the theme (with which we have already been made acquainted) of the Count’s love for men gushes out and overflows in every sentence of Heine’s attack on his opponent’s talents and character. For instance:

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