My VIews on the part played by sexuality in the aetiology of the neuroses 11 страница

In any case, if our marriage-broker anecdotes are jokes, they are all the better jokes because, thanks to their façade, they are in a position to conceal not only what they have to say but also the fact that they have something - forbidden - to say. The continuation of this interpretation - and this uncovers the hidden meaning and reveals these anecdotes with a comic façade as tendentious jokes - would be as follows. Anyone who has allowed the truth to slip out in an unguarded moment is in fact glad to be free of pretence. This is a correct and profound piece of psychological insight. Without this internal agreement no one lets himself be mastered by the automatism which in these cases brings the truth to light.¹ But this converts the laughable figure of the Schadchen into a sympathetic one, deserving of pity. How happy the man must be to be able at last to throw off the burden of pretence, since he makes use of the first chance of shouting out the very last scrap of truth! As soon as he sees that the case is lost, that the bride does not please the young man, he gladly betrays yet another concealed defect which has escaped notice, or he takes the opportunity of producing an argument that settles a detail in order to express his contempt for the people he is working for: ‘I ask you - who would lend these people anything?’ The whole of the ridicule in the anecdote now falls upon the parents, barely touched on in it, who think this swindle justified in order to get their daughter a husband, upon the pitiable position of girls who let themselves be married on such terms, and upon the disgracefulness of marriages contracted on such a basis. The marriage-broker is the right man to express such criticisms, for he knows most about these abuses; but he must not say them aloud, for he is a poor man whose existence depends on exploiting them. The popular mind, which created these stories, and others like them, is torn by a similar conflict; for it knows that the sacredness of marriages after they have been contracted is grievously affected by the thought of what happened at the time when they were arranged.

¹ This is the same mechanism that governs slips of the tongue and other phenomena of self-betrayal. See The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901b).1

Let us recall, too, what we observed while we were investigating the technique of jokes: that in jokes nonsense often replaces ridicule and criticism in the thoughts lying behind the joke. (In this respect, incidentally, the joke-work is doing the same thing as the dream-work.) Here we find the fact confirmed once again. That the ridicule and criticism are not directed against the figure of the broker, who only appears in the examples we have quoted as a whipping-boy, is shown by another class of jokes in which the marriage-broker is represented, on the contrary, as a superior person, whose dialectical powers prove sufficient to meet any difficulty. They are anecdotes with a logical instead of a comic façade - sophistical conceptual jokes. In one of them (p. 1664 f.) the broker succeeds in arguing away the bride’s defect of being lame. It is at least a ‘

fait accompli’; another wife, with straight limbs, would on the contrary be in constant danger of falling down and breaking her leg, and this would be followed by illness, pains, and the expenses of treatment, all of which would be spared in the case of the woman who is lame already. Or there is another anecdote, in which he succeeds in repelling a whole series of complaints made by the suitor against the bride, meeting each one with good arguments till he replies to the last, which cannot be countered: ‘What do you want? Isn’t she to have a single fault?’, as though there were not necessarily something left over from the earlier objections. There is no difficulty in showing the weak spot in the argument in these two examples, and we did so in examining their technique. But what interests us now is something different. If the broker’s speech is given such a marked appearance of logic which, on careful examination, is recognizable as being only an appearance, the truth behind it is that the joke declares the broker to be in the right; the thought does not venture to do so seriously but replaces the seriousness by the appearance which the joke presents. But here, as so often, a jest betrays something serious. We shall not be mistaken if we assume of all these anecdotes with a logical façade that they really mean what they assert for reasons that are intentionally faulty. It is only this employment of sophistry for the disguised representation of the truth that gives it the character of a joke, which is thus essentially dependent on its purpose. For what is hinted at in the two anecdotes is that it is really the suitor who is making himself ridiculous when he collects the bride’s different advantages together with so much care, though all of them are weak, and when, in doing so, he forgets that he must be prepared to take as his wife a human being with her inevitable defects; while, on the other hand, the one characteristic that would make marriage with the woman’s more or less imperfect personality tolerable - mutual attraction and readiness for affectionate adaptation - is quite left out of account in the whole transaction.

