My VIews on the part played by sexuality in the aetiology of the neuroses 12 страница

In a second group of technical methods used in jokes - unification, similarity of sound, multiple use, modification of familiar phrases, allusions to quotations - we can single out as their common characteristic the fact that in each of them something familiar is rediscovered, where we might instead have expected something new. This rediscovery of what is familiar is pleasurable, and once more it is not difficult for us to recognize this pleasure as a pleasure in economy and to relate it to economy in psychical expenditure.

¹ If I may be allowed to anticipate the exposition in the text, I can at this point throw light on the condition which seems to determine whether a joke is to be called a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ one. If, by means of a word with two meanings or a word that is only slightly modified, I take a short cut from one circle of ideas to another, and if there is not at the same time a link between those circles of ideas which has a significant sense, then I shall have made a ‘bad’ joke. In a bad joke like this the only existing link between the two disparate ideas is the one word - the ‘point’ of the joke. The example of ‘Home-Roulard’ quoted above is a joke of this kind. A ‘good’ joke, on the other hand, comes about when what children expect proves correct and the similarity between the words is shown to be really accompanied by another, important similarity in their sense. Such, for instance, is the example ‘Traduttore - Traditore’. The two disparate ideas, which are here linked by an external association, are also united in a significant relation which indicates an essential kinship between them. The external association merely takes the place of the internal connection; it serves to point it out or make it clear. A ‘translator’ is not only called by a similar name to a ‘traitor’; he actually in a kind of traitor and bears the name, as it were by right.

The distinction that is here developed coincides with the one which is to be introduced later between a ‘jest’ and a ‘joke’. But it would be unjust to exclude examples like ‘Home-Roulard’ from the discussion of the nature of jokes. As soon as we take into consideration the peculiar pleasure derived from jokes, we find that the ‘bad’ jokes are by no means bad as jokes - that is, unsuitable for producing pleasure.3

It seems to be generally agreed that the rediscovery of what is familiar, ‘recognition’, is pleasurable. Groos (1899, 153) writes: ‘Recognition is always, unless it is too much mechanized (as, for instance, in dressing,...), linked with feelings of pleasure. The mere quality of familiarity is easily accompanied by the quiet sense of comfort which Faust felt when, after an uncanny encounter, he entered his study once again... If the act of recognition thus gives rise to pleasure, we might expect that men would hit on the idea of exercising this capacity for its own sake - that is, would experiment with it in play. And in fact Aristotle regarded joy in recognition as the basis of the enjoyment of art, and it cannot be disputed that this principle should not be overlooked, even if it does not possess such far-reaching significance as Aristotle attributes to it.’

Groos goes on to discuss games whose characteristic lies in the fact that they intensify the joy in recognition by putting obstacles in its way - that is to say, by creating a ‘psychical damming up’, which is got rid of by the act of recognition. His attempt at an explanation, however, abandons the hypothesis that recognition is pleasurable in itself, since, by referring to these games, he is tracing back the enjoyment of recognition to a joy in power, a joy in the overcoming of a difficulty. I regard the latter factor as secondary, and I see no reason to depart from the simpler view that recognition is pleasurable in itself i.e., through relieving psychical expenditure - and that the games founded on this pleasure make use of the mechanism of damming up only in order to increase the amount of such pleasure.

It is also generally acknowledged that rhymes, alliterations, refrains, and other forms of repeating similar verbal sounds which occur in verse, make use of the same source of pleasure - the rediscovery of something familiar. The ‘sense of power’ plays no perceptible part in these techniques, which show so much similarity to that of ‘multiple use’ in the case of jokes.4

In view of the close connection between recognizing and remembering, it is not rash to suppose that there may also be a pleasure in remembering - that the act of remembering is in itself accompanied by a feeling of pleasure of similar origin. Groos seems not to be averse to such a hypothesis, but he derives it once again from the ‘sense of power’, to which he attributes (wrongly, in my view) the chief reason for enjoyment in almost all games.