The mockery directed at the suitor in these examples, in which the broker quite appropriately plays the part of a superior, is expressed much more plainly in other anecdotes. The plainer these stories are, the less joke-technique do they contain; they are, as it were, only marginal cases of jokes, with the technique of which they no longer have anything in common but the construction of a façade. But owing to their having the same purpose and to its being concealed behind the facade, they produce the complete effect of a joke. Moreover, the poverty of their technical methods explains how it is that many of these jokes cannot, without suffering damage, dispense with the element of dialect, which has an effect similar to the joke technique.

A story of this sort, which, while possessing all the force of a tendentious joke, exhibits nothing of its technique, is the following: ‘The marriage-broker asked: "What do you require of your bride?" - Answer: "She must be beautiful, she must be rich, and educated." - "Very good", said the broker, "but I count that as making three matches."' Here the rebuke to the man is delivered openly, and is no longer clothed as a joke.

In the examples we have considered hitherto, the disguised aggressiveness has been directed against people - in the broker jokes against everyone involved in the business of arranging a marriage: the bride and bridegroom and their parents. But the object of the joke’s attack may equally well be institutions, people in their capacity as vehicles of institutions, dogmas of morality or religion, views of life which enjoy so much respect that objections to them can only be made under the mask of a joke and indeed of a joke concealed by its façade. Though the themes at which these tendentious jokes are aimed may be few, their forms and envelopes are very many and various. I think we shall do well to distinguish this class of tendentious joke by a special name. The appropriate name will emerge after we have interpreted a few examples of the class.

I may recall the two stories - one of the impoverished gourmet who was caught eating ‘salmon mayonnaise’ and the other of the dipsomaniac tutor - which we learnt to know as sophistical displacement jokes. I will now continue their interpretation. We have since heard that if an appearance of logic is tacked on to the façade of a story the thought would like to say seriously ‘the man is right’, but, owing to an opposing contradiction, does not venture to declare the man right except on a single point, on which it can easily be shown that he is wrong. The ‘point’ chosen is the correct compromise between his rightness and his wrongness; this, indeed, is no decision, but corresponds to the conflict within ourselves. The two anecdotes are simply epicurean. They say: ‘Yes. The man is right. There is nothing higher than enjoyment and it is more or less a matter of indifference how one obtains it.’ This sounds shockingly immoral and is no doubt not much better. But at bottom it is nothing other than the poet’s ‘Carpe diem’, which appeals to the uncertainty of life and the unfruitfulness of virtuous renunciation. If the idea that the man in the ‘salmon mayonnaise’ joke was right has such a repellent effect on us, this is only because the truth is illustrated by an enjoyment of the lowest kind, which it seems to us we could easily do without. In reality each of us has had hours and times at which he has admitted the rightness of this philosophy of life and has reproached moral doctrine with only understanding how to demand without offering any compensation. Since we have ceased any longer to believe in the promise of a next world in which every renunciation will be rewarded by a satisfaction - there are, incidentally, very few pious people if we take renunciation as the sign of faith - ‘Carpe diem’ has become a serious warning. I will gladly put off satisfaction: but do I know whether I shall still be here tomorrow? ‘Di doman’ non c’è certezza.’¹

¹ [‘There is no certainty about tomorrow.’] Lorenzo de’ Medici.4

I will gladly renounce all the methods of satisfaction proscribed by society, but am I certain that society will reward this renunciation by offering me one of the permitted methods - even after a certain amount of postponement? What these jokes whisper may be said aloud: that the wishes and desires of men have a right to make themselves acceptable alongside of exacting and ruthless morality. And in our days it has been said in forceful and stirring sentences that this morality is only a selfish regulation laid down by the few who are rich and powerful and who can satisfy their wishes at any time without any postponement. So long as the art of healing has not gone further in making our life safe and so long as social arrangements do no more to make it more enjoyable, so long will it be impossible to stifle the voice within us that rebels against the demands of morality. Every honest man will end by making this admission, at least to himself. The decision in this conflict can only be reached by the roundabout path of fresh insight. One must bind one’s own life to that of others so closely and be able to identify oneself with others so intimately that the brevity of one’s own life can be overcome; and one must not fulfil the demands of one’s own needs illegitimately, but must leave them unfulfilled, because only the continuance of so many unfulfilled demands can develop the power to change the order of society. But not every personal need can be postponed in this way and transferred to other people, and there is no general and final solution of the conflict.