The ‘rediscovery of what is familiar’ is the basis for the use of another technical resource in jokes, which we have not yet mentioned. I refer to the factor of ‘topicality’, which is a fertile source of pleasure in a great many jokes and which explains a few of the peculiarities in the life-history of jokes. There are jokes which are completely independent of this condition, and in a monograph on jokes we are obliged to make almost exclusive use of examples of that kind. But we cannot forget that, in comparison with these perennial jokes, we have perhaps laughed even more heartily at others which it is difficult for us to use now because they would call for long commentaries and even with such help would not produce their original effect. These latter jokes contained allusions to people and events which at the time were ‘topical’, which had aroused general interest and still kept it alive. When this interest had ceased and the business in question had been settled, these jokes too lost a part of their pleasurable effect and indeed a very considerable part. For instance, the joke made by my friendly host when he called a pudding that was being served a ‘Home-Roulard’ does not seem to me to-day nearly so good as it did at the time when ‘Home Rule’ provided a standing head-line in the political columns of our daily papers. In attempting to estimate the merits of this joke I now attribute them to the fact that a single word has transported us, with the economy of a long detour in thought, from the circle of ideas of the kitchen to the remote one of politics. But at the time my account would have had to be different, and I should have said that this word transported us from the circle of ideas of the kitchen to that of politics, which was remote from it but was certain of our lively interest because we were constantly concerned with it. Another joke, ‘This girl reminds me of Dreyfus; the army doesn’t believe in her innocence’, has also faded to-day, though its technical methods must have remained unaltered. The bewilderment caused by the comparison and the double-entendre in the word ‘innocence’ cannot compensate for the fact that the allusion, which at the time touched on an event cathected with fresh excitement, to-day recalls a question that is settled. Here is a joke which is still topical: ‘The Crown Princess Louise approached the crematorium in Gotha with the question of how much a Verbrennung [cremation] costs. The management replied: "Five thousand marks normally; but we will only charge you three thousand as you have been durchgebrannt [literally ‘been burnt through’ - slang for ‘eloped’] once already.’ A joke like this sounds irresistible to-day; in a short time it will have sunk very considerably in our estimation; and some time later still, in spite of its good play upon words, it will lose its effect entirely, for it will be impossible to repeat it without adding a commentary to explain who Princess Louise was and the sense in which she was durchgebrannt.

Thus a great number of the jokes in circulation have a certain length of life: their life runs a course made up of a period of flowering and a period of decay and it ends in complete oblivion. The need which men feel for deriving pleasure from their processes of thought is therefore constantly creating new jokes based on the new interests of the day. The vital force of topical jokes is not their own; it is borrowed, by the method of allusion, from those other interests, the expiry of which determines the fate of the joke as well. The factor of topicality is a source of pleasure, ephemeral it is true but particularly abundant, which supplements the sources inherent in the joke itself. It cannot be simply equated with the rediscovery of what is familiar. It is concerned rather with a particular category of what is familiar, which must in addition possess the characteristic of being fresh, recent and untouched by forgetting. In the formation of dreams, too, we come across a special preference for what is recent and we cannot escape a suspicion that association with what is recent is rewarded, and so facilitated, by a peculiar bonus of pleasure.

Unification, which is after all no more than repetition in the sphere of thought-connections instead of in that of subject-matter, was given special recognition by Fechner as a source of the pleasure in jokes. He writes (Fechner, 1897, 1, Chapter XVII): ‘In my opinion the chief part in the field we are now considering is played by the principle of the unified linking of multiplicities; it requires support, however, from auxiliary determinants in order that the enjoyment which can be derived from these cases, with its peculiar character, may be carried over the threshold.’¹

In all these cases of repeating the same connections or the same subject-matter in the words, or of rediscovering what is familiar or recent, it seems impossible to avoid deriving the pleasure felt in them from economy in psychical expenditure provided that this line of approach turns out to be fruitful in throwing light on details and in arriving at new generalities. We are aware that we have still to make it clear how the economy comes about and what the meaning is of the expression ‘psychical expenditure’.