We now know the name that must be given to jokes like those that we have last interpreted. They are cynical jokes and what they disguise are cynicisms.

Among the institutions which cynical jokes are in the habit of attacking none is more important or more strictly guarded by moral regulations but at the same time more inviting to attack than the institution of marriage, at which, accordingly, the majority of cynical jokes are aimed. There is no more personal claim than that for sexual freedom and at no point has civilization tried to exercise severer suppression than in the sphere of sexuality. A single example will be enough for our purposes - the one mentioned on p. 1678, ‘An Entry in Prince Carnival’s Album’:

‘A wife is like an umbrella - sooner or later one takes a cab.’5

We have already discussed the complicated technique of this example: a bewildering and apparently impossible simile, which however, as we now see, is not in itself a joke; further, an allusion (a cab is a public vehicle); and, as its most powerful technical method, an omission which increases the unintelligibility. The simile may be worked out as follows. One marries in order to protect oneself against the temptations of sensuality, but it turns out nevertheless that marriage does not allow of the satisfaction of needs that are somewhat stronger than usual. In just the same way, one takes an umbrella with one to protect oneself from the rain and nevertheless gets wet in the rain. In both cases one must look around for a stronger protection: in the latter case one must take a public vehicle, and in the former a woman who is accessible in return for money. The joke has now been almost entirely replaced by a piece of cynicism. One does not venture to declare aloud and openly that marriage is not an arrangement calculated to satisfy a man’s sexuality, unless one is driven to do so perhaps by the love of truth and eagerness for reform of a Christian von Ehrenfels.¹ The strength of this joke lies in the fact that nevertheless - in all kinds of roundabout ways - it has declared it.

A particularly favourable occasion for tendentious jokes is presented when the intended rebellious criticism is directed against the subject himself, or, to put it more cautiously, against someone in whom the subject has a share - a collective person, that is (the subject’s own nation, for instance). The occurrence of self-criticism as a determinant may explain how it is that a number of the most apt jokes (of which we have given plenty of instances) have grown up on the soil of Jewish popular life. They are stories created by Jews and directed against Jewish characteristics. The jokes made about Jews by foreigners are for the most part brutal comic stories in which a joke is made unnecessary by the fact that Jews are regarded by foreigners as comic figures. The Jewish jokes which originate from Jews admit this too; but they know their real faults as well as the connection between them and their good qualities, and the share which the subject has in the person found fault with creates the subjective determinant (usually so hard to arrive at) of the joke-work. Incidentally, I do not know whether there are many other instances of a people making fun to such a degree of its own character.

¹ See his essays (1903).6

As an example of this I may take the anecdote, quoted on p. 1679 f., of a Jew in a railway train promptly abandoning all decent behaviour when he discovered that the newcomer into his compartment was a fellow-believer. We made the acquaintance of this anecdote as evidence of something being demonstrated by a detail, of representation by something very small. It is meant to portray the democratic mode of thinking of Jews, which recognizes no distinction between lords and serfs, but also, alas, upsets discipline and co-operation.

Another, especially interesting group of jokes portrays the relation of poor and rich Jews to one another. Their heroes are the ‘Schnorrer ' and the charitable householder or the Baron.

‘A Schnorrer, who was allowed as a guest into the same house every Sunday, appeared one day in the company of an unknown young man who gave signs of being about to sit down to table. "Who is this?" asked the householder. "He’s been my son-in law", was the reply, "since last week. I’ve promised him his board for the first year."'