The third group of techniques of jokes - for the most part of conceptual jokes - which comprises faulty thinking, displacements, absurdity, representation by the opposite, etc., may at a first glance seem to bear a special impress and to betray no kinship with the techniques of rediscovery of what is familiar or the replacement of object-associations by word-associations. Nevertheless it is particularly easy here to bring into play the theory of economy or relief in psychical expenditure.

¹ The title of Chapter XVII is ‘On significant and joking similes, play upon words and other cases which bear the character of being amusing, funny or ridiculous.’6

It cannot be doubted that it is easier and more convenient to diverge from a line of thought we have embarked on than to keep to it, to jumble up things that are different rather than to contrast them - and, indeed, that it is specially convenient to admit as valid methods of inference that are rejected by logic and, lastly, to put words or thoughts together without regard to the condition that they ought also to make sense. This cannot be doubted; and these are precisely the things that are done by the joke-techniques which we are discussing. But the hypothesis that behaviour of this kind by the joke-work provides a source of pleasure will strike us as strange, since apart from jokes all such inefficient intellectual functioning produces in us nothing but unpleasurable defensive feelings.

‘Pleasure in nonsense’, as we may call it for short, is concealed in serious life to a vanishing point. In order to demonstrate it we must investigate two cases - one in which it is still visible and one in which it becomes visible again: the behaviour of a child in learning, and that of an adult in a toxically altered state of mind.

During the period in which a child is learning how to handle the vocabulary of his mother-tongue, it gives him obvious pleasure to ‘experiment with it in play’, to use Groos’s words. And he puts words together without regard to the condition that they should make sense, in order to obtain from them the pleasurable effect of rhythm or rhyme. Little by little he is forbidden this enjoyment, till all that remains permitted to him are significant combinations of words. But when he is older attempts still emerge at disregarding the restrictions that have been learnt on the use of words. Words are disfigured by particular little additions being made to them, their forms are altered by certain manipulations (e.g. by reduplications or ‘Zittersprache’), or a private language may even be constructed for use among playmates. These attempts are found again among certain categories of mental patients.

Whatever the motive may have been which led the child to begin these games, I believe that in his later development he gives himself up to them with the consciousness that they are nonsensical, and that he finds enjoyment in the attraction of what is forbidden by reason. He now uses games in order to withdraw from the pressure of critical reason. But there is far more potency in the restrictions which must establish themselves in the course of a child’s education in logical thinking and in distinguishing between what is true and false in reality; and for this reason the rebellion against the compulsion of logic and reality is deep-going and long-lasting. Even the phenomena of imaginative activity must be included in this category. The power of criticism has increased so greatly in the later part of childhood and in the period of learning which extends over puberty that the pleasure in ‘liberated nonsense’ only seldom dares to show itself directly. One does not venture to say anything absurd. But the characteristic tendency of boys to do absurd or silly things seems to me to be directly derived from the pleasure in nonsense. In pathological cases we often see this tendency so far intensified that once more it dominates the schoolboy’s talk and answers. I have been able to convince myself in the case of a few boys of secondary school age who had developed neuroses that the unconscious workings of their pleasure in the nonsense they produced played no less a part in their inefficiency than did their real ignorance.

Nor, later on, does the University student cease these demonstrations against the compulsion of logic and reality, the dominance of which, however, he feels growing ever more intolerant and unrestricted. A large amount of student ‘rags’ are a part of this reaction. For man is a ‘tireless pleasure-seeker’ - I forget where I came across this happy expression - and any renunciation of a pleasure he has once enjoyed comes hard to him. With the cheerful nonsense of his Bierschwefel,¹ for instance, the student tries to rescue his pleasure in freedom of thinking, of which he is being more and more deprived by the schooling of academic instruction. Much later still, indeed, when as a grown man he meets others in scientific congresses and once more feels himself a learner, after the meeting is over there comes the Kneipzeitung,² which distorts the new discoveries into nonsense, and offers him a compensation for the fresh addition to his intellectual inhibition.

¹ [‘Bierschwefel’: ludicrous speech delivered at a beer party.]

² [A comic set of minutes. Literally, ‘tavern newspaper’.]8

The Bierschwefel and the Kneipzeitung give evidence by their names to the fact that the criticism which has repressed pleasure in nonsense has already grown so powerful that it cannot be put aside even temporarily without toxic assistance. A change in mood is the most precious thing that alcohol achieves for mankind, and on that account this ‘poison’ is not equally indispensable for everyone. A cheerful mood, whether it is produced endogenously or toxically, reduces the inhibiting forces, criticism among them, and makes accessible once again sources of pleasure which were under the weight of suppression. It is most instructive to observe how the standards of joking sink as spirits rise. For high spirits replace jokes, just as jokes must try to replace high spirits, in which possibilities of enjoyment which are otherwise inhibited - among them the pleasure in nonsense - can come into their own: ‘Mit wenig Witz und viel Behagen.’¹ Under the influence of alcohol the grown man once more becomes a child, who finds pleasure in having the course of his thoughts freely at his disposal without paying regard to the compulsion of logic.

I hope I have now also shown that the absurdity-techniques of jokes are a source of pleasure. It need only be repeated that this pleasure arises from an economy in psychical expenditure or a relief from the compulsion of criticism.

If we look back once more at the three separate groups of joke-techniques, we see that the first and third of these groups - the replacement of thing-associations by word-associations and the use of absurdity - can be brought together as re-establishing old liberties and getting rid of the burden of intellectual upbringing; they are psychical reliefs, which can in a sense be contrasted with the economizing which constitutes the technique of the second group. Relief from psychical expenditure that is already there and economizing in psychical expenditure that is only about to be called for - from these two principles all the techniques of jokes, and accordingly all pleasure from these techniques, are derived. The two species of technique and of obtaining pleasure coincide - in the main at all events - with the distinction between verbal and conceptual jokes.

¹ [‘With little wit and much enjoyment.’]9 The preceding discussion has given us unawares an insight into the evolution or psychogenesis of jokes, which we will now examine more closely. We have made the acquaintance of preliminary stages of jokes, and their development into tendentious jokes will probably uncover fresh relations between the various characteristics of jokes. Before there is such a thing as a joke, there is something that we may describe as ‘play’ or as ‘a jest’.

Play - let us keep to that name - appears in children while they are learning to make use of words and to put thoughts together. This play probably obeys one of the instincts which compel children to practise their capacities (Groos). In doing so they come across pleasurable effects, which arise from a repetition of what is similar, a rediscovery of what is familiar, similarity of sound, etc., and which are to be explained as unsuspected economies in psychical expenditure. It is not to be wondered at that these pleasurable effects encourage children in the pursuit of play and cause them to continue it without regard for the meaning of words or the coherence of sentences. Play with words and thoughts, motivated by certain pleasurable effects of economy, would thus be the first stage of jokes.

This play is brought to an end by the strengthening of a factor that deserves to be described as the critical faculty or reasonableness. The play is now rejected as being meaningless or actually absurd; as a result of criticism it becomes impossible. Now, too, there is no longer any question of deriving pleasure, except accidentally, from the sources of rediscovery of what is familiar, etc., unless it happens that the growing individual is overtaken by a pleasurable mood which, like the child’s cheerfulness, lifts the critical inhibition. Only in such a case does the old game of getting pleasure become possible once more; but the individual does not want to wait for this to happen nor to renounce the pleasure that is familiar to him. He thus looks about for means of making himself independent of the pleasurable mood, and the further development towards jokes is governed by the two endeavours: to avoid criticism and to find a substitute for the mood.

And with this the second preliminary stage of jokes sets in - the jest. It is now a question of prolonging the yield of pleasure from play, but at the same time of silencing the objections raised by criticism which would not allow the pleasurable feeling to emerge. There is only one way of reaching this end: the meaningless combination of words or the absurd putting together of thoughts must nevertheless have a meaning. The whole ingenuity of the joke-work is summoned up in order to find words and aggregations of thoughts in which this condition is fulfilled. All the technical methods of jokes are already employed here - in jests; moreover linguistic usage draws no consistent line between a jest and a joke. What distinguishes a jest from a joke is that the meaning of the sentence which escapes criticism need not be valuable or new or even good; it need merely be permissible to say the thing in this way, even though it is unusual, unnecessary or useless to say it in this way. In jests what stands in the foreground is the satisfaction of having made possible what was forbidden by criticism.