The purpose of these stories is always the same; it emerges most clearly in the next one:

‘The Schnorrer begged the Baron for some money for a journey to Ostend; his doctor had recommended sea-bathing for his troubles. The Baron thought Ostend was a particularly expensive resort; a cheaper one would do equally well. The Schnorrer, however, rejected the proposal with the words: "Herr Baron, I consider nothing too expensive for my health."' This is an excellent displacement joke which we might have taken as a model for that class.¹ The Baron evidently wants to save his money, but the Schnorrer answers as though the Baron’s money was his own, which he may then quite well value less than his health. Here we are expected to laugh at the impertinence of the demand; but it is rarely that these jokes are not equipped with a façade to mislead the understanding. The truth that lies behind is that the Schnorrer, who in his thoughts treats the rich man’s money as his own, has actually, according to the sacred ordinances of the Jews, almost a right to make this confusion. The indignation raised by this joke is of course directed against a Law which is highly oppressive even to pious people.

Here is another anecdote:

‘A Schnorrer on his way up a rich man’s staircase met a fellow member of his profession, who advised him to go no further. "Don’t go up to-day," he said, "the Baron is in a bad mood to-day; he’s giving nobody more than one florin." - "I’II go up all the same", said the first Schnorrer "Why should I give him a florin? Does he give me anything?" ‘

This joke employs the technique of absurdity, since it makes the Schnorrer assert that the Baron gives him nothing at the very moment at which he is preparing to beg him for a gift. But the absurdity is only apparent. It is almost true that the rich man gives him nothing, since he is obliged by the Law to give him alms and should, strictly speaking, be grateful to him for giving him an opportunity for beneficence. The ordinary, middle-class view of charity is in conflict here with the religious one; it is in open rebellion against the religious one in the other story, of the Baron who, deeply moved by a Schnorrer’s tale of woe, rang for his servants: ‘Throw him out! he’s breaking my heart!’ This open revelation of its purpose constitutes once more a marginal case of a joke. It is only in the fact that they present the matter as applied to individual cases that these last stories differ from a complaint which is no longer a joke: ‘There is really no advantage in being a rich man if one is a Jew. Other people’s misery makes it impossible to enjoy one’s own happiness.’

Other stories, which are once again technically frontier cases of jokes, give evidence of a profoundly pessimistic cynicism. For instance:

‘A man who was hard of hearing consulted the doctor, who correctly diagnosed that the patient probably drank too much brandy and was on that account deaf. He advised him against it and the deaf man promised to take his advice to heart. After a while the doctor met him in the street and asked him in a loud voice how he was. "Thank you", was the answer. "You needn’t shout so loud, doctor. I’ve given up drinking and hear quite well again." A little while later they met once more. The doctor asked him how he was in his ordinary voice, but noticed that his question had not been understood. "Eh? What was that?" - "It seems to me you’re drinking brandy again", shouted the doctor in his ear, "and that’s why you’re deaf again." "You may be right," replied the deaf man, "I have begun drinking brandy again and I’II tell you why. So long as I didn’t drink I was able to hear. But nothing I heard was as good as the brandy."' Technically this joke is nothing other than an object-lesson: dialect or skill in narrative are necessary for raising a laugh, but in the background lies the sad question: may not the man have been right in his choice?

It is on account of the allusion made by these pessimistic stories to the manifold and hopeless miseries of the Jews that I must class them with tendentious jokes.

Other jokes, which are in the same sense cynical and which are not only Jewish anecdotes, attack religious dogmas and even the belief in God. The story of the Rabbi’s ‘Kück, the technique of which lay in the faulty thinking which equated phantasy and reality (another possible view was to regard it as a displacement), is a cynical or critical joke of this kind, directed against miracle-workers and certainly against the belief in miracles as well. Heine is said to have made a definitely blasphemous joke on his death-bed. When a friendly priest reminded him of God’s mercy and gave him hope that God would forgive him his sins, he is said to have replied: ‘Bien sûr qu’il me pardonnera: c’est son métier.’¹ This is a disparaging comparison (technically perhaps only having the value of an allusion), since a ‘métier’, a trade or profession, is what a workman or a doctor has - and he has only a single métier. But the force of the joke lies in its purpose. What it means to say is nothing else than: ‘Of course he’ll forgive me. That’s what he’s there for, and that’s the only reason I’ve taken him on (as one engages one’s doctor or one’s lawyer).’ So in the dying man, as he lay there powerless, a consciousness stirred that he had created God and equipped him with power so as to make use of him when the occasion arose. What was supposed to be the created being revealed itself just before its annihilation as the creator.

¹ [‘Of course he’ll forgive me: that’s his job.’]9 To the classes of tendentious jokes that we have considered so far -

exposing or obscene jokes,

aggressive (hostile) jokes,

cynical (critical, blasphemous) jokes -

I should like to add another, the fourth and rarest, the nature of which can be illustrated by a good example:

‘Two Jews met in a railway carriage at a station in Galicia. "Where are you going?" asked one. "To Cracow", was the answer. "What a liar you are!" broke out the other. "If you say you’re going to Cracow, you want me to believe you’re going to Lemberg. But I know that in fact you’re going to Cracow. So why are you lying to me?"'

This excellent story, which gives an impression of over-subtlety, evidently works by the technique of absurdity. The second Jew is reproached for lying because he says he is going to Cracow, which is in fact his destination! But the powerful technical method of absurdity is here linked with another technique, representation by the opposite, for, according to the uncontradicted assertion of the first Jew, the second is lying when he tells the truth and is telling the truth by means of a lie. But the more serious substance of the joke is the problem of what determines the truth. The joke, once again, is pointing to a problem and is making use of the uncertainty of one of our commonest concepts. Is it the truth if we describe things as they are without troubling to consider how our hearer will understand what we say? Or is this only jesuitical truth, and does not genuine truth consist in taking the hearer into account and giving him a faithful picture of our own knowledge? I think that jokes of this kind are sufficiently different from the rest to be given a special position. What they are attacking is not a person or an institution but the certainty of our knowledge itself, one of our speculative possessions. The appropriate name for them would therefore be ‘sceptical’ jokes.

In the course of our discussion of the purposes of jokes we have perhaps thrown light on a number of questions and have certainly come upon plenty of suggestions for further enquiries. But the findings of this chapter combine with those of the last one to present us with a difficult problem. If it is correct to say that the pleasure provided by jokes depends on the one hand on their technique and on the other hand on their purpose, from what common point of view can such different sources of the pleasure in jokes be brought together?

B. SYNTHETIC PARTIV THE MECHANISM OF PLEASURE AND THE PSYCHOGENESIS OF JOKES

We can now start out from an assured knowledge of the sources of the peculiar pleasure given us by jokes. We are aware that we may be deceived into confusing our enjoyment of the intellectual content of what is stated with the pleasure proper to jokes; but we know that that pleasure itself has at bottom two sources - the technique and the purposes of jokes. What we now want to discover is the way in which the pleasure arises from these sources, the mechanism of the pleasurable effect.

We shall, I think, find the explanation we are in search of far easier from tendentious jokes than from innocent ones. We will therefore begin with the former.

The pleasure in the case of a tendentious joke arises from a purpose being satisfied whose satisfaction would otherwise not have taken place. That a satisfaction such as this is a source of pleasure calls for no further remark. But the manner in which a joke leads to this satisfaction is linked with particular conditions, from which we may perhaps arrive at some further information. Two cases are to be distinguished here. The simpler one is where the satisfaction of the purpose is opposed by an external obstacle which is evaded by the joke. We found this, for instance, in the reply received by Serenissimus to his question of whether the mother of the man he was speaking to had ever lived in the Palace and in the critic’s rejoinder to the two rich rascals who showed him their portraits: ‘But where’s the Saviour?’ In the former case the purpose was to answer one insult by another, and in the latter it was to hand across an insult instead of the assessment that had been asked for. What opposed the purpose were purely external factors - the powerful position of the people at whom the insults were directed. It may nevertheless strike us that, however much these and analogous jokes of a tendentious nature may satisfy us, they are not able to provoke much laughter.