It is, for instance, simply a jest when Schleiermacher defines Eifersucht [jealousy] as the Leidenschaft [passion] which mit eifer Sucht [with eagerness seeks] what Leiden schafft [causes pain]. It was a jest when Professor Kästner, who taught physics (and made jokes) at Göttingen in the eighteenth century, asked a student named Kriegk, when he was enrolling himself for his lectures, how old he was. ‘Thirty years old’ was the reply, whereupon Kästner remarked: ‘Ah! so I have the honour of meeting the Thirty Years’ War [Krieg].’ (Kleinpaul, 1890.) It was with a jest that the great Rokitansky replied to the question of what were the professions of his four sons: ‘Two heilen [heal] and two heulen [howl]’ (two doctors and two singers). The information was correct and therefore not open to criticism; but it added nothing to what might have been expressed in the words in brackets. There can be no mistaking the fact that the answer was given the other form only on account of the pleasure which was produced by the unification and the similar sound of the two words.

I think now at length we see our way clearly. All through our consideration of the techniques of jokes we have been disturbed by the fact that they were not proper to jokes only; and yet the essence of jokes seemed to depend on them, since when they were got rid of by reduction the characteristics and the pleasure of the joke were lost. We now see that what we have described as the techniques of jokes - and we must in a certain sense continue to describe them so - are rather the sources from which jokes provide pleasure; and we feel that there is nothing strange in other procedures drawing from the same sources for the same end. The technique which is characteristic of jokes and peculiar to them, however, consists in their procedure for safeguarding the use of these methods of providing pleasure against the objections raised by criticism which would put an end to the pleasure. There is little that we can say in general about this procedure. The joke-work, as we have already remarked, shows itself in a choice of verbal material and conceptual situations which will allow the old play with words and thoughts to withstand the scrutiny of criticism; and with that end in view every peculiarity of vocabulary and every combination of thought-sequences must be exploited in the most ingenious possible way. We may be in a position later to characterize the joke-work by a particular property; for the moment it remains unexplained how the selection favourable for jokes can be made. The purpose and function of jokes, however - namely, the protection of sequences of words and thoughts from criticism - can already be seen in jests as their essential feature. Their function consists from the first in lifting internal inhibitions and in making sources of pleasure fertile which have been rendered inaccessible by those inhibitions; and we shall find that they remain loyal to this characteristic throughout their development.

We are also in a position now to assign its correct place to the factor of ‘sense in nonsense’ (cf. the introduction, p. 1618), to which the authorities attribute such great importance as a distinguishing mark of jokes and as an explanation of their pleasurable effect. The two fixed points in what determines the nature of jokes - their purpose of continuing pleasurable play and their effort to protect it from the criticism of reason immediately explain why an individual joke, though it may seem senseless from one point of view, must appear sensible, or at least allowable, from another. How it does so remains the affair of the joke-work; if it fails to do so, it is simply rejected as ‘nonsense’. But there is no necessity for us to derive the pleasurable effect of jokes from the conflict between the feelings which arise (whether directly or along the path of ‘bewilderment and enlightenment’) from the simultaneous sense and nonsense of jokes. Nor have we any need to enter further into the question of how pleasure could arise from the alternation between ‘thinking it senseless’ and ‘recognizing it as sensible’. The psychogenesis of jokes has taught us that the pleasure in a joke is derived from play with words or from the liberation of nonsense, and that the meaning of the joke is merely intended to protect that pleasure from being done away with by criticism.

In this way the problem of the essential character of jokes is already explained in jests. We may now turn to the further development of jests, to the point at which they reach their height in tendentious jokes. Jests still give the foremost place to the purpose of giving us enjoyment, and are content if what they say does not appear senseless or completely devoid of substance. If what a jest says possesses substance and value, it turns into a joke. A thought which would deserve our interest even if it were expressed in the most unpretentious form is now clothed in a form which must give us enjoyment on its own account.¹ A combination like this can certainly not, we must suppose, have come about unintentionally; and we must try to discover the intention underlying the construction of the joke. An observation which we made earlier (in passing, as it seemed) will put us on the track. We said above (p. 1691) that a good joke makes, as it were, a total impression of enjoyment on us, without our being able to decide at once what share of the pleasure arises from its joking form and what share from its apt thought-content. We are constantly making mistakes in this apportionment. Sometimes we over-estimate the goodness of the joke on account of our admiration of the thought it contains; another time, on the contrary, we over-estimate the value of the thought on account of the enjoyment given us by its joking envelope. We do not know what is giving us enjoyment and what we are laughing at. This uncertainty in our judgement, which must be assumed to be a fact, may have provided the motive for the construction of jokes in the proper sense of the word. The thought seeks to wrap itself in a joke because in that way it recommends itself to our attention and can seem more significant and more valuable, but above all because this wrapping bribes our powers of criticism and confuses them. We are inclined to give the thought the benefit of what has pleased us in the form of the joke; and we are no longer inclined to find anything wrong that has given us enjoyment and so to spoil the source of a pleasure. If the joke has made us laugh, moreover, a disposition most unfavourable for criticism will have been established in us; for in that case something will have forced us into the mood which play has previously sufficed to produce, and for which the joke has tried by every possible means to make itself a substitute. Even though we have earlier asserted that such jokes are to be described as innocent and not yet tendentious, we must not forget that strictly speaking only jests are non-tendentious - that is, serve solely the aim of producing pleasure. Jokes, even if the thought contained in them is non-tendentious and thus only serves theoretical intellectual interests, are in fact never non-tendentious. They pursue the second aim: to promote the thought by augmenting it and guarding it against criticism. Here they are once again expressing their original nature by setting themselves up against an inhibiting and restricting power - which is now the critical judgement.

¹ As an example which shows the difference between a jest and a joke proper we may take the excellent joking remark with which a member of the ‘Bürger’ Ministry in Austria answered a question about the cabinet’s solidarity: ‘How can we einstehen [stand up] for one another if we can’t ausstehen [stand] one another?’ Technique: use of the same material with slight (contrary) modification. Logical and apposite thought: there can be no solidarity without mutual understanding. The contrary nature of the modification (ein [in] - aus [out]) corresponds to the incompatibility asserted in the thought and serves as a representation of it.

This, the first use of jokes that goes beyond the production of pleasure, points the way to their further uses. A joke is now seen to be a psychical factor possessed of power: its weight, thrown into one scale or the other, can be decisive. The major purposes and instincts of mental life employ it for their own ends. The originally non-tendentious joke, which began as play, is secondarily brought into relation with purposes from which nothing that takes form in the mind can ultimately keep away. We know already what it is able to achieve in the service of the purpose of exposure, and of hostile, cynical and sceptical purposes. In the case of obscene jokes, which are derived from smut, it turns the third person who originally interfered with the sexual situation into an ally, before whom the woman must feel shame, by bribing him with the gift of its yield of pleasure. In the case of aggressive purposes it employs the same method in order to turn the hearer, who was indifferent to begin with, into a co-hater or co-despiser, and creates for the enemy a host of opponents where at first there was only one. In the first case it overcomes the inhibitions of shame and respectability by means of the bonus of pleasure which it offers; in the second it upsets the critical judgement which would otherwise have examined the dispute. In the third and fourth cases, in the service of cynical and sceptical purposes, it shatters respect for institutions and truths in which the hearer has believed, on the one hand by reinforcing the argument, but on the other by practising a new species of attack. Where argument tries to draw the hearer’s criticism over on to its side, the joke endeavours to push the criticism out of sight. There is no doubt that the joke has chosen the method which is psychologically the more effective.

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