It is otherwise when what stands in the way of the direct realization of the purpose is not an external factor but an internal obstacle, when an internal impulse opposes the purpose. This condition would seem, on our hypothesis, to be fulfilled in the jokes of Herr N., in whom a strong inclination to invective is held in check by a highly developed aesthetic culture. By the help of a joke, this internal resistance is overcome in the particular case and the inhibition lifted. By that means, as in the instance of the external obstacle, the satisfaction of the purpose is made possible and its suppression, together with the ‘psychical damming-up’ that this would involve, is avoided. To that extent the mechanism of the generation of pleasure would be the same in the two cases.

Nevertheless, we are inclined here to go more deeply into the distinctions between the psychological situation in the cases of an external and an internal obstacle, for we have a suspicion that the removal of an internal obstacle may make an incomparably higher contribution to the pleasure. But I suggest that at this point we should exercise moderation and be satisfied for the moment with establishing what remains the essential point for us. The cases of an external and an internal obstacle differ only in the fact that in the latter an already existing inhibition is lifted and that in the former the erection of a new one is avoided. That being so, we shall not be relying too much on speculation if we assert that both for erecting and for maintaining a psychical inhibition some ‘psychical expenditure’ is required. And, since we know that in both cases of the use of tendentious jokes pleasure is obtained, it is therefore plausible to suppose that this yield of pleasure corresponds to the psychical expenditure that is saved.

Here then we have once more come upon the principle of economy which we met first in discussing the technique of verbal jokes. But whereas in the earlier case we seemed to find the economy in the use of as few words as possible or of words as much alike as possible, we now have a suspicion of an economy in the far more comprehensive sense of psychical expenditure in general; and we must regard it as possible that a closer understanding of what is still the very obscure concept of ‘psychical expenditure’ may bring us nearer to the essential nature of jokes.

A certain lack of clarity which we have been unable to overcome in our handling of the mechanism of pleasure in tendentious jokes may be taken as an appropriate punishment for our having tried to clear up the more complex problem before the simpler one, tendentious jokes before innocent ones. We take note of the fact that ‘economy in expenditure on inhibition or suppression’ appears to be the secret of the pleasurable effect of tendentious jokes, and pass on to the mechanism of pleasure in innocent jokes.

On the basis of suitable specimens of innocent jokes, in which there was no fear of our judgement being disturbed by their content or purpose, we were driven to conclude that the techniques of jokes are themselves sources of pleasure; and we shall now try to discover whether it may perhaps be possible to trace that pleasure back to economy in psychical expenditure. In one group of these jokes (play upon words) the technique consisted in focusing our psychical attitude upon the sound of the word instead of upon its meaning - in making the (acoustic) word presentation itself take the place of its significance as given by its relations to thing-presentations. It may really be suspected that in doing so we are bringing about a great relief in psychical work and that when we make serious use of words we are obliged to hold ourselves back with a certain effort from this comfortable procedure. We can observe how pathological states of thought-activity, in which the possibility of concentrating psychical expenditure on a particular point is probably restricted, do in fact give this sort of sound-presentation of the word greater prominence than its meaning, and that sufferers in such states proceed in their speech on the lines (as the formula runs) of the ‘external’ instead of the ‘internal’ associations of the word-presentation. We notice, too, that children, who, as we know, are in the habit of still treating words as things, tend to expect words that are the same or similar to have the same meaning behind them - which is a source of many mistakes that are laughed at by grown-up people. If, therefore, we derive unmistakable enjoyment in jokes from being transported by the use of the same or a similar word from one circle of ideas to another, remote one (in the ‘Home-Roulard’, for instance, from the kitchen to politics), this enjoyment is no doubt correctly to be attributed to economy in psychical expenditure. The pleasure in a joke arising from a ‘short-circuit’ like this seems to be the greater the more alien the two circles of ideas that are brought together by the same word - the further apart they are, and thus the greater the economy which the joke’s technical method provides in the train of thought. We may notice, too, that here jokes are making use of a method of linking things up which is rejected and studiously avoided by serious thought.¹

